Homegrown not coming up rosé..

Ifeel like I’ve lost two months of my life I’m never going to get back. Care and attention my nearest and dearest could only dream of was lavished on three tomato plants in the hope of bestowing a bounty of sweet fruit.

Watering, feeding, moving from one sunny patch to another, “pinching out” unwanted shoots and constructing elaborate bamboo frames, however, failed to produce one solitary tomato.

I’m now starting to wonder if the plants given to me, by one of herself ’s relatives who shall remain nameless, were even tomatoes.

My failure to get a spag bol out of homegrown toms has certainly shot down any hope of digging a trench in the back garden to plant grapes.

While visiting the amazing gardens at Kylemore Abbey in Galway the other week, I spied gnarled-looking vines in one of the Victorian era greenhouses bearing bunches of grapes labelled Black Hamburgh.

The internet tells me the grape is originally from Germany where it’s known, not as Schwarz Hamburg, but Trollinger. But it made it to the UK a right while back and, apparently a vine planted at Hampton Court Palace in 1768 is still producing fruit.

Reading about the effort that goes into growing grapes gives me a renewed respect for people who do it year round in the hope of making fabulous wine. Next year I’ll give tomatoes another rattle, but grapes I’ll leave to the professionals. To drown my sorrows, a beautifully shaped bottle of rosé arrived in the house the other night.

The Côtes de Provence is a Mediterranean appellation where around four fifths of production is rosé. The wines tend be quite pale, which is apparently all the rage and it’s a part of France where “serious” rosé can be found, meaning top end but pricey.

Cinsaut and Grenache are the most widely used grapes and rosé here must contain at least 20% saignée wine.

The term means bled and is when juice from just crushed dark skinned grapes is allowed to run into the wine, adding flavour and those phenolics that are supposed to be good for us.

What you end up with, with the wines widely available here for less than a tenner anyway, are crisp but lightly sweet wines that are great with food. There’s a fair few at good offies and supermarkets. Try one of these while I mourn the tomatoes that never were.