I’m in! When is the tasting session?

It turns out people are not only growing grapes in cities, they are also getting together to turn it into wine. Now that’s community spirit!

This appealing idea means turning your backgarden fruit into something everyone can enjoy, right in time for Christmas. This innovative north London community scheme is asking the alluring question ‘Do you grow grapes in your garden or allotment that you would like to have made into wine?’

The community food co-operative OrganicLea has invited local growers to deliver their harvested grapes to its Hawkwood Winery in North London this autumn. The Winery is now busy combining all deliveries into two batches to make one red and one white wine, and will then return the finished wine to participating growers in the proportion of grapes they deliver to this year’s vintage.

The ratio is one bucket of grapes = one bottle of wine!

The minimum individual delivery the winery will accept is 1.5kg of grapes (about one full bucket). You can expect to get one bottle of wine for every 1.5 kilos. In return for your grapes and a minimal production fee of £6 per bottle, Hawkwood Winery will ferment, age and bottle the wine. Your wine you will be for domestic consumption only – that is, it cannot be sold.

Last year the Community Wine Making Scheme took in 400 kilos of grapes from 27 households across London, which were made into 260 bottles of wine.

However you go about celebrating this time of year, bonfires, fireworks, and Halloween are all ways to come together as communities, and though we don’t recognise it overtly now, sharing the seasonal glut and crop harvest is still a large part of this seasons celebrations, though ‘Harvest Festival’ isn’t a phrase I’ve heard much in recent years, isn’t the pumpkin one of the biggest brightest symbols around right now?

It is great to see such a community project in the heart of Britain’s biggest city.

This time last year I had the most fun harvesting olives with my husband and twin sons in Portugal, we took our harvest to the community olive press and gained a litre of olive oil for every 10 kilos of olives we took with us. ‘Payment’ for pressing comes as a 10% of our harvest so we don’t have to pay a single cent. This is an annual event and has remained unchanged since we first took in our olives there 20 years ago – the same system and the same lovely feeling of being part of our rural community. It was great to share with our teenagers.