A friend sends me a WhatsApp that says “Good Luck for tomorrow” which is when we leave for Japan to attend an international trade fair.  The Widow has been promoted to Assistant for the next week.  “It feels like the opposite of Christmas Eve” I message back. 

That evening we go to the launch of The Silo Collective which is packed with friends, most of whom seem to know a lot more about Japan than I do and I find myself practicing bowing and receiving business cards with two hands but my attempts are met by a puzzled “No… not quite like that.”  In the back of my mind I am definitely thinking “I may never see any of you again”.

This is because aeroplanes are not natural, a 14 hour flight is not natural and I will probably get a blood clot despite two pairs of very unnatural stockings in my bag.  When I get there, I will loom over everyone on account of being over 6ft in the aforementioned stockings and be unable to communicate and therefore possibly starve.     

Back home I find myself looking at the drooping basil plant by the kitchen sink and wondering “Oh, has a plant ever been quite so lovely?”. (I am listening to Mansfield Park and can’t stop thinking in Austen speak).  I am, in other words, already homesick.

24 hours later - it must be more but what with time zones and lost days I can’t be specific.

1. It is very sunny and pretty warm.
2. Zam’s jetlag is worse than his Assistant’s.
3. Only one person has commented on our height and he said it very politely.
4. I have not yet bowed on account of still being very self conscious about this but it doesn’t seem to matter and I will attempt it tomorrow.
5. Everybody wears a mask all the time. Which is not compulsory.
6. There is a card on the table at breakfast with various instructions including “please enjoy your meal silently” which is a card I will be bringing home.
7. And yes, the loos are clean with many symbols none of which illustrate Flush.  It turns out be the button with 9 dots on it.  I googled it. In desperation.
8. I spend the day in the Great Britain section surrounded by UK cheese makers.  Estonia is on my left, Italy on my right and Latvia just behind me.   
9. Team spirit amongst the British is high.  Am very happy with the three stoppers Adrian lent me.  He’s got one of our ice buckets.
10. Skeins of cormorants fly over a lot.
11. I have just been told that the Japanese do not on the whole go for sarcasm or irony. So I must stop saying it never rains in England.

Not being one of the world’s natural travellers, I am eyeing up the impending trip to Japan with a mixture of feelings. Zam is joining a number of English vineyards, invited by the Department for International Trade, to promote English sparking wine at a trade fair in Tokyo. He gets to take an assistant. I am nervous.

Being an assistant involves answering questions and for some reason, I panic when asked for the simplest information about the wine. How big is the vineyard? When was it planted? What year are we drinking? I should know. I do know. But whenever I’m asked anything I stare at my interlocutor and my mind goes blank. As for bottling dates, dosages and pruning techniques… I wonder if it’s because Zam has told me all of this so many times that it’s like being given directions to somewhere and you just switch off after the second directive to turn right.

The beauty is in its simplicity, few parts to break. But when the Korma corker was turned on, nothing happened. Harry and Samuel took it apart and put it back together and… well the details being given to me by Zam are somehow akin to the second directive to turn right but I do remember jubilee clips and hydraulic tubing being mentioned. “And it makes the most beautiful noise,” he concluded.

Zam’s luxury on a desert island would be a box of broken things so I’m not remotely surprised that this episode has brought him joy. “But I’m not clear quite what you had to do with mending it?” I ask. That he was not part of the solution doesn’t dim his enjoyment one bit. That evening he spends hours with a pin trying to unclog the bialetti coffee pot that hasn’t worked for months and which has been gathering dust next to the broken toaster. Breakfast, I tell him, is becoming increasingly difficult. The pin yields no results and toast is now made on the hot plate. The aga toasting rack fell apart years ago. But the orange squeezer is, at the moment, operational.

Gratifyingly, the panorama I have managed to film on my camera draws an awestruck reaction on the family whatsapp group. JEEEESUS being the general tone.  I am quite proud of this little film, especially as I find the phone button counter-intuitive and tend to find I have filmed the ground.  Actually the ground is, in this case, the point.

