So, you want to make wine. Romantic, right? Maybe you’ve imagined yourself strolling through rows of vines at golden hour, a floppy hat perched rakishly on your head, occasionally plucking a grape and pondering its phenolic maturity with a furrowed brow. Lovely. Now toss that image aside and prepare for dirt under your fingernails, mild financial panic, and a lot of shouting at deer.

Before you can ferment anything, you need vines. And before you get vines, you need land. Ideally, this land has decent drainage, a nice aspect (south-facing slopes are always in vogue), and the kind of soil that makes vine roots wriggle with joy. You’ll also want a climate that won’t regularly destroy your crop—though this is getting trickier by the year.

Assuming you’ve found your little slice of viticultural heaven, the first job is often tearing out whatever was there before. Old vines, rocks, trees, that mysterious concrete bunker—all of it goes. Then comes the soil prep. This involves ploughing, testing pH levels, adding compost, and generally annoying every worm in residence. It’s not glamorous, but neither is planting a vineyard on exhausted dirt.

Next, you choose your vines. This is where things get technical. What grape? What clone of that grape? What rootstock? (Because modern vines are grafted onto pest-resistant roots, not planted straight into the ground like the old days. Unless you enjoy feeding your entire investment to phylloxera, which is essentially vineyard locusts in business casual.)

You order the vines, you wait. They arrive in bundles, bare-rooted and looking about as inspiring as a bag of damp sticks. But those sticks hold potential. You plant them, usually in spring, using laser-guided tractors if you’re fancy, or string and back pain if you’re not. The rows are spaced, the trellising is installed, and suddenly it’s starting to look like a vineyard. A very young, very needy one.

Now comes the waiting. Vines take three years to produce their first commercial crop, which means three seasons of nurturing a plant that gives you precisely zero income. In the meantime, you spend your days training shoots, tying things to wires, and fending off pests with a mix of science, superstition, and mild desperation.

Let’s talk about pests. Deer love young vines. So do rabbits, voles, and the occasional rogue sheep. Then there are insects, which range from vaguely annoying to borderline apocalyptic. And let’s not forget mildew, rot, hail, frost, drought, and the existential threat of a neighbouring vineyard deciding to go fully biodynamic and start burying cow horns on your property line.

By year three, if all goes well, your vines will produce grapes. Not many, and possibly not great, but grapes nonetheless. You might do a micro-vinification—essentially a test batch to see what your site can do. It will probably taste weird. That’s okay. You’re learning.

Vineyards don’t just teach you how to grow grapes. They teach patience, resilience, and the precise sound your voice makes when yelling at birds from a moving quad bike. You’ll learn to read the weather like a sailor, diagnose leaf issues like a plant doctor, and develop opinions about canopy management that you didn’t know a human could have.

And yet, despite the sweat, setbacks, and spreadsheets, you’ll look out one morning and see your vines basking in the light. The rows are neat, the leaves are fluttering, and for a moment—a brief, perfect moment—it’ll all feel worth it.

That is, until you realise you forgot to net for birds.

Stay tuned for Part 2: Harvest Time, aka The Grapes Fight Back.