People find solace after a bereavement in surprising places. For Amanda Gibson (age 63), it was amid the Müller-Thurgau and Bacchus vines of Warden Abbey Vineyard in Bedfordshire, where she has been volunteering for the past six years.
‘Without the vineyard I would have been completely lost,’ she says. ‘The other volunteers are so friendly: they wrap themselves around you if you’re struggling. You come to the vineyard, you concentrate on a repetitive task and you forget about your problems.’
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Growing interest
Amanda Gibson at the Warden Abbey Vineyard in Bedfordshire, where she has been volunteering for the past six years
Gibson is just one of a fast-growing cohort of people wanting to volunteer at UK vineyards – doing so for myriad reasons. Demand has grown so quickly that many vineyards now have waiting lists of people wanting to volunteer.
It’s not hard to see the appeal. Many of the vineyards make an event of it – welcoming volunteers each day during harvest time and plying them with tea, coffee, cake, a slap-up lunch and usually a glass (or two) of bubbly at the end.
‘We try to make it as much a celebration as “getting the job done”,’ says Mike Wagstaff, who owns Greyfriars Vineyard in Surrey with his wife Hilary and has been welcoming volunteers since they started in 2011. ‘We pick for about four hours then give everybody a celebratory lunch, wine and a harvest-commemoration t-shirt based on a current pop-culture theme – 2023 was Barbie.’
Some of the volunteers have been coming for the past 10 years and proudly show off their back catalogue of harvest t-shirts to newbies.
‘It [volunteering] has exploded in scale since 2021. For the last four years we have organised between two and three days of picking with about 120 volunteers coming to help us on each day,’ Wagstaff adds. ‘People start emailing us in July asking when harvest will be and we get emails from people begging to participate after the list has closed. We get a lot of multigenerational family groups, especially those wanting to get teenage children outside and off their phones.’
A family affair
Austin Bell, who volunteers at Greyfriars Vineyard in Surrey
Austin Bell, from Guildford (pictured above), has been volunteering with Greyfriars during the harvest for the past four years and has brought his teenage son with him each time.
‘He was 10 when he first came and we both really enjoyed it. Spending a day walking up and down a vineyard picking grapes is really mindful,’ Bell explains. ‘Greyfriars makes a big fuss of you. It feels like a really nice exchange of labour and effort. I learned a lot about the vines, like why they handpick rather than using machines.’
He adds that he has done it even in the worst weather: ‘It doesn’t seem to put people off.’
Nick Brewer, co-owner of Oastbrook Estate Vineyard in East Sussex, agrees that volunteer numbers have increased, particularly since Covid-19. ‘For people who are now working from home, they can volunteer on a Friday or Monday and fit it in flexibly with their work,’ he says. ‘For someone who’s sitting in front of a screen working alone or in an office it’s quite cathartic.’
Oastbrook also gets a lot of people coming down from London to volunteer and sometimes couples turning up as a date.
Some volunteers get very competitive about who can pick the fastest. ‘The best picker we ever had was a brain surgeon,’ says Brewer. ‘He clinically removed the grapes. I’ve never seen a neater or tidier vine picker. If I ever need someone to operate on my brain, I’d go to him if he does surgery as well as he picks grapes.’
Spurred on
A volunteer picker at Grange Estate. Credit: Seablue Media
Some enjoy it so much that they end up volunteering all year round – as Amanda Gibson has done at Warden Abbey, a not-for-profit vineyard in Bedfordshire entirely run by volunteers.
‘We do everything from mending fences to pruning, marketing, fundraising and doing tastings at our stockists,’ she explains. Warden Abbey also works with schools to get children with special needs into the vineyard to help with planting and testing soil quality. ‘It’s incredibly rewarding for them,’ Gibson says.
At The Grange in Hampshire, volunteers are roped in to help light and snuff candles that are put out in the vineyard for frost protection. Kane Scully began volunteering for The Grange’s ‘frost watch’ in early 2024.
‘If you’re on standby, you might get a phone call at 1am, which means you need to get down to the vineyard,’ he says. ‘It’s a few hours’ work of systemically lighting candles in freezing temperatures, then we’re all back in bed by 3am. You build friendships in the dark. It’s quite an odd thing really – but I enjoy it.’
Scully has since taken on part-time paid work at the vineyard on top of volunteering.
A post-Brexit boon
For some vineyards, the booming interest in volunteering has been something of a relief, given the challenges in finding labour since the UK left the EU.
‘Before Brexit, we used to rely a lot on Romanian workers,’ says Nick Wenman, owner of Albury Vineyard in Surrey. ‘But now there are fewer and fewer of them, and competition for casual workers is fierce.’
Albury has been taking on volunteers and has waiting lists each year for spots. Nick Brewer of Oastbrook reports a different experience: ‘We haven’t had an issue finding workers, and could do everything with casual labour, but we think it’s nice to get people involved and see the looks on their faces. Sometimes we get people saying “You’re exploiting people – why don’t you use paid labour?”, but we do. This is just a nice extension of that.’
Phoebe French of trade body WineGB says: ‘For the vineyard owners, using volunteers helps them develop close relationships with their local community and develop unofficial brand ambassadors. It also helps them tell the story of how much work is required to produce a bottle of their wine.’
She adds that while most sign-ups currently are locals, as the industry develops, volunteering could well become a part of a vineyard’s tourism offering.
Reality check
Frost candles at The Grange
However, volunteering is not all sunshine and rainbows. For many individuals this is the first time they’ve had to confront the brutal realities of farming, facing up to destruction and disappointment.
‘We’ve had two bad years in a row,’ says Gibson. ‘It’s been really hard. You arrive in January and gradually watch the vineyard come to life. You get very emotionally attached. To then see that crop fail can be devastating.’
But, as the volunteers explain, there’s nothing that beats the feeling of looking out over a vineyard after a satisfyingly tiring day’s labour – a glass of English bubbly in hand and new friends all around. That’s what keeps them coming back.
‘I look forward to autumn now because it means harvest is near,’ says Bell.
