Deep in Hampshire chalk: Exton Park vineyard manager Fred Langdale and winemaker Olly Whitfield. THE ELECTRIC EYE PHOTOGRAPHY/EXTON PARK VINEYARD
LOCATION, LOCATION:THE RIGHT PLACE IS CRUCIAL
LOOK AT ANY GEOLOGICAL MAP THAT INCLUDES both the south of England and northern France and you will see that the same seam of chalk continues under the Channel from one country into the other. In England, it is principally in Sussex and Hampshire; in France, it is in the region around the champagne towns of Rheims and Epernay. And that, so the popular argument goes, is why sparkling wine as good as champagne can be made in England. If only life – and fizzy wine – were so simple.
With wine, so many factors influence the final result. Climate is crucial, more so than the dirt into which roots delve; vines will grow in just about any soil, but flowers won’t set and grapes won’t ripen if the weather is too cold, too dry, too wet, too windy. Then there’s the choice of vines, the variety, the specific clones, the rootstock, the density of planting – these and more affect fruit flavour as well as whether or not the plants themselves will flourish. Human involvement is another major modifying element. Other chapters in this book cover these matters, but this one is all about place.
Deep in Hampshire chalk: Exton Park vineyard manager Fred Langdale and winemaker Olly Whitfield. THE ELECTRIC EYE PHOTOGRAPHY/EXTON PARK VINEYARD
The Exton Park cellar excavation shows just how little soil lies above the Hampshire chalk. THE ELECTRIC EYE PHOTOGRAPHY/EXTON PARK VINEYARD
The UK’s wine vine-growing area is tiny compared to that of almost every other wine country, but within it there are major geological differences, which of course reflect in the soil that lies above the bedrock.
Sometimes that soil is nigh-on non-existent, as I found early on in the research for this book when I stood on the lip of a sheer man-cut cliff and stared down into white depths so bright that anyone working there needed to wear sunglasses. At my feet the soil was barely deep enough to nourish the roots of the short sward of downland grass. It seemed hardly possible that vines could grow in it, but they do. Below the excavation the same rock stretched down, down, down for hundreds of metres more. This was the famed Channel-hopping chalk, from the Upper Cretaceous period, laid down approximately 83 million years ago, exactly the same chalk that underlies the vineyards of the Côte des Blancs, prime chardonnay-growing area of Champagne and home to such world-renowned wines as Krug Clos du Mesnil. No wonder so many people in England latch on to the comparison.
The debate: is chalk crucial?
So many, but not everyone. In a timely, well-argued article published in The World of Fine Wine in November 2015, Margaret Rand, one of the most respected of wine journalists, talked to leading growers on either side. There were the chalk crusaders, led by Ian Kellett of Hambledon Vineyard (on Hampshire chalk), and the proponents of ‘soil-is-the-last-thingthat-matters’, with as figurehead the late Mike Roberts, founder of Ridgeview (on Sussex clay-with-limestone). Back and forth went the debate: surely it made sense to choose a soil profile as close as possible to that in Champagne if world-class sparkling wine was the aim; good drainage rather than the type of soil was the all-important factor; chalk provided a finesse missing in grapes from locations elsewhere in southern England where the geology was different; exposed-to-the-wind chalk hills offered a harsher environment for vines than lower, more sheltered non-chalk sites; the capillary action of chalk combined with that of vine roots made for fitter plants as they worked hard for water they always eventually found; in a very dry summer vines would be happier rooted in clay over sand rather than in chalk; there was softer, gentler acidity in grapes grown on chalk; clay retained nutrients better; vines grown on chalk never found their roots languishing in the cold and the wet; too much chalk could be too much of a good thing for vines, yellowing their leaves due to iron deficiency.
