OUR HOBBY WINE IS GREAT WITH A HELPING OF CHIPS

Emma Williams-Holt, 36, lives in shrewsbury with husband tom, 34, and their son Jack, four. they have a hobby vineyard at home in shropshire. she says:

OUR vineyard is a much-loved member of our wider family, though Tom always jokes that ‘only a mother could love’ the white wine we produce there.

He planted it in May 2008 when he was part-way through a three-year degree course studying viticulture and oenology, his interest in wine having been piqued while stacking shelves at a wine merchant’s in Shrewsbury where he and I met.

A friend of his parents had bought a new property with a spare field attached to it that happened to be south-facing and on a bit of a slope, making it ideal for wine growing.

After a few tipples one night, Tom dreamed up the idea of planting it with vines and producing wine to share between friends and family, and the owners told him to go for it.

We called it Earlsdale Vineyard and set to work. Twelve years on, it has 500 vines, all of them Bacchus, which produce enough white wine for everyone who’s involved to drink a bottle a week.

It’s an aromatic, typically-English hedgerow wine and goes great with chips, although it’s met with varying degrees of enthusiasm depending on the quality of the vintage.

With Tom’s parents and the friends who own the land, we prune and tidy the vines, and do all the general maintenance. Jack is only four but we have already trained him to follow us up and down with a wheelbarrow, collecting all the cuttings when the vines are being pruned.

On harvest day every October we all get there early, eat breakfast cooked on a grill and open a few bottles of wine at lunchtime. The grapes are then made into wine using our own tiny hydropress.

We had a good run with our vintages in 2017 and 2018 when we won best white wine at the Shrewsbury Flower Show. Everything we’ve learned has meant we’ve even realised our dream of having a commercial vineyard in Spain, which we christened Paso-Primero.

But we can’t imagine ever getting rid of our little hobby vineyard.