Every year, to maximise the quality of our Pinot, we severely strip shoots and bunches. But vines are philoprogenitive as buggery: kill their babies and they strike back. We ask our long suffering pickers not to pick ‘secondary’ bunches and until recently getting on for a tonne of these relatively unripe grapes has been left for the crows. But stone the crows. Why not pick the secondaries once they reach 12% sugar and make Rose out of them?
We tried it last year and it worked. We did it again this year and the stuff sold out within a month. Is there a lesson here?