Bob Lindo:'Soil Is Trumped By Climate Every Time'.CAMMEL VALLEY WINES
Rand left the penultimate words to Bob Lindo, whose Camel Valley Vineyard award-winning sparkling wines are from vines rooted in ancient Cornish slate: ‘England is the best experimental vineyard in the world. And soil is trumped by climate every time.’ Then she countered that with the view of Nyetimber winemaker Cherie Spriggs, on the estate’s Tillington single-vineyard sparkling wine (on Sussex greensand): ‘It tastes of where it comes from.’
Rand’s own view was summed up as she introduced the article: ‘All I can say is, if you laid all the opinions in England end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. Which is probably appropriate for an industry a mere 25 years old.’
In the location debate there continues, understandably, to be much focus on southern England and its chalk downlands (though this is very modern: George Ordish’s Vineyards in England and Wales, published in 1977 and a then highly regarded guide to wine vine-growing, included no geological discussion at all, no mention of chalk). But even the chalk isn’t simple. In different places it has subtly different characteristics, affecting water retention, for example. The thickness of the soil on top of it varies from a few millimetres to many centimetres. Between the chalk hills lie other, related, base rocks. Greensand, for example, fills much of the area between the North and South Downs where the chalk has eroded and, like chalk, it is an ancient marine deposit, but its colour and characteristics are different. All this means that above and around the southern chalk there is a mosaic of soils, some sandy, some loamy, some clayey.
Move away from the south-east of England and the age of the base rocks increases, as does their variety. There are older Cretaceous layers – limestone rich in fossils, for example, which arcs from Dorset’s Jurassic coast to north Yorkshire – and, edging further back in geological time, the red Devonian sandstone that covers much of the West Country. Older still are volcanic and metamorphic rocks, remnants of truly ancient volcanic activity and of the massive heat and pressure that transformed the face of the planet billions of years ago. All these create soils in which vines can flourish, so the UK is in no way short of potential growing areas, from the south to the fairly far north.
Physical evidence of all this clung to my boots as I walked the vineyards in 2017. The mud came in many colours: white, yellow, many shades of brown, deep red. There was smooth clayey mud, sandy mud, gravelly mud, mud where the pebbles or flints were too big to stick to boot soles. Sometimes it crumbled away almost immediately; on other occasions it stuck tenaciously, needing to be chipped off once it had dried. Yet vines flourished in every type of soil that created those diverse muds.
Soil – whatever the arguments for one type over another, and however much proponents may insist it affects the flavour of wine – is no more than one factor in site selection, and detailed discussion of it is best left to geologists. What else matters, perhaps even more?
High and dry or low and sheltered?
Vines hate to have their roots sitting in pools of water. For a successful crop they should grow where there is the minimum risk of frost during the delicate bud-break period. Some air movement around them is essential to reduce risks of fungal diseases, but they don’t like facing into the teeth of a gale. They need a long growing season, to develop flavours in their grapes, and warm sun to ripen them. So the choice of site must largely follow the basic rules that were set many centuries ago: a well-drained slope, not too high, exposed to maximum sun but sheltered from blasting winds. That’s not too difficult to achieve, certainly in southern England, and every savvy new vine-grower here should accept the criteria.
But there is argument over how much breeze vines enjoy on their leaves. At Rathfinny and Exton Park for example, both high on bare chalk hills, those responsible for the vines champion the effect of wind in reducing the risk of spring frosts or, later in the year, attacks of mildew and botrytis. Many other growers, whose vines are planted much lower, point out that their protected sites are warmer and kinder to ripening grapes. Most emphatic of the anti-wind campaigners is Peter Hall at Breaky Bottom; coincidentally, the nearest vine-growing neighbour to his sheltered South Downs site is Rathfinny.
Tweaking goes on to improve growing conditions: examples include leaving an area at the lowest point of the vineyard barren of vines to allow frost to pool there harmlessly, sparing the vines above, or creating ponds for the same effect. Windbreaks may be planted to create shelter where none occurs naturally. Digging drainage trenches in a soggy but otherwise suitable area is another possibility. But no amount of intervention, however much money is spent on it, will make a bad site good.
Optimum hours of sunlight, length of the growing season and overall average temperatures explain the concentration of vineyards in southern England. Not that vines can’t flourish further north – George Bowden planted his Leventhorpe vineyard in Yorkshire in the 1980s, and his confidence in the potential of the south-facing slope with well-drained sandy soil has proved justified, creating immensely characterful wines, which express their complexity best after several years in bottle. Leventhorpe and its county neighbours are not the most northerly of UK vineyards – when I wrote this, one in Fife had that distinction, but it wasn’t flourishing. Another, in a south-facing walled garden in Northumberland, had proved it could ripen grapes but was failing to gain much support for a crowd-funding initiative to pay for its expansion plans. So, for the moment at least, Yorkshire is the UK’s not-so-frozen north so far as wine is concerned.
Vines flourish in the west, too – not only to the far tip of Cornwall and on the Isles of Scilly but also in Wales. Among the latter are plantings of white and red varieties at Ty Croes, on the southern corner of the Isle of Anglesey, its soil sandy loam over shale. They became the major focus of a ‘good life’ farm established by Harry Dean and his family in 1977, the vines largely pushing out the livestock, a herd of Highland cattle excepted. Glacial slopes at the foot of Snowdon are the location for Pant Du, where there is sun enough to power the entire vineyard and apple orchard operation, with spare electricity left to go to the national grid. The oldest commercial vineyard in Wales, Glyndwr, on clay above limestone soil, is in the Vale of Glamorgan, where average mean temperatures are among the highest in Britain.
But the fringes of Britain are fringe wine-lands. Even in the friendly south there can be big variations in vine-growing conditions within comparatively short distances, as research at Plumpton College, England’s much-respected wine education centre, is aiming to quantify. This project, in conjunction with similar work being done at several other research institutes, should have Europe-wide benefit, says Plumpton wine head Chris Foss. It is showing how even small differences between the top of a hill and the bottom, for example, can reflect substantially in vine growth.
At Breaky Bottom the sheltered north-facing vines (to the left) ripen before those on the more southerly slope. AUTHOR
Such detailed work is invaluable, but general principles remain. After much walking through vineyards from Kent to Cornwall, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number that faced outside the ninety- degree quadrant of south-east to south-west, but there are notable exceptions. At Breaky Bottom there is one of the rare successful north-facing English vineyards. The vines both bud earlier and produce ripe fruit sooner than their counterparts in the south-eastfacing vineyard mere metres away, simply because they are more sheltered. Similarly, Denbies in the Surrey hills has a protected north-facing vineyard where pinot noir has flourished for close on thirty years; elsewhere on the estate, plantings have far more conventional exposition.
Too many would-be growers don’t listen to all the advice, a situation that viticultural consultant Stephen Skelton laments: ‘Sadly, there are still vineyards being planted on hopeless sites. Poor site selection is a real issue and one that is very slowly being addressed.’
As yet, there is no shortage of potential vineyard land in the UK, and it is easy to understand the attraction of this developing wine region to outsiders. For the champagne houses, expansion here makes a lot of sense, with land prices way below what they would pay at home, where availability as well as price is at a premium. The champenois interest apart, what is new in the English wine location story is that farmers who previously made other use of their land are increasingly latching on to the potential of changing to a more profitable crop. There is an increasing demand for good grapes, and canny growers on the right sites can make money from that, provided they have the resources to cover the three years between planting and the first saleable crop. As growers rather than winemakers, they don’t need to invest at the eye-watering level that is required to turn grapes into quality wine, and they have the experience of coping with British weather – rain at harvest time can rot wheat as easily as grapes.
Behind the farmers, particularly those who prefer to sell their land rather than plant it, estate agents are following, and the prices they are urging sellers to ask are starting to rise steeply. Would-be vine-growers, as never before, would be wise to do their homework carefully.
