Grape Expectations

Just over a year ago I had this idea that I wanted to make my own wine. Not the kind your dad used to make out of kits that always tasted awful but the real thing with real grapes. Maybe prompted by the several glasses of wine I'd consumed as well as a dissillusionment with urban city life, I announced one late summer's afternoon to a group of friends that I was going to produce a bottle of wine with my name on the label. There and then, mildly sloshed sitting in the back garden watching the last of the summer sun dissappear behind the rooftops of Nunhead it seemed a perfectly reasonable proposition. The following day however it didn't seem so straightforward. For starters where was I going to get these grapes from and although I worked in wine retail, actually making anything remotely drinkable required a good deal of expertise and money? I wasn't the green fingered type either. Louise my partner and I had tried an allottment once but gave up when our child Ben was born. Just as well as all we seemed to grow was Bind Weed. What I did have in my favour however was a stubborn refusal to give in verging on bloodymindedness. I'd also had some experience of making the impossible happen. As a extremely normal youth growing up in a remote part of the Midlands in the middle of the dull seventies I saw my future stretching out in front of me and I didn't like what I saw. My dad, was the Headmaster of the school I went to. Yes, that's right headmaster's son no less. I seemed genetically programmed to be a normal, well adjusted individual with a decent if unexciting career in education mapped out for me if I didn't balls it all up. Which is exactly what I did. Instead of doing what I was meant to do I did the opposite. I became the lead vocalist in a punk rock band. Well I suppose new wave would be more accurate. I'd morphed from swot to dropout almost overnight. Needless to say dad wasn't impressed but I'd yearned to be different and art and music were my real passions. Still I was a long way from making a record, the ultimate goal.
Basically, despite everything I kept at it. I couldn't play or sing but hey that was positively encouraged in those days. But I had bigger ideas and eventually we got to make a record. The day the square brown cardboard package arrived was one of the most exciting days of my life. I could barely contain myself opening it. Inside was a 7inch vinyl single in a picture sleeve. The Take 3 EP by B-Movie and on the inner label of the record was my name written by Steve Hovington. Here was a dream made reality, something I'd made and sweated over. A dream you could touch, see, hear and smell. That moment has stayed with me all my life, a moment when my expectations in life were wildly surpassed. I've made quite a few records since, some have exceeded expectations like our first single for a major label 'Remembrance Day' and 'Nowhere Girl' which I'm proud of but somehow, somewhere that simple moment when you are ultimately satisfied with something has been lost. Obviously the birth of my son Ben is the best moment of my life but I remain creatively unfulfilled and the desire to recapture some of that lost emotion is behind the urge to do something way beyond me and making wine is right up there with climbing high mountains as far as I'm concerned, virtually impossible. If I could achieve the goal of making my my own wine with my own label wouldn't I feel that enormous sense of satisfaction and achievement. It seemed the perfect antidote to the onset of winter. I was determined to do this but the only problem was where to start.