Help us make a quality wine from London grapes

[Victor Keegan]

Hi
A group of us (see victorkeegan.com) are trying to encourage allotment users and garden lovers to plant agreed vines (Phoenix for white wine and Regent for red) with the aim of producing a high quality London wine made by a professional winemaker. Is anyone interested?
During the early years - as we are building up volume -  we would recommend the grapes are part of the wonderful Chateau Tooting initiative (urbanwineco.co.uk) when, once a year, grapes of all kind are delivered to a central point in Wimbledon and then processed by an established wine maker.
If you are interested please plant one or both of those vines this Spring. You can get them from the internet or from the excellent National Vine Collection at sunnybankvines.co.uk which also has hints about how to nurture the vines.
Spread the word if you can - and keep in touch.

Best wishes

Victor Keegan

[Victor Keegan]

[Vinlander]

UK grown red wine will always be thin and weak compared to grapes grown in hotter countries.

Also, chilled fermentation allows those countries to avoid all the 'stewing' flavours they used to suffer from.

I'd rather grow seedless grapes for the table, and with my few seeded vines I'd rather produce first-rate juice than 3rd rate wine...

However there is a solution - grapes grown from hybrids with american species (like V. labrusca etc.) are early and can be much more immune to cold damp climates (they grow up past Nova Scotia) and more importantly contain more of the rich fruity flavours that sunny places enjoy. 

There are excellent seedless red varieties like Reliance (lovers of blandness might find them too much).

But for yield and flavour the seeded 'Schuyler' and 'Swensons red' are hard to beat and will make your wine taste more like Chilean red wine than German red wine (ugh).

Cheers.

PS. I have tried Chambourcin which is one of the parents of Regent and though the juice can be nice (and taste different every year) whenever I've made wine from it there was a horrible taste of boiled sweets (to me - not a beaujolais lover)  that I don't get from any other variety.