I’ve Planted a Vineyard. Now What Do I Do With My Grapes?

You’ve planted your vineyard, invested the money, waited a few years for the vines to establish, and now you’re looking at your first proper harvest.

But what happens next?

You’ve got grapes. Hopefully, quite a lot of them. And unless you’re planning to eat them all yourself, you need to decide what you’re going to do with them.

There are a few different routes you can take…

Make Your own Wine

The romantic option: grow your own grapes and make your own wine.

It sounds idyllic — and it absolutely can be — but it requires investment, technical skill and quite a lot of space. You’ll need winemaking equipment, tanks, presses, pumps, somewhere suitable to work, and somewhere to store your wine while it matures. And then there’s bottling, labelling and, of course, selling the finished wine.

It’s a completely different skill set to growing grapes, so don’t underestimate the learning curve. If you’re serious about having a go, there are some excellent winemaking courses at Plumpton College, where you can learn the theory and get hands-on experience in the winery.

For some vineyard owners, making the wine is the whole point. For others, the thought of dealing with 5,000 litres of fermenting grape juice is enough to make them reach for the phone…

Use a Contract Winemaker

This is probably the most straightforward option if you want to create your own wine without investing in your own winery.

You grow the grapes, and a contract winemaker takes care of the winemaking — usually to an agreed specification and style. Depending on the winery, they can take you from pressing and fermentation right through to blending, bottling, storage and, for sparkling wine, disgorging.

It means you can still have your own wine, your own brand and your own relationship with the customer, without having to build and operate a winery yourself.

There are a number of established contract winemakers in the UK. Itasca Wines offers a bespoke “crate to case” service, while Defined Wine specialises in contract winemaking and works with growers to define the style of wine they want to make. Langham Wine Estate, Wiston Estate and Litmus Wines at Denbies also offer contract winemaking services.

The key thing is to start the conversation early. Wineries get busy, particularly around harvest, and you don’t want to be standing in your vineyard with a trailer full of ripe Chardonnay and nowhere to take it.

Become a Grower

Or, if you will, a grape farmer.

Not everyone who plants a vineyard wants to become a winemaker. You might simply love growing grapes and want to sell them to someone who does the rest.

This can be a very attractive model: you concentrate on what you’re good at — producing healthy, high-quality fruit — and let someone else worry about fermentation, bottling, marketing and selling the wine.

There are two main ways of doing this.

Sell your Grapes on the Open Market

Platforms such as The Grape Exchange allow growers to list their fruit and connect with buyers. You can list by variety, quantity and location, and buyers can make offers. It gives smaller growers access to a wider market than simply relying on local contacts.

The downside is that grape prices can move around. In a year when there’s a shortage of particular varieties, growers may find themselves in a strong position. But in a year when there’s plenty of fruit available, prices can be pushed down.

Current listings (Sep ‘26) on The Grape Exchange give a good illustration of how much prices can vary. Recent Chardonnay listings have ranged from around £2,200 to £2,800 per tonne, while Pinot Noir has appeared at anything from around £1,500 to £2,500 per tonne, depending on the fruit and the particular lot.

So yes, a tonne of good Chardonnay can be worth around £2,500 — but I wouldn’t build your entire vineyard business plan around getting that price every year.

Go into Contract with a Winery

The other option is to establish a relationship with a larger winery that regularly buys grapes from selected growers.

This is a much more planned approach. Rather than waiting until harvest to see who wants your grapes, you have an agreement in place with a winery that knows your vineyard, your varieties and, importantly, the quality of fruit you produce.

These relationships tend to be built over time. A winery needs confidence that you can consistently deliver the quantity and quality they require, while you need confidence that they will take your crop and pay an agreed price.

And this is where being a good grower really matters.

It’s not simply about how many tonnes you can produce. Variety, clone, location, yield, ripeness, disease management and picking decisions all influence the value of your fruit. A smaller crop of excellent-quality grapes can be much more valuable to a winery than a huge crop of average fruit.

So What’s the Best Option?

There isn’t one.

It really comes down to what you want your vineyard to be.

Do you want to make wine? Build a brand? Have a cellar door? Or do you actually just want to grow really good grapes and sell them to somebody else?

The good news is that you don’t have to decide all of this on the day you plant your vines. But you do need to start thinking about it well before your first harvest.

Three years might sound like a long way away when you’re planting those first vines. It really isn’t.

At Five Rivers, this is one of the things I love about working with new vineyard owners: helping them think beyond the planting plan and work out what happens next — from the first bunch of grapes to the finished bottle, whatever route they choose.