Charles Palmer Vineyards at Winchelsea, East Sussex, is a family business which is making the most of innovation to take advantage of the fast-developing English wine sector. Charles and his son Robert have been able to combine their farming experience with the latest techniques in grape production, and firmly believe that mechanisation is the way forward.
The UK grape harvest is currently carried out almost exclusively by hand, but change is on the horizon, suggests Charles. “We’ve always used labour from (vineyard management services provider) Vineworks, with a requirement for 35-40 people for a week, but it was hard to predict exactly how many we needed and when, and easy to end up with too many or too few,” he explains. “Then
