Better vineyard management boosts UK 2024 wine crop

English and Welsh winegrowers have reported a small but good quality crop in 2024 due in part to better vineyard management, the latest WinesGB Harvest Yield Survey has found. The report, which is published annually, highlighted the growing maturity of the homegrown UK industry and its understanding of vineyard management, which helped growers cope with the “testing conditions” experienced this year. The “expertise, resilience, and selectivity in the vineyard resulted in many producers harvesting a small but good quality crop,” it said, based on “assiduous vineyard management and selective picking”. The grapes overall had a high level of phenolic ripeness, the survey found, because they had been let to hang over a longer than average harvest period. “A true ‘winegrowers’ vintage’, the skills amassed by vine-growing and production teams in the UK worked in synergy with the variability of this year’s harvest,” the report said. It was a year that saw lower yields than those in 2023 ...