The Vineyard

Some twenty years ago I wanted to create a vineyard for my 1866 battles in Italy, but I wasn't impressed with the commercial products on the market and I wasn't a fan of green foam flock glued onto commercial model fences. So I sat down with a bit of wire and some GreenStuff and made a master pattern for a strip of vines that could be cast.

Fortunately I had seen a lot of grapevines in my time, usually from the window of the vineyard tasting room, or on the labels of the bottles containing their fermented fruit, so it was a relatively simply task to create the master. In due course I cast up some 30 pieces, twelve of them were mounted on strips and used in a game and they are still used in various games today. Half a dozen pieces were given away and the remaining twelve pieces languished in my spare bits box until I had a major clean up a few weeks ago.

Over a couple of evenings I had them cleaned up, painted up and based them up as a small vineyard. Of course, because the pieces are fixed to the base, it will have to be a piece of terrain impassable to all but skirmishing troops, which is quite fitting really since it would have been exceedingly difficult to maintain a battle line in a vineyard. I did think about making the gaps between the rows of vines wider to allow line troops to move along them, but it just looked silly. Here then is the finished piece.