Halfpenny Green Wine Estate near Stourbridge gears up for bumper harvest amid summer heatwaves

A vineyard near Stourbridge is on track for another good year with the summer heatwaves creating perfect conditions for another bumper harvest.

The team at Halfpenny Green Wine Estate have their work cut out trimming and tucking in the 40,000 vines at the vineyard in Bobbington, South Staffordshire.

It’s a mammoth task but is expected to help yield a “fabulous crop” according to Clive Vickers, who runs the wine estate with wife Lisa and daughters Imogen and Emily.

Clive said: “The vines here are very deep rooting - 80 to 100 feet. They'll fetch up all the water nutrients, minerals they need - they'll enjoy the sunshine and they will grow and enjoy it and bring on hopefully a fantastic, high-quality, high yielding crop.

“These are being trimmed and tucked in but we got 40,000 vines on this site, each with about 10 arms growing up through the canopy, so 400,000 arms growing at two to three inches per day in this hot weather - so the workload, the manual labour, to get them into this canopy and tucked in is huge but it's rewarding because it brings on a fabulous crop.”

He said the grapes produced on the 30-acre estate, which his late father Martin Vickers began planting back in the 1980s, will produce around 90,000 bottles of wine.

But he added: “It's not all about the quantity - we’ll limit that to make sure the quality’s absolutely bang on - but the weather is doing its job.”

The hot weather in recent years has also brought forward the harvest season with picking expected to begin in a matter of weeks.

Lisa said: “If it’s anything like last year; our earliest ever harvest started on the 21st of August and we've never picked in August before.

“Thirty years ago we were picking late October into November, now we're picking early September and last year we started in August.

“It's crazy really when you stop to think about it.”

The award-winning wine estate, which also incorporates a shop, restaurant and fishing pools, has a dedicated team of volunteer grape pickers from the local community who come in to help out when harvest season gets under way.

“They’re valued friends from the nearby community and we don’t take any of them for granted. Many of them have been with us since we were founded,” Clive told the Express & Star last harvest season.

A decision to invest in cutting-edge pressing machinery following a wash-out 2024 means the estate can process nearly 1,000 tonnes of grapes each year, making its operation one of the biggest in the UK.