Newick Wine Estate

There is a moment in early spring when the vineyard looks its most hopeful. After months of bare, dormant wood, the first tiny buds begin to swell and break, little flashes of green appearing along the canes of our Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Bacchus. It is one of the most satisfying sights in the viticultural calendar. It is also, if we are honest, one of the most nerve-wracking.

Because with budburst comes frost risk. And in England, the frosts arrive with uncomfortable regularity.

Why Frost Is Such a Threat

To understand why frost keeps vineyard managers awake at night, it helps to understand a little of what is happening inside the vine at this time of year.

During winter dormancy, the vine is remarkably resilient. Frozen temperatures are no real threat to a dormant bud. But the moment a bud breaks and green tissue is exposed to the world this changes, that tender new growth is largely made of water. Ice crystals forming inside the cells will rupture them, and a bud that looked perfectly healthy at dusk can be lost int the morning, along with the potential fruit it would have borne.

The critical temperature is broadly around 0°C for newly emerged growth, though the this is more nuanced than a single figure suggests. We think of frost risk less like a switch and more like a sliding scale, the colder it gets and the longer it stays cold, the greater the proportion of buds we stand to lose.

Not All Frost Is the Same

There are two distinct types of frost event, and they behave very differently.

Radiation frost is the kind we face most often in spring. On a clear, still night with no cloud cover, heat radiates upward from the earth’s surface and is lost into the atmosphere. Temperatures close to the ground drop sharply, often several degrees colder than the air temperature recorded at the standard weather station. Cold air is dense and heavy, it flows downhill and pools in low-lying areas. Certain areas in our vineyard are more exposed to this cold-pooling effect than others, and we have learned over time exactly where the edge of risk is.

Advection frosts are rarer but far more serious: a mass of genuinely cold air moving across the landscape, bringing freezing conditions regardless of cloud cover, wind, or topography. When an advection event is forecast, there is relatively little a vineyard can do. The good news is that these events are less common in the critical spring window, and modern forecasting gives us reasonable warning.

The vast majority of our spring frost battles are radiation events and those, at least, we can fight.

How We Protect the Vines

Our primary tool is frost candles, large vegetable wax candles, placed between the vine rows and lit when temperatures threaten to fall to dangerous levels. They are a traditional method, used across France for centuries and one of the more common found in English vineyards too. They work by releasing heat into the air immediately around the vines, raising the local temperature by a degree or two.

Lighting them in the small hours of a spring morning is one of the stranger and more memorable experiences this job has to offer. The vineyard, which by day is an orderly and familiar place, becomes something else entirely at 2am. The candles cast a warm, flickering orange glow across the rows, and the air carries the distinctive sweet, slightly smoky smell of burning vegetable wax which is unmistakeable. You become aware of how quiet the countryside is at that hour. And then you notice the eyes: foxes, deer, owls sitting in the hedgerows, watching you move between the rows with a lighter. They seem entirely unbothered. It is, in its way, a beautiful scene even if your mind is calculating temperatures and watching the thermometer with considerable anxiety.

We follow a staged approach to candle deployment. We begin lighting in our most vulnerable, cold-pooling block when temperatures reach 0.5°C, bringing the full complement online as temperatures approach 0°C. Extinguishing them is just as important as lighting them, we wait until we are certain the temperature is rising consistently and daylight has properly established, since a false dawn can see temperatures dip again after an initial climb.

Passive Strategies: Buying Time Before the Candles Come Out

Alongside active frost protection, there are things we do throughout the year that reduce our exposure before a frost event even arrives.

Late pruning is our most valuable. By delaying our pruning into March, we can push budburst back by one to two weeks, which is a meaningful buffer in a season where the difference between a damaging late frost and a clean spring can be a handful of days. It is not always logistically straightforward, but on our most frost-susceptible areas, timing the pruning late is well worth the effort.

Grass sward management between the rows also plays a role. A closely mown row has a higher daytime heat absorption and storage, thus allowing for greater re-radiation of heat at night. Leading to warmer near-surface air during potential radiation frost events.

The Forecast Problem

One of the most challenging aspects of frost management is the unreliability of forecasts at the precise local level. A regional forecast showing a low of 2°C might mean -1°C in our coldest block, depending on wind, cloud cover, and the exact path of overnight air drainage. We use a combination of Met Office data, specialist viticultural forecast services, and our own on-site sensor readings to build the clearest picture we can, and we still sometimes find ourselves making judgement calls based on experience.

What Frost Risk Means for Our Wines

It is worth saying plainly: frost events are not merely an inconvenience. A severe frost at the wrong moment can remove a significant portion of a year’s crop entirely. For a small estate like ours, producing Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Bacchus from eight hectares, that has real consequences for the wines we are able to make, the volumes available, and the business as a whole.

So when you visit us and open a bottle, know that somewhere in that wine there is a night, when someone was out in the dark at 2am, lighting candles, watching foxes, and willing the temperature not to drop any further.

It usually doesn’t. But we never quite stop worrying.