Text Box: Christmas Newsletter 2009 Welcome to our Christmas 2009 newsletter! In this issue we have all the latest news on the exceptional 2009 vintage growing season and up-to-the-minute news from the wine-maker, including details of our special 30th birthday wine! We have some great ‘nouveaux’ (early bottled) wines of the 2009 vintage available to purchase now, as well as liqueurs, special taster-packs, gift packs, vouchers and Rent-a-vine memberships – all available online at http//:www.EnglishOrganicWine.co.uk or http//:www.Rentavine.co.uk We also mourn the loss of 1,000 bottles of quality Fizz smashed accidentally on a concrete floor by our contractor. We announce the winner of our competition to win a case of Sedlescombe organic wine. Please follow the links below to see more detail on each topic. Old Vine Wine (Vieilles Vignes) What a sensational vintage to celebrate our 30th Birthday! Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard is 30 years old this year! To mark this seemingly miraculous achievement, we are making a Vieilles Vignes (old vine wine) made exclusively from grapes harvested from the 30-year-old vines planted back in 1979 – the oldest organic vines in England! This represents our debut vintage of a limited production, top of the line, old vine cuvée and would make a great birthday gift for anyone you know who has a 30th birthday or anniversary in 2010! Our new winemaking apprentice Enrico and cellar-master Roy will be using their skills to turn the low-yielding, old-vine grapes of the Reichensteiner variety into a unique wine. Their task will be made easier by the fact that old vine roots go very deep into the soil, bringing up more interesting, multi-dimensional flavours into the grapes and creating added complexity in the wine. Normally, as vines age their yield declines and they become uneconomic after 25 to 30 years, but since these vines are grown on their own roots (not grafted onto special root-stocks like most vines) they can grow on indefinitely, a bit like the Great Vine at Hampton Court which is 250 years old! Click on photo to see more! So if the 2009 ‘Old-Vine’ wine is a success with our customers you can also look forward to enjoying drinking this wine in future years too. A Vintage Year 2009 will surely go down as one of the highest quality vintages to date in UK vineyards. Adequate summer rainfall in July, which helped to swell the fruit, was followed by the warmest September and October weather we can remember. September was in fact one of the driest for 100 years, and October one of the warmest, producing stunning autumn colours. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1222869/End-British-Summer-Time-marked-autumnal-glow.html Harvesting in October sunshine was a memorable and very enjoyable experience for all our pickers. We will be making about 20,000 bottles from the 2009 vintage, which is our second highest after the 28,000 of 2006. 2007 and 2008 were both less than half of this year’s yield due to rain at flowering time, causing poor fruit set. Consequently our wine stocks are almost completely depleted. ‘Nouveau’ wines This week we have bottled 2009 Bodiam Harvest and 2009 Rose, so that we will have our full range on offer for this Christmas. All wines are available from our vineyard shop, farmers markets