Testing Grapes and Collecting Awards

With harvest now only just over a week away, we’ve been spending our time monitoring grapes, looking at the skies, and occasionally even picking up an award for our hard work. 

Hello once again friends. We’re back with another update for you on life and times on our Eridge vineyard, so make yourself comfortable, it’s fika time.

Now that they are almost ready after another eventful year of the vineyard cycle, we are testing our grapes regularly of course, checking for sugar levels against the Oechsele Scale. That’s the hydrometer scale for measuring the density of the grape juice, which is an indicator of grape ripeness and sugar content.

The results change every day and we are not quite there yet, but it now looks like our harvest will be starting the week of the 18th – with the Chardonnay a little later. So exciting to have a date for it now!

And from future award winning wines, to a current one: This month we were pleased to pick up a Silver medal from The Global Sparkling Masters wine awards, a respected competition in which wines from across the globe are judged purely on style and price.

We also have a very interesting piece of news to share concerning a fantastic new distributor…

As you can see from the handshake, we’ve reached an agreement to work with leading on-trade specialist Yapp Brothers. The plan is to create wider availability for our wines in the premium on-trade. We want you to find our wines in top restaurants!

We’re really happy to have joined their portfolio of family-owned and very quality-led grower producers, and look forward to introducing our wines to their team and customers. We will keep you updated of course.

As you know, our brand presentation is incredibly important to us, and we created our packaging with so much care and attention to detail, and it’s lovely that people always talk to us about it and how much they like it.

It seems The Drinks Business Awards agree, and at a ceremony in central London, they awarded our Brut 2018 with a special commendation in the English wine category – a nice validation.

Lastly we just had to share this photo with you; the only way we can describe it is a meringue mountain! OK it’s actually a normal lemon meringue pie, but a really good recipe, with tangy custard, crumbly pastry and ‘mile-high meringue’. Definitely give this one a look.

Right, that is all from us for this time. But stay tuned to our social media for harvest updates, and we will see you very soon.

Until then…

Skål!

Susanna & Douglas

Busi Jacobsohn Wine Estate