Black Mountain Vineyard
Mark & Laura Smith
England, West Midlands, Herefordshire
Nestled down a Herefordshire country lane, in the shadow of the Brecon Beacons, Black Mountain Vineyard is an unexpected find. But this three-hectare labour of love - planted by Mark & Laura Smith in 2009- has been an evolution.
There’s no rulebook for planting vines here, and Mark soon realised classic English sparkling varieties were not best suited to the area, and began re-planting with better matched hybrids.
Now with two organic harvests under their belt, Mark & Laura have been experimenting with the use of essential oils and whey as alternatives to eliminate the need for copper or sulphur sprays in the vineyard. With tasks in the vines & cellar undertaken by hand, production is tiny and quantities are extremely limited.
We had a chat with Mark to discuss this year’s season, how the vineyard has developed and why he’s worried about wasps.
How has the growing season been for you guys?
“It's been a weird old year - that goes without saying probably.
Unfortunately we got hit by really bad frost this year. Mid-May everything was growing really strongly, then it got smashed, it was quite a bad one. It's going to be a small harvest this year.I think we've done as well as we can after that. I'm still reasonably happy with it.
”I've got a variety called Siegerrebe which I really like, but unfortunately wasps really like it as well. The weather at the moment has been really good for those grapes, slowly ripening. It's breezy and overcast, so I haven't had any problems with wasps yet - I'm monitoring it really carefully at the moment- I keep seeing people on Instagram having their grapes munched by wasps. I'm just waiting for them to come. Hopefully they won't!
“We'll start picking in the next couple of weeks, but it'll only be a few days of picking this year unfortunately.We’re looking at losses of up to 70%. Some varieties we grow come back much better than others after a frost. The fruit you get differs massively. The hybrids we grow like Solaris & Cabernet Cortis come back really well. Whereas with the Pinot Noir there’s just nothing. Nothing left!”
Is that what prompted the replanting of more hybrids in place of the traditional sparkling varietals, their resilience to that Welsh-border weather?
“Yeah, I did the Plumpton College course in 2005 and coming out of that everyone was planting champagne grapes and it felt like the right thing to do. Obviously in hindsight, I wish I’d planted more hybrids earlier. Vineyards are a bit weird, you plant something and only 10 years later do you get to figure out if it worked or not!
”We just haven't got the climate here to ripen the Champagne varietals. I ripped all the Chardonnay out this year, that's given me quite a bit of pleasure! It was so susceptible to powdery mildew. The Pinot Meunier is much better. They just seem a bit more resilient, you get a reasonable crop with that bit of a lower acidity. It works really well blended with the hybrids. We used it with the Siegerrebe for the Col Fondo, there’s still a place for it here.
“We’ve found with the hybrids you hardly need to spray them. You’re instantly reducing the amount of copper and sulphur that you're using, which is perfect, it makes such a difference. We've never used a lot of chemicals though, we've always been conscious of it. I’ve worked a lot in agriculture, in different fields. I started off as a dairy farmer, I’ve always been interested in it. When we started, the first six or seven years we were working full time & doing the vines at the weekends and evenings. Laura's a teacher, but some of the jobs I did were awful.
“I ended up working on this strawberry farm, doing the tractor spraying. It was horrific, just spraying chemicals. It was such a horrendous job that it finally pushed me to go full time on this thankfully. That was 2016, the first harvest we did here, another big factor in spraying as little as possible.”
How have your experiments been going with alternative sprays since?
“Pretty interesting really, whey is one that seems pretty effective against powdery mildew. It’s difficult sometimes to work out what’s working, it takes a few years to really get a good picture of it. I’ll be pushing it further next year, trying to reduce copper as much as possible.
“Though with the alternative sprays and the hybrid varieties themselves it has meant we’ve been able to spray very little of that stuff.”
Were there any vineyards in particular on your trip through France in 2018 that really prompted the push to committing to organic conversion?
“In Bordeaux actually at Château Meylet in Saint Emilion. I’d never been to Bordeaux, there’s vines everywhere, it’s just total mono-culture.
“But they were a tiny 2 hectare estate, working biodynamically. They were telling us the problems they faced being surrounded by so much commercial agriculture and that was a big factor for me in committing to the change. It was fascinating, they’d been trying to put up trees to protect from the sprays blowing in off other vineyards and were coming against local opposition for that, it must be tough.”
Are your vineyards fairly isolated? Nobody’s stopping you planting any trees to promote bio-diversity?
“We’re just surrounded by sheep! That’s something we're going to do more of actually, we've got patches that we leave wild, so we've got a nice population of different insects and stuff.
“We leave a lot of wood around to try and encourage that sort of thing. Having taken out a patch of vines has freed up the space to get more native plants, try to encourage more biodiversity.”
Do you invite the neighbouring sheep in?
“We do actually after harvest, in November. Our neighbour has about 35 sheep, they just pop round and happily eat the grass. They do a much better job than my mower. So it's nice and tidy over the winter! They've been really good, actually, they don't touch the vines at all.
”Moving organic has changed how I operate certainly. More intensive manual work, so any help with the labour I can get from the sheep is welcome! Working like this has helped me stay alert to things, needing to keep a closer eye out to what's going on in the vineyard. It's much more fun, trying to work out what's going on, working out how to fix things rather than just spraying it.”
With this year’s smaller harvest, have you had to change plans for the wines you’ll make?
“I've been building up reserve wines from 2018 & 2019 since we moved organic. A lot of what we'll do this year is start the grapes off fermenting and add them into the other finished wines before bottling. That means we’ll be able to have a natural second fermentation in the bottle, which will be good. The whole wine will be a totally natural process, no additions, which is what we're looking for really.
“Hopefully next year we'll release a NV version of the Col Fondo and a pink version of the Col Fondo. That'll probably be about it! We've found our focus with that Col Fondo style so next year will be a smaller range, trying to do it as well as we can.”
Any plans for the future? Aside from hoping 2021 brings less frost?
”I really like a variety we have planted here, Cabernet Cortis, which we'll be planting more of. I have a few experiments with that, works in progress. It can come out as a cab-franc style, lots of that hedgerow-blackberry. I really like it but I’m just working out where it could fit in. It might work more as a fizzy red.
“I've always thought the Siegerrebe would make a really good skin contact wine, if we had a reasonable crop of that in the future. Siegerrebe is a Gewurztraminer/ Madeleine Angevine cross. It can have that really spicy Alsace style, quite intense flavour. It can be a tricky one to grow; it ripens early which is brilliant, but it has delicate flowering.
And I have to protect it from the wasps!”
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