The Hardie Inheritance by Anne Melville

effort of talking.
    â€˜We pick young nettle tips in spring and boil them like spinach. I can tell you, the smell is disgusting. Philip does all the skilled work; the fermentation.’
    â€˜Do you sell any of it?’
    â€˜Not the nettle wine. Not everyone likes it. But elderberry wine, yes. Your father takes some of that down to the marketfor us.’ Grace flushed a little as she admitted it, although it was foolish for someone whose family had in earlier generations prospered by selling wine commercially to be ashamed of this small-scale activity. The cash it brought in enabled them to buy the sugar needed both for the wine they consumed themselves and the preserves of fruit which Mrs Hardie stocked up for each winter. Sugar, like shoes, was something which could not be produced on their own land, but must be bought for money.
    â€˜Do you never use grapes?’
    Grace shook her head. ‘The vine that you probably remember was in one of the glasshouses. We don’t heat those any longer.’
    â€˜But you could grow vines out of doors.’
    â€˜Surely not. They wouldn’t ripen in an English summer, would they?’
    â€˜Romans,’ said Philip. On the rare occasions when he spoke, he was economical with words; but Andy, understanding his meaning, nodded.
    â€˜That’s right. The Romans had vineyards in England – even further north than this. I was walking about earlier on, while your visitor was here. The ridges on the lower pasture, you know, below the house – I reckon that’s old terracing. Facing south-west, sheltered from the north, draining down well. There could have been a vineyard there once. Could be again. Though nowadays anyone who wanted to plant would take the rows north to south. Let me show you.’ He stood up, eager to lead the way down the hill.
    Both Mrs Hardie and Philip shook their heads smilingly. The visit of their young relative had interrupted their usual daily routine and they were anxious to return to work. Only Grace, who had abandoned her carving for the day when she took off her working clothes, was prepared to walk down through the upper meadow and stand with Andy on the highest of what must certainly have been a series of terraces long ago.
    â€˜A row going north to south would cut across these lines,’ she pointed out; for the meadow, like the house itself, had a south-west aspect.
    â€˜All the better,’ said Andy. ‘The extra height would allow more sun to reach the end of the rows. It would be more difficult to plough the land for the first time, I suppose – but you wouldn’t need to use the whole meadow. An acre would be quite enough to start with to see how it went. About three thousand vines, say.’
    â€˜Three thousand!’ Grace had thought they were discussing only a small test area: half a dozen vines, perhaps, from which an experimental wine could be made by the same method which Philip applied to raspberries or redcurrants. ‘You’re not suggesting that we should attempt to start a proper vineyard here!’
    â€˜It’s easier than you might think. In France –’
    â€˜We’re not in France,’ said Grace. ‘And we have no labour. Who is going to dig out three thousand holes and drive in three thousand stakes and plant and prune and hoe for three or four years, I suppose, before the first fruit is seen? And all for nothing, perhaps, if the soil proves unsuitable or the summers too cold.’
    â€˜The soil’s all right. And it’s autumn that matters, not summer. I remember some good Septembers and Octobers here. Five years out of six you’d get a good ripening.’
    â€˜Anyway –’ Grace hardly listened to his interruption – ‘we couldn’t possibly afford to buy vines on such a scale.’
    â€˜Well, you could cut the number by half and plant them at six feet instead of three. Or even fewer to start with, and root the