Inside track: Staff 'adopt a vine' in the Pig’s vineyard, says Robin Hutson

Robin Hutson explores his plans for 2022, including encouraging all staff members to work in the vineyard.

The post festive season is a funny old time in any year. There are conflicting senses of anti-climax after the fun-filled but exhausting Christmas and New Year period, and the optimism as we look towards spring and a fresh year ahead. Let’s hope that 2022 means a full 12 months of trading, rather than any repetitions of what we have witnessed in the past two years.

These days there appear to be more and more people kicking off the year with dry January. I applaud their efforts and those of our bar teams, who seem to have a never-ending list of brilliant ideas up their sleeves for garden-inspired mocktails. Personally, I won’t be doing a totally dry January, but will attempt to have a modest month to start off the year. Mind you, maybe it’s not such a great idea anyway if you believe the article I read recently that suggested the risk of catching severe Covid was reduced by 17% (quite specific!) if you drank red wine. Well, that’s a good enough excuse for me.

Drinking or not drinking, I am certainly intent on spending some time reading about wine. Quite apart from trying to at least scan my backlog of Decanter magazines, I have begun to delve into a quite brilliant book by Oz Clarke entitled English Wine, that I happily received as a Christmas present. It’s a no-nonsense reference book and a bang up-to-date view on what’s happening in English wine today. It’s consumer-friendly and suitable for anyone intrigued by the domestic wine scene, full of personal tales, history, maps, tips and hard facts. I should say that I am not on commission for plugging this book, but I am definitely going to buy it for each of our wine crew.

Talking of wine, we have just launched an exciting initiative to get as many of our hotel team as possible involved in our little two-acre vineyard at the Pig in the South Downs. It’s called ‘Adopt a Vine’ and offers staff members the opportunity to work in the vineyard at specific times of the year, on their allotted row of vines, in return for a few bottles when it is produced.

The first call on their labour will be for pruning in February. We are going to bring in the experts for a crash course on how to prune – we wouldn’t want any ‘snip-happy’ rookies cutting our precious vines in the wrong place, would we?

Judy and I have adopted our row and look forward to getting stuck in with rest of the gang. I must say I am not looking forward to the hand-weeding. I suspect the most enthusiastic response from the team may be for the harvest itself, when there is the promise for all involved of a traditional harvest lunch in the vineyard. So from now on, it’s fingers crossed for some decent vine-friendly weather.