Nectar of the Gods
THE GRAPE VINE IN BRITAIN
by Brian Edwards
There seems little doubt that wandering, primitive mankind settled in one place, became growers of crops and cultivators of the soil, for one crop, vines, and the wine they produced. People settled, and began the long and dubious march to ‘civilisation’ for the sake of the vine.
Traces of wine can be found, thanks to modern techniques, well before the development of writing. The major vine species, vitis vinifera, can be found wild across Asia Minor, The Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan and the near East. Wild vines extend into Southern Germany, and I have found vines growing wild, though of an identifiable variety once grown by the Romans, in a hedge on the hills around Cheddar in Somerset. Early growers would have found wine easy to make – though by no means easy to make well. Crush the grapes, try and store the juice, and you will, very shortly, have wine.
Life was rough – so what, you may think, is new. The beneficial effects of alcohol helped, and still help, to make tolerable a difficult life. Europeans, at least, have been consuming alcoholic drinks for so long that moderate consumption seems to lengthen life, and lower the incidence of health problems. This is not a fictional effect, merely drawn from life insurance statistics. People in Europe, at least, have been growing grapes, eating them, making wine, and drinking the results, for a very, very long time.
Written records go back a long way. The book of Genesis has Noah, having survived the great flood, becoming a ‘husbandman’, planting a vineyard, making wine from the crop, and becoming very drunk. The writer was clearly familiar with grape cultivation. Greeks, and later Romans, spread the vine wherever they went. They, and others, worshiped Gods of wine. It is striking how close to the then limits of the then successful cultivation of the vine are the boundaries of the Roman Empire. In Britain, our first records date from Roman times ,and are scanty but real. Vineyard sites have been found, together with written and archeological evidence. Saxon writing, laws and records, make it clear that vines were grown, while the Domesday book records 38 vineyards
Vines are tough. The myth of them being delicate and needing greenhouses to grow in is just that, myth.. Most European vines will survive temperatures about that of the inside of a deep freeze, while some native vine types from the USA and Russia, though of very different types, will survive -40c below, sometimes more. Vines will grow, and some sorts ripen their fruit, well up to Norway. There are few parts of Britain where vines cannot be successfully grown.
We exist, as far as we can tell, in an interglacial warm spell, which some choose to attribute to human action. People like to believe disaster scenarios, so the idea is popular, but as far as one can tell, is very much not proven. Temperatures have been considerably higher in other interglacial periods. The 2nd and 3rd c AD were certainly warmer than today, as was the period when the Vikings colonised what was then, really, Greenland in the 9thc. Similarly, cold periods are on record. The period at, and preceding, the Black Death is one example, while in the later Victorian period, skating on the Thames was commonplace.
Recent temperature increases, however caused, have certainly encouraged viticulture in Britain. In addition, the net, making vine knowledge and catalogues available at the click of a computer terminal, has encouraged amateur planting both for wine and dessert. The National Vine collection aims at identifying and trialling suitable varieties for both wine and dessert, both seeded and seedless. In addition, trials for disease resistance will, we hope, enable us to identify with increasing certainty vines that that not merely can be grown with so called organic sprays – a dubious advantage, in my opinion, but which can be grown successfully without sprays at all in most circumstances.
Vine growing in Britain has a long history, and not all as one might expect, by monastic institutions. However, cultivation was rarely really profit making, and seems always to have always to have been fairly small scale. It was not until after the Second World War that British viticulture took off. There is today probably currently a greater acreage in Britain than ever before.
Much of this can be attributed to the pioneers of vine trials. As a result of their efforts, for the first time potential growers had a reasonable idea of which varieties would succeed in Britain, and which would not. The work of Ray Barrington Brock in running the first systematic vine trials in Britain, and later, the collection assembled by Gillian Pearkes, helped identify those varieties then available, both classic sorts and those of more recent origin, which would succeed in this country. The first commercial planting, by Sir Guy Salisbury Jones at Hambledon in Hampshire, alerted others to the possibilities, and there are today 2000 plus acres in crop, including some seriously successful businesses producing excellent wines, and a number of sparking wines, some as good as any in the world. Given a sensible selection of varieties, there is today no reason why professional and amateur should not make excellent wines in any of the warmer parts of the country, while our work at the National Vine Collection is at last sorting out reliable outdoor table grapes, and an ever increasing choice of seedless varieties.
For myself, I have been interested in grapes from an early age, and in the 1970’s my wife and I, with the aid of an alarming mortgage and two full time jobs, purchased Wain House in W. Gloucestershire, a semi derelict cottage with land. This became St. Anne’s Vineyard, with a collection of vines on informal trial on a separate piece of land. We kept the day jobs. When we sold the vineyard – still operating, twenty years later, we kept the vine collection. This has become the National Vine Collection, at our present address. We are understandably proud of it with over four hundred varieties likely to be suitable for Britain on trial, as far as we know the largest collection of vines ever assembled in this country.
