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Better vineyard management boosts UK 2024 wine crop
English and Welsh winegrowers have reported a small but good quality crop in 2024 due in part to better vineyard management, the latest WinesGB Harvest Yield Survey has found.
The report, which is published annually, highlighted the growing maturity of the homegrown UK industry and its understanding of vineyard management, which helped growers cope with the “testing conditions” experienced this year.
The “expertise, resilience, and selectivity in the vineyard resulted in many producers harvesting a small but good quality crop,” it said, based on “assiduous vineyard management and selective picking”. The grapes overall had a high level of phenolic ripeness, the survey found, because they had been let to hang over a longer than average harvest period.
“A true ‘winegrowers’ vintage’, the skills amassed by vine-growing and production teams in the UK worked in synergy with the variability of this year’s harvest,” the report said.
It was a year that saw lower yields than those in 2023 and fairly mixed experiences in different areas, with higher disease pressure this year due to the wet weather. The variability of the weather led to disparity across the country, with the east of the country generally faring better. Yields were highest in East Sussex, Kent, Surrey and West Sussex followed by the Thames valley and Chilterns (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire), and the East (Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire). However some producers picked little or no crop this year.
The total wine production for 2024 across England and Wales is expected to be between 6 and 7 million bottles – a fall of around 30-40% lower than the 10-year average of 10 million bottles.
However, bottled and reserve stocks remain high due to the larger than average 2023 harvest, which saw 20-22 million bottles, more than 50% more than the previous record year of 2018. This has helped mitigate this year’s shortfall, WinesGB said.
Potential alcohol levels are close to the 2016-2024 average, it continued – and greater than the high-yielding 2023 vintage. Bacchus and Chardonnay performing particularly well, with Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier also achieving good yields.
WineGB CEO Nicola Bates said that producers had shown “huge resilience and expertise” in harvesting a small, but high-quality crop, noting that stock levels was high and “there remains consistency in the supply of wine for sale.”
“This year is both a reminder of the unpredictability of British weather and the skill of our workforce, which is well-versed in dealing with our variable climate,” she said.
The author of the harvest report, Stephen Skelton MW added that the figures showed that “when faced with climatic adversity, skilled growers are able to rise to the challenge and employ the resources available to them to produce reasonable yields.”
“It also shows that our four major varieties – Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Meunier, and Bacchus – can produce good yields, even in testing years,” he said.
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