The last few days have been eventful, to say the least. We had a very important delivery of all the Trellis materials, posts, wires etc... needed to plant the vineyard in April. If I said that the delivery was a piece of cake I'd probably be lying to you. It's not like our family to have everything nice and easy. Being the complete novices we are, you'd be correct to assume things didn't go as smoothly as you might expect at somewhere like Denbies Estate. But here at Kenton Park Estate, we don't let a little thing like that stop us...
The day started promisingly... with the lorries getting lost. I then had to go and find them where I was met with the next problem. The lorries were MASSIVE, two big articulated lorries from Germany were expected to come down the narrow lanes that surround the Estate. The third problem was that I was met with a bit of a language barrier, The two drivers were Bulgarian and Romanian and spoke a solid 10 words of English between them. It took a bit of convincing and some inventive gesturing to get one of them to follow me down to our driveway.
The next thing for me to do was to navigate my way around the forklift which I've never used before, so I thought it would be a great idea to learn on the job, unloading 3 tonnes of equipment worth more than a Ferrari, yeah trust Ben not to break any of this equipment and ruin any chance of running a successful vineyard and throw all the money down the drain... Thankfully I turned out to be a bit of a natural on the old forklift and if there's anyone in need of a job doing, I'm now coming highly recommended haha. I won't lie, there were a few improvised moments and close shaves thanks to some shady hand gestures that seemed to get lost in translation, however, we successfully unloaded all of the equipment into the barn.
The day definitely didn't end there as probably the hardest job was still to come. By this I mean the daunting task of attempting to aid a Bulgarian and then a Romanian reverse a 50-foot lorry back up a narrow farm driveway. Half an hour and one utterly shredded driveway later, we were in the clear. All that remains now is to complete the soil preparation in the fields. We still need to Lime the soil, power harrow and deep plough the soil, ready for planting, oh and of course repair the driveway. There's no way we're getting a vintage Aston Martin up it at the moment for our classic car meet at the end of the month, so that needs to be done ASAP. The weather, however, is proving to be a right nuisance at the moment and delaying the whole process.
As you can imagine we're getting to the stage now where it's beginning to sink in and become a reality, this is our future, our adventure and it's about to start for real and doesn't really get much more exciting!
In other news, I've got a new batch of cider coming out this week, This one has used the same base cider as the last one (cooking apples) but we've blended it with juice from Adam's Pearmain's apples to sweeten it and try and balance out the tannin levels. What we've ended up with is a medium sweet carbonated cider as opposed to a dry cider. To keep updated with the latest news and offers about this cider, please sign up to my mailing list.
Until next time,
Cheers!
