Six years ago I had a problem. We live on top of the beautiful North Downs in Kent and are lucky enough to have a bit of spare land. For the first few years we let someone keep their horses on it. Then they went and frankly I wasn't disappointed -- the horses were nice enough but left the land in a terrible mess.

After that we let a local farmer keep his sheep on there for nothing, which went fine, though they did bully the dog a bit from time to time (which is my problem, not theirs). But farmers don't keep sheep much any more. So I found myself with a couple of acres and nothing to do with them.

I know! Plant grapes! How hard can making your own wine be?

Idiot. Four hundred vines went in, half of the Pinot Meunier, half a red variety, Leon Millot. The Pinot never liked it here and spent most of the time not growing and covered in fungus. The Millot, though a variety no one has heard of, adore it. Rampant isn't the word. Below you can see what they look like today, tended by son Tom who's learned more about viticulture than I'll ever know.

<!--more-->Grapes are hard work, even now we're down to two hundred, and not all of them intended for wine. They do look lovely though and Tom's first trial vintage last year isn't half bad. The colour's beautiful and there's the making of a decent table red there I think. It's a bit sharp but this apparently will be rectified this year through something called malolactic fermentation. Search me.

Anyway -- this is what it looks like now, entirely due to the labour of Tom and his mum, not the one who came up with this daft idea in the first place. I should make clear that Tom is not a professional grape grower. He's actually a musician and music teacher in London and if you need a good jazz pianist he's your man as you can see from his website <a href="http://www.tomhewson.com" target="_blank">www.tomhewson.com</a>. If you want to hear him play <a href="http://tomhewson.com/listen/" target="_blank">you could start here</a>.

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