Foreign workers in short supply says vineyard boss

THE owner of a vineyard in Henley has had to do his winter pruning a month early to get ahead of an agricultural labour shortage.

Jan Mirkowski, who owns Fairmile Vineyard, says a shortage of foreign workers due to the covid pandemic and Brexit forced him to hire skilled orchard workers in January rather than February to undertake the critical task of pruning the canes to set them up for summer.

He hired a group of Romanian workers through a Kent agency.

Mr Mirkowski said: “Some of the jobs in the vineyard are quite unskilled and I’m happy to pay local volunteers all year round.

“But some of the jobs are more specialised. I bring a gang up from Kent who are specialised orchard, vineyard and fruit workers. They’re very good at what they do.

“But there are few of them as they now need to have settled status in the UK, so there just aren’t so many going around.

“You hear of farmers leaving crops in the field to rot because there’s nobody around to pick them.

“The agency rang me in January and said, ‘If you want your winter pruning doing, we’ve got plenty of labour now but in February it’s tighter’.

“I keep my ear to the ground and the Government is talking about releasing almost 50,000 visas for seasonal workers to come to the UK this year.”

Mr Mirkowski, who lives next to his vineyard, says owners like him now share workers to overcome the shortage.

He said: “They’ll come and do a few days’ work for me here, then they’ll go on to the next vineyard and the next one.

“The trouble with vineyards, like a lot of agriculture, is it’s very seasonal. I need a lot of labour for a period of a few days, then nothing.”

In a few months’ time, Mr Mirkowski will hire skilled workers again to do “bud rubbing”.

He said: “The buds start popping out on the sides of the trunks. If you left them to their own devices, they’d grow enormous canes, which you don’t want. The workers put on a pair of gloves and spend the whole day bent double, rubbing up and down the trunk to knock the buds off.”

The nature of the work means that there are not many skilled orchard workers in this country.

Mr Mirkowski said: “There are some but not enough, that’s the trouble.

“It’s also back-breaking work. These guys turned up this morning just after 7am when it was still dark,

“If it spits with rain, they’ll pull their hoods up and carry on working. They don’t stop, they don’t complain. They really are hard working. As I say, I do use local volunteers but would they come at 7am and carry on all the way through, day in and day out? I don’t think so.”

The Romanians, led by Stefan Duti, tied canes on to the wires that run along the rows of vines to keep them orderly.

Mr Mirkowski said: “This is quite an artificial shape of ours. They don’t normally go like that in nature.

“If you put some grapeseed in the ground and tried to grow them, you’d end up with an unruly shrub — very unkempt.”

The canes grow prolifically, reaching heights of 5m, before they are sliced off using machinery in July.

The debris takes three years to rot into the soil, although Mr Mirkowski says many farmers burn it.

He said: “All that’s doing is sending good nutrients up into the atmosphere, annoying the neighbours and causing pollution.”

The number of vineyards in England is increasing as the south of France is becoming hotter.

Mr Mirkowski said: “What I’m doing isn’t unique. There are loads of people developing vineyards and there are currently about 700 commercial ones.

“The pre-eminent region is the southern stretch of England: Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, right the way to Devon and Cornwall.”

He is celebrating his vineyard’s 10th anniversary this year and says he is not worried about the
competition.

Mr Mirkowski said: “We’re ahead of the game as we’ve got a loyal following. And it’s not really increased competition. Every bottle of English sparkling wine is a bottle of champagne that won’t get imported on a truck and brought 200 miles — another argument to support local.”