Milldown House, the home of Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones, and the modern vineyard. CHRIS DIXON PHOTOGRAPHY/HAMBLEDON VINEYARD
MEET THE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PIONEERS, THE PEOPLE BEHIND ENGLAND’S APPEARANCE ON THE WORLD WINE MAP
WHEN MODERN ENGLISH WINE’S HOLY TRINITY, Raymond Barrington Brock, Edward Hyams and George Ordish, laid down the creed for a future industry, they needed disciples. The first appeared in the somewhat unlikely form of a man with a distinguished military and diplomatic service career. Major-General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones fought in the two world wars – winning the Military Cross in the first and in the second, after time in Egypt and Greece, serving in the team that planned the Normandy landings – and afterwards became Marshal of the Diplomatic Service. He loved all things French, had friends at the champagne house Pol Roger, and happened, in his retirement, to live in a house set on Hampshire’s vine-friendly chalk.
One brief event in that military career was, decades later, to prompt the ending of what could be argued had been the first true break in largish-scale wine production in the UK since Roman times. The planting of England’s first modern commercial vineyard was, Sir Guy said in an address to the Royal Society of Arts in 1973, all down to a moment in the cold and muddy autumn of 1917, when French soldiers sharing a trench with the British guardsmen poured beakers of wine for their allies. The gesture, he continued, ‘consolidated my love, not only for France, but [also] for her wine’.
Thirty-four years after that morale-boosting encounter in the trenches, as Sir Guy looked down the sunny slope stretching below his house at Hambledon in Hampshire and pondered how best to use the land, his stepson put forward the ‘wild suggestion’ of planting vines. Soon, following meetings with Hyams and Brock, the wild suggestion was on the way to becoming reality. With his gardener, Mr Blackman – ‘without whom I could have achieved nothing’ – Sir Guy set off to the vineyards of Burgundy. Part of the entertainment was a banquet given by the Confrèrie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, in the iconic fine-wine location of the former Cistercian monastery of Clos Vougeot. ‘I have often thought since that it was under the influence of Burgundian hospitality that I ordered four thousand vines,’ he told his 1973 RSA audience.
Those vines were mainly seyval blanc, recommended then although regarded with mixed feelings now, plus a little chardonnay and pinot noir. They were planted early in 1952, and the first wine was on sale three years later. It was the beginning of England’s nascent