Trials such as this are vital. Performance and ripening times and sequences do not necessarily match figures obtained from abroad. It would seem that vines come in two, admittedly overlapping, types. One sort needs simply a certain amount of heat to ripen, the other needs also a certain amount of sun and high temperatures. Most cool climate growing areas have a significantly shorter growing season than ourselves, but a much hotter high sun summer. Total heat levels may be similar, but very differently distributed. Thus, until a vine has been trialled in Britain, it is far from certain how it will perform.
Modern vine breeding really began in the 19thc., and in Europe at least was a response to necessity. America has its own interesting vitis species, likewise its own pests and diseases. Imports from America brought these to Europe, where the native vitis vinifera had no inbuilt resistance. Protective spraying became necessary, while in due course the root louse phylloxera began to eat the roots of European vines.
The threat to Europe’s wine supplies was many- sided, and dealt with in several ways. Fungicides and pesticides were trialled and used, while grafting vines onto resistant American rootstocks became standard. In addition, mainly in France, private growers set out on an intensive breeding programme aimed at combining European fruit quality with American hardiness and disease resistance.
Thousands of new varieties were produced. Some became very popular, and a number exist today. A few are still really worth while growing in the UK. The variety Seyval Blanc, first class for dry wine or ‘fizz’, is one such. The inbuilt toughness and resistance of many of these sorts is particularly useful to amateurs and those hoping to grow organically, in a climate such as ours where disease is a problem. Some are still used as parents in modern breeding programmes. Today however, it is German research stations which are producing more interesting new varieties, often incorporating plant material from American and Russian sources. Such work is always interesting for the UK., and money and time is being spent on a new generation of disease and often phylloxera resistant hybrids.
Much more useful work was done in Russia and its satellites under communism, much of it aimed at cold resistance and not all of it transferable to Britain. There is a Siberian vitis species called vitis amurensis with useful qualities, and this has been widely used as a parent. It gives, as one might imagine, first rate winter hardiness. Not needed in Britain, the other part- short season ripening, has produced a wide range of extremely early sorts, some disease resistant, and as many of these as we can get are being included in our trials, helped by sudden availability through the new members of the EU. Ironically, some of the most interesting come from a private Latvian breeder Pauls Suhatnieks, working during the communist period on his own in his own time on a Latvian collective farm.
Elsewhere in Europe, a highly successful breeding programme had been carried on at the Eger Research station in Hungary. Much of this has involved cross breeding Perle de Csaba- an ultra early vinifera of high quality, low disease resistance and tiny crops, with the old French hybrid Seyve Villiard 12375 – huge crops of big grapes of reasonable quality, plus virtually total disease resistance. Some excellent varieties for dessert and wine have resulted, and seem to like our climate, along with a number of other sorts from the same breeders.
The most extensive breeding programmes as you can imagine, are under way in the United States. There is, and has long been, money available and a willingness to spend on research. So unlike contemporary Britain. Many State universities run serious breeding and trialling programmes, and success bring prestige to the university, and can be seriously rewarding financially. Traditionally, Cornell University, New York State, ran the cool climate breeding work. From the 19thc onwards, they produced a whole range of dessert and wine varieties, trying to combine adequate toughness, cold and disease resistance for the difficult conditions of the N.E.USA with European fruit quality. In addition, a major long running attempt was made to produce seedless cultivars.
Seedlessness is not a natural condition for grapes, and can develop in two ways. Either the grape is (1)parthenocarpic – basically a male plant but with usually tiny grapes, wholly without seeds, or(2)stenospermocarpic – seeds are tiny, and aborted, ideally too small to notice. Black Corinth, the currant grape, is the only well known example of (1), but virtually all are type (2) , which gives bigger grapes, better crops, and generally better quality. Breeders at Cornell found that crossing the American dessert hybrid variety Ontario with Thompsons Seedless, a high quality vinifera type 2 seedless, produced an exceptional number of high quality offspring. This cross was done thousands of times, and some very fine varieties have resulted, several succeeding well in this country. Most American dessert grape breeding is now for seedless sorts, and a number of State universities are producing good new varieties. A wide range of selections of new sorts are under trial. In this country, we are trialling varieties for both indoor and outdoor production, with very promising results.
Also in the USA, in the cold climate state of Wisconsin, an American farmer named Elmer Swenson has, beginning in the 1940’s,bred a range of ultra hardy short season disease resistant sorts with great success. His work has been taken up by the State University of Minnesota, an we have a number of his varieties under trial – less for their cold hardiness, which we cannot check, than for their promise of extreme earliness and in some cases good quality.
Our collection is ever growing, and includes varieties from all these sources. New contributions are always welcome, and over time we intend to establish which varieties perform best in this country.
© Brian Edwards
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