Harvest 2026, baby!

 What a wild season it’s been.

Solaris harvest crew

Every spring, our vines wake up with the same optimism we’ve been squirrelling away all winter. Then the weather gets involved and we remember that growing grapes for wine is never quite plain sailing.

Here in Mid-Wales, 2026 brought rolling heatwaves and a seriously dry summer. When the ground screws for our new vineyard cabins were installed, the team at No More Digging Wales (we highly recommend them!) dug two metres down into beautiful Silurian shale it was all dry as a bone.

Our established vines loved the sunshine, whereas our younger vines, more accustomed to moderate Welsh summers, slowed right down from July onwards.

So what did it mean for the 2026 grape harvest?

Our biggest harvest yet

Despite the challenging weather, 2026 has been our biggest harvest yet across all our grape varieties.

Our older vines coped well and our older young vines (not the baby ones) produced their biggest crops to date. This harvest feels like a real milestone because we planted our vineyard in five different batches between 2017 and 2025 (as you do...) it's all taken a while to kick off.

If you're thinking of planting a vineyard, don't do it this way! Definitely, definitely plant them all at the same time. Grapevines take three to five years to establish enough to produce a decent crop and can take even longer when you're dealing with late spring frosts, Welsh weather and an organic approach to growing.

An earlier Welsh wine harvest

Harvest started around two to three weeks earlier than in 2022 and 2023. We’re not really counting 2024, aka The Bummer Year.

We had a surprise bumper crop of Ortega this year, so we’re making a new still white wine: a field blend of Ortega, Bacchus and Muscaris. Our younger vines kindly produced enough fruit for us to have a little more fun in the winery. It won’t be ready for a while, but keep your eyes peeled for the 2026 vintage.

The hot, dry summer also brought our Solaris and Rondo towards ripeness earlier than usual. We held off picking until the acidity had dropped into balance, which is an important part of making the fresh, naturally expressive wines we love.

Our Regent, destined for our 2026 Still Red, was destemmed and pressed earlier this week. It’s currently looking like it will come in at around 12% ABV, which is at the higher end of the scale for us in our cooler climes.

And then there was the rain...

There’s always some peril.

The biggest upset came with our Phoenix grapes. After endless weeks of drought, two big rainstorms arrived in the last week of August. Some of our younger Phoenix vines simply couldn’t cope with the sudden intake of water and quite a few grapes split.

There’s not much you can do when that happens except cut out the damaged bunches and hope the survivors make it through. Thankfully, they did.

One thing we didn't have much trouble with this year though was birds. The hedgerows were absolutely heaving with food, so our resident wildlife mostly left the grapes alone. Apart from one particularly plucky pheasant family who have made our vineyard their home.

And then there were the wasps. After the biblical wasp deluges of 2023 and 2025, we barely saw any this year. We're not sure whether it was the extreme summer weather, the warmer and wetter winters, or something else entirely. If you know where all the wasps went, please tell us. We’d genuinely like to know.

Harvest is better with friends

Over four harvest days, we welcomed more than 20 different volunteers to the vineyard, starting with Solaris in early September and finishing with Regent, Bacchus and Muscaris this weekend. There were new friendships forged, plenty of cross-pollination of ideas and a few lightly nicked fingers. 

Harvest volunteering is one of our favourite ways to share the vineyard with our community. As much as James and I like rattling around just the two of us, as always, the vineyard comes alive with people in it! On a harvest day, expect to spend a few hours snipping bunches off the vines, chatting to people you might never otherwise meet and generally settling into the rhythm of it all.

A few volunteers told us they found it surprisingly meditative. Once the harvesting is done there’s lunch with wine and lashings of Olwen's (James' mum's) utterly delicious welsh cakes.

Our Rondo being crushed at the winery at Black Mountain Vineyard

What happens next?

Well, there’s a lot of winemaking still to come.

We picked so much fruit this year that our winemaker's winery is bursting at the seams. Which means there’s a good chance we’ll be doing some of the winemaking here at Whinyard Rocks next year.

A new chapter with our own little winery in the Welsh Borders. Watch this space and get those feet washed!

Fancy joining us for Harvest 2027?

If you’d like to experience harvest at our family-run vineyard in Mid-Wales, we’ll be opening up volunteer spaces for Harvest 2027 next year.

Sign up to join our harvest community, we’d love to have you join us in the vines.