My panoramic film shows a hole in the ground that is over 100 metres long and about 30 metres wide.  Zam makes sweeping movements with his arms to describe areas for fermenting, bottling, storing, labelling… we nod as he explains entrances and exits and that the winery, on its incredible chalk plateau, has to be finished before this year’s harvest.  JEEESUS we think, all over again.

Amazingly you can hardly see it till you come across it.  But it feels like you could see it from the moon.

He booked himself and it into various Christmas fairs but got Covid and so asked genius winemaker Harry to take it to Wiltshire.  The landrover averages about 35 mph. The tailback on the A303 became considerable.  The wind and cold whistled round Harry’s head.  The brakes were hair-raising.  He didn’t want to drive it back again.  When Zam recovered he went to collect it and arrived home pale and chastened.  The “quirks” were, he now admitted, considerable.  It went into the local garage for remedial attention and now it’s back. As a bar it’s rather wonderful.  As transport… he’s on his own. 

Zam tries to round up people to take part in two photo shoots… he wants young people but not too young and older people who are not too old.  I am too old but he’s desperate.  The photographer, Tom, has been photographing the vineyard since this adventure began ten years ago and is now so successful that he needs booking months in advance.  Whatever the weather.  The weather actually turns out to be the last nice day I can remember so the first shoot is an afternoon of picnics and swimming.  The older group gather in a tent at the Grange Festival for supper, cooked by my sister: egg and prawn mousse, cold beef and salads, raspberries. “But don’t eat the mousse” she tells us, “It’s been sitting in the sun too long and will probably kill you.” We know that Zam will ignore this but Clare and I nod at each other. We’re not touching it.  My only job, other than to turn up, is to bring cream.

I’m so anxious I have second helpings of mousse. The other guests are so late they’ve tucked in before anyone has time to warn them.  Then I realise I’ve forgotten the cream so we pour milk onto raspberries but it moves too quickly - as Tom explains while telling me to hold a glass by it’s stem. All I can see is the gardening dirt under my nails.  Milk, dirt and poisonous prawns.  I haven’t seen the photographs.

We are very happy to announce the arrival of Harry Pickering as our first in-house Winemaker. Harry’s appointment follows a six-month global search with over a hundred applicants from eleven countries – but he’s joining us from Gusbourne, just up the road in East Sussex. There he has worked with Charlie Holland since 2015, helping to establish a renowned range that stands at the forefront of English wine.

The appointment is a critical step in the next phase of The Grange's development and, once he arrives in June, Harry will be overseeing the build and fit out of our sleek new winery designed by Timothy Hatton Architects (see above).  After that he will be tasked with taking the complex, rich and layered sparkling style we have developed with Emma Rice at Hattingley to the next level, as well as developing new sparkling and still wines and setting up a small high-end contract wine-making operation.

After the nightmare of 2020, it looks like 2021 is going to be a busy year!

With the grapes through the presses and the juices fermenting, the days are shortening and the damp and the chill starting to dominate, so it is something of a relief to be able to spend less time in the vineyard and put one’s feet up and look back on this bizarre year – there has certainly been a lot going, even leaving C-19 to one side.

From the viticultural point of view it has been mixed.  The terrible frosts of April and May hit us hard, reducing yields, but the generally lovely weather since those frosts has led to remarkable quality in all varieties and I am really looking forward to tasting the wines come 2024, even if they turn out to be rare jewels.

Outside the vineyard in 2020, the 2015 based wines have been doing very well in the  various wine competitions we have entered and have won 7 Silver medals, 2 Golds and a Platinum between them.  Driven on by these amazing votes of confidence for what we have always thought were lovely wines, the sales team, spearheaded by Claire, has also been going great guns.  Highlights include Daylesford stocking both wines at all their stores, Hawkins Brothers taking the CLASSIC and Haynes Hanson and Clark adding the PINK to the already stocked CLASSIC. Beyond that we also got on to the wine list at The Pig Hotel in The New Forest and the fabulously fashionable Hut at Colwell Bay on the Isle of Wight.

2020 will mainly be remembered for this miserable and terrifying virus but, in amongst the horror of those memories, we here at The Grange will have some little Platinum coloured glints...