When 2024 Didn’t Go to Plan: The Unexpected Wines We Made in the Welsh Borders

How a disastrous 2024 vintage in the Welsh Borders led us to make three wines we never planned to make.

So, what wines did we make?

Our Solaris Pet Nat, Still Orange and Rosé Col Fondo wines

From the challenging 2024 UK wine vintage came three joyfully unexpected wines: a 100% Solaris Pet Nat, a Rosé Col Fondo made from Solaris and Rondo, and a 12-week skin-contact Solaris orange wine. All three were born from a difficult harvest and a decision to experiment with the fruit we could source, rather than accept that 2024 would be a year without wine.

The UK wine harvest of 2024: a year of rain, cold and crop losses

Whilst you flip open up your fifth tube of sun cream this summer, you’ve probably forgotten what the summer of 2024 was like. It was chilly, grey and wet wet wet. We yearned for the sun to shine more than two days at a time and for the relentless rain to let up. Sadly, temperatures refused to rise and the overcast skies never seemed to shake. The UK summer of 2024 was the coolest since 2015. So what does this mean for grape growing? Very bad news indeed. The 2024 UK grape harvest was reported to be the second worst in the UK since records began and many vineyards reported dramatically reduced yields. Although we know the altitude and northerly location of our Mid-Wales vineyard means cooler temperatures overall, few vineyards across the UK were immune to the great grape-growing disaster of 2024.

Why our 2024 grape harvest was so difficult

Our family harvesting Solaris at Whinyard Rocks in October 2024

We first discovered things weren’t looking good at leaf stripping time. This is when we remove the leaves around the bunches to expose them to the sun, soon after the vines flower in July. (They say the week around Wimbledon is the prime flowering time.) However, when we pulled off the leaves to witness the magical potential below, for our Solaris and Rondo, there wasn’t much there. Our Regent, Phoenix and some Ortega however managed to catch a window of fair weather at flowering. We could see there were grapes, but it quickly became clear that they were going to ripen much later than usual.

So our spirits stayed perky and we spent the summer hoping to be able to harvest a reduced crop. But something in the back of our minds niggled. It dawned on us that this was not going to be a great year. The idea of not having any wine for at least a year felt sad and worrying, particularly as our scale at this point was (ridiculously) small. All of our wines at this time were made with fruit we’d harvested from our original 7-year old 800 vines. So we thought we’d try to source some grapes locally, a common practice around the world when vineyards have an over or under supply of grapes.

Sourcing Solaris grapes from Herefordshire

Solaris at Bryn's vineyard in Herefordshire in September 2024

Enter Bryn, the friendly octogenarian grape whisperer of the Welsh borders, capable of growing grapes when others failed. A miraculous wizard whose parcel of unsprayed and carefully tended Solaris vines in Herefordshire seemed unscathed from the horror of that summer. On the 24th of September James and I hand-harvested his field along with a local group of regular volunteers whose joy at being able to harvest was palpable.

A harvest means so much more than picking grapes. It’s a celebration of the peak of the season’s efforts and signals a thrilling promise in the wine to come, and everybody there felt it. Whilst we were happy to be harvesting, there was still one year’s worth of toil in our fields where the outcome was unknown. We didn’t quite know at this point what would come next. That would all depend on the rest of our harvest.

An October frost brings the 2024 harvest to an end

Celebrating a total 2024 Solaris harvest of four crates. Yes, you read that right.

For us, the whole season was like a series of little slow car crashes, repeated with each new unpredictable turn, leading up to a giant explosion, just to round it off in style. We hoped for an early September heatwave, like the one that crept up in 2023. If this had happened, our remaining varieties could’ve limped over the line, giving us a shot at a reasonable harvest. The weather, of course, had other plans. In a final blow, the crushing reality of a total curveball mid-October frost meant curtains for every single bunch. We dropped everything. Whole bunches cut and dropped to the ground instead of buckets and crates.

Three unexpected wines from a difficult vintage

After a brief grieving period - this was our first bad vintage - we got down to the business of working out what to do next. Tooled up with our own tiny Solaris and Rondo harvest and a Solaris harvest from Bryn’s vineyard, we began to think about three wines we never planned to make. With a larger proportion of solaris than we’d had before, the doors of experimentation opened up. 

We loved the idea of pushing Solaris’ skin-contact capabilities, and so our 12-week skin-contact Solaris orange wine was born. Savoury, textural and full of the flavour of broken orange peel, we love it so much that we have more in the winery from our 2025 harvest.

Our micro Rondo harvest was perfect for our first foray into sparkling rosé, which became our Rosé Col Fondo. It's all wild strawberries on the nose, with vibrant acidity and an easy-drinking freshness.

Then came our 100% Solaris Pet Nat. A style we already know and love, but made entirely from Solaris. Deep peach-blush in colour, it's fresh, fun and full of tropical fruit, with a moreish dose of freshly cut pineapple and lively fine bubbles.

Turning a difficult vintage into an unexpected success

Solaris grapes in the winery in 2024 and our Rosé Col Fondo in the winery in June 2025.

The difficult growing season forced us to think differently about what we could make. What started as an experiment has turned into three delightful wines we’re now a bit obsessed with and would never have existed otherwise. In the end, we’re rather glad it happened. They say the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, but we couldn’t be happier.

The story behind our new wine labels

Designed in collaboration with our friend and local photographer Mat Price, each label features his stunning photography of the Radnor Valley - our home and where our vineyard lies in the heart of. From the enchanting Radnor Forest on our Solaris Pet Nat to the patchwork valley floor on our Rosé Col Fondo, we hope you enjoy them!

Discover the wines

The three wines born from our unexpected 2024 experiment are now available from Whinyard Rocks.