Spiced Beetroot Wine

Our famous Spiced beetroot wine is now on sale. We've delivered to most of our outlets and done a tasting for Low Sizergh Barn in South Cumbria. We attended November's Orton Farmers Market where we sold lots of wine. Weather permitting, we shall also be at December's market and Rheged's Food and Craft Fair on December 4th.

Apple harvest

We picked masses of apples from our usual two sources.  One of them is Hilary Wilson's orchard where she grows an amazing variety of apples. We call her the "Apple Lady" because what she doesn't know about apples isn't worth knowing.  The following day we milled and pressed  all the apples, gaining 220 litres of juice. That is now fermenting well.

Hilary's orchard

Second picking - note use of Sainsburys boxes!

Unfortunately Apple Day at Acorn Bank was cancelled because the fields were water-logged.  We had such a good day last year!

Alison filming close-up of pressing

About two weeks after processing the apples, Alison Freeman from BBC's Look North came to film and interview us about apple wine.  We had to get some apples from a third source so we could be filmed.  In contrast to the crew of 6  for Countryfile, Alison was a one woman band! As yet it hasn't been shown.

September news

We expect you've all been on tenterhooks, wondering who won the case of wine for the most popular picture.  We can now reveal that it was Eddie Potts's picture of Nichol Chair.  Congratulations, Eddie!

Eddie Potts with winning picture (photo from The Herald). 

The Countryfile programme was shown on September 4th. We were only  on for about 2 minutes and they didn't say who we were but we had a number of enquiries as a result. Even though the programme showed us only starting to make this year's wine and Matt giving Clare Balding "their last bottle" of last year's wine it didn't stop people ordering beetroot wine!  We are going to have it ready by the beginning of November. It's certainly a fantastic colour!

Pressing beetroot.

We've had a busy month dealing with damsons and elderberries. Most of the damsons came from Colby but a few came from the walled garden at Highhead Castle, a fascinating ruin, owned by Christopher Terry. There has been such a bumper crop of damsons this year that we've had to turn people away. We crushed the damsons and they are now fermenting happily.

Crushing damsons.

Elderberries are our least favourite fruit to harvest.  So many bushes have a mixture of completely ripe fruit, completely unripe fruit and all states in between! This year we even found flowers with the berries! We have bushes in our field but we also have to go out on the lanes. Then we have to strip the berries off the stems with a fork. This is very labour intensive and monotonous, leaving us with purple hands, but we get a lot of TV watched!

Dense bunches of ripe elderberries.

Flowers and berries on the same bush!

As part of the Eden Artists Open Studios we visited Haydn Morris in Tirril.  As a result we have agreed to make him some wine from his prolific harvest of grapes grown in a poly tunnel. They are now fermenting. Our Rondo grapes on the fellside are not in such good condition!

Presssing Haydn's crushed grapes. 

Our Rondo grapes - waiting for the compost heap!

The last week

We had a stall at our local agricultural show of Dufton. Ron helped Angela set up and then cycled back to the winery to open.  Angela had a successful day, only slightly marred by the incessant commentary from the nearby show jumping.  She had no idea there were so many horse riders around.  We did not enter any of the wonderful classes in the industrial tent like 'cake made by a man', 'the most items in a match box' and '3 carrots'.

The art exhibition finished on Bank Holiday Monday and the next week was occupied with taking down the exhibition and paying the artists who had sold works. We sold over 40% of the work, which in the present climate we are very pleased with.

We counted the votes for the favourite work of art and will announce the winner soon when we've told her/him and arranged how to publicise it.  Watch this space!

Our stall at Dufton Agricultural Show

Dufton Show with Dufton Pike in the background

We've also been pressing beetroot for our spiced beetroot wine. This has a spectacular purple colour which is seen here.

Countryfile

19th August:  The BBC Countryfile film crew arrived.  Two weeks earlier we'd found ourselves sitting on the next table to John Craven at Fusion Cafe, Brougham Hall.  He was filming a programme called Britain at Risk, to be broadcast in 2012. On the way home we'd discussed an idea that Countryfile should make a programme about some of the businesses that had been awarded diversification grants after Foot and Mouth, to see how things had worked out. Not 30 minutes after we arrived home, Countryfile phoned!  However they hadn't read our minds; this was a different idea. They wanted to be involved in making one of our wines, but the only one we make in August is our spiced beetroot wine. So when it came to filming, Matt Baker picked some beetroot at Carleton Farm near Penrith, and brought it to us to be made into our spiced beetroot wine. Matt helped Ron mill the washed beetroots and then pour the mush into a fermentation tank. Finally Matt tasted some beetroot wine we'd made earlier - our last bottle from 2010. It was all a good laugh with Matt being very willing to pose for our personal photo record taken by Sam, our son-in-law.  Matt even put up with me standing on his dancing foot! No idea how much will be on TV but it's scheduled to be transmitted on Sept 4th.

Matt, Ron and Producer discussing next scene.

 

Further discussion.

Action - the beetroots are delivered!

 

Watching the action.

Preparing for the tasting.

Shooting the tasting.

Take 2.

Angela treads on Matt's dancing feet!

Matilda gets in on the act.

Angela sells Matt some wine and flapjack.

More Rhubarb

5th August: With the latest period of rain, rhubarb has made a comeback and so today we picked 26 kg of the stuff from the garden of Tirril Brewery (Thank you guys). Many of the stalks were monsters.

8th August:   Another project which has been underway for almost a year is conversion of one of our barns into self-catering holiday lets. Today we progressed a bit further. We got really filthy clearing ancient straw and hay and rotten flooring from upstairs in the barn until customers arrived 45 minutes before opening time. What a quick change that was! We had such a busy day, I never washed properly till we closed.

Verjuice and crime writing

We sold some more crab apple verjuice yesterday to someone who is a real enthusiast. She uses it for salad dressings, glazes and sauces. A restaurant in Bristol has also discovered it and has ordered a lot for one of their menu recipes. The young chef who won the Cumbria Young Chef of the Year award and then went on to win the North West round incorporated our crab apple verjuice into several of his recipes. They are complicated, but you can find the details here. 

        Muncaster lobster, seashore herbs, Pink Fir, cockles and radish

        Muncaster crab cannelloni, crisp claw and bisque

The verjuice is used like lemon juice but it has only half the acidity, so it is not so harsh, and, of course, it has a delicious apple flavour. There are more details on our website. If anyone has discovered a good recipe using crab apple verjuice and is willing for us to include it on our website, please contact us.

A week or so ago the crime writer Gwen Moffat visited the winery. We had to admit we hadn’t come across her although we are always ready to try local novelists. It turns out that before becoming a crime writer, Gwen was Britain's leading female mountain climber and the first woman to qualify as a mountain guide. So today we visited the library in Penrith to borrow one of Gwen’s latest novels.