Meet the villagers picking to save the English wine crop
Barbara Laithwaite is used to local people calling Wyfold Vineyard a “haven”. Her south-facing two hectares of the Chiltern Hills, Oxfordshire, are set snug between thickets of forest, and discovered only by footpath or tapered country lanes.
It is the sort of place that looks like a painting even on a bad day; on a good one, you could trick yourself into thinking you’re in Champagne.
But for the past three months of lockdown, Laithwaite, 73, has seen Wyfold become more than a place of quiet sanctuary, and instead something of a lifeline for the rural community surrounding it.
When the coronavirus accelerated in mid-March, Laithwaite could continue travelling to and from the vineyard and her home a few miles away, thanks to agricultural workers’ exemption from the unessential travel ban.
“Everything at the vineyard was so quiet, on the roads and out in the fields, and you could just sit in the peace of the vineyard and look and listen as the world happened around you. But then I thought, ‘Other people should be benefitting from this as well.’”
Every summer, Laithwaite invites a small group of local people to help on the vineyard, letting them take care of simpler jobs, while groups of more skilled migrant workers, usually Romanian (the few groups who didn’t return to Europe before lockdown, she says, are hugely in-demand and now quite expensive) take care of the specialist tasks. She then hosts a barbecue – usually paired with a few bottles of Wyfold’s award-winning sparkling wines – in thanks.
Laithwaite racked her brains. The barbecues couldn’t go ahead, obviously, but the work still needed to be done if there was to be a vintage of 2020, so she could certainly justify inviting locals to work on the land and no rules would be broken. And it’d be a shame not to be able to share the vineyard while everyone’s stuck at home. It was simply a question of logistics…
“And then I realised,” she says, brightly, “our vineyard is absolutely perfect for distanced working.”
It’s true. As factories and offices scramble to install labyrinthine one-way systems and Perspex screens to ensure safe distances, Wyfold’s rows of vines are already precisely 2.2m apart.
“That’s not the case for all vineyards, but we just happened to be using that rule, so I thought I might as well try it and see if people are interested.”
In late April, a trial day was organised. Laithwaite put a message out on neighbourhood connections app NextDoor and emailed locals she knew to offer them a chance to help out, specifically arriving either singly or in their households at 10 minute intervals. They then washed and disinfected, before Laithwaite assigned each helper or household a few rows to look after and instructions for what to do – which could be anything from bud selection to canopy management.
“The feedback was instantly amazing,” Laithwaite says, “you chat a little bit while working, but just to see human beings in the same area, doing the same task, is a great comfort. This is people who really focus and do the work extremely well, but they’re in a loose group and sticking to the rules, with essential workers’ certificates. It’s just so beneficial for everybody.”
Perhaps nobody more than Rachel Wood. The 38-year-old American, who works in renewable energy, had only just moved to the area for work when lockdown started. She barely knew her way around, had left all her friends either in Yorkshire (where she’d been living for 13 years) or in the US, and didn’t even know the vineyard existed.
“It was pretty lonely really, to be inside all the time and not even knowing anyone when you’re out walking your dog, but I saw Barbara’s post on NextDoor and thought, ‘huh, I did not expect a vineyard to be in England.’ But I needed something to do with myself, so I went down at the end of April,” she says.
“As soon as I got there it just felt so good to be doing something useful, and to be outside. You just start on a row in the morning, then two hours later you’ve got to the end, met some new people and been helpful.”
Wood is one of dozens of local people who have found viticulture an unlikely source of calm during the emotionally-straining weeks of lockdown. Becky Bryant’s 16-year-old son, Jonty, was due to be completing his GCSEs this summer. When they were postponed, instead of moping around or playing Fortnite, he agreed to lend a hand at Wyfold with his mum twice a week.
“We have a very busy house – my husband’s working from home, I work part-time, we have another son who is 13 and at home, so it’s been so nice to break off in a splinter group to do something positive,” Bryant, 49, says. “For him I think it is key to get a sense of achievement at the moment, to work for something having had the exams snatched away. Plus, you pack a good picnic and he’ll come anywhere.”
Jonty’s loved it. “I didn’t really feel like I had any routine in my life [when school closed], every day was pretty much the same, so getting to work outside and have something to look forward to was exciting,” he says. “It can be a bit fiddly, but it’s sort of therapeutic to do it while listening to music or a podcast, or chatting.”
Of a slightly different vintage, but no less energetic, is 74-year-old widow Judy Skeet, who has lived in Wyfold village for 45 years. As a member of the government’s ‘vulnerable’ over-70s group, when her old friend Laithwaite put the call out for help, Skeet saw an opportunity to escape her home for a few hours and get some state-sanctioned company.
“It has particularly been a lifeline for the over-70s like me. I’ve got some gardening skills I can lend, and have been volunteering for Barbara for years, but this year has been really special. And I’ve talked to people I’ve never met in 40 years.”
Wood was nervous when she first tended to one of Wyfold’s 9,000 vines, worried anything she does in spring might scupper the harvest in the autumn. “It’s like looking after somebody’s babies – Barbara knows every individual one. But after a while you get used to it and just feel lucky. At a time like this, when you have a kind of moral obligation to do nothing, we’re able to do something that will have an amazing product at the end.”
Laithwaite, for the record, isn’t the type to bark orders, even if the vines are her babies. Every bottle of Wyfold sparkling wine comes with the story of that year’s conditions – a frosty start, a dry summer, that sort of thing. When the 2020 bottles are produced in four years, she might need to mention a certain plague.
“Gosh, yes. The ‘Covid Vintage’, we will definitely mention it. I think we’ll always remember this spring. There’s been a lot of negatives, of course, but we mustn’t forget the things we can celebrate too.”
If you'd like to try Wyfold’s wines, visit laithwaites.co.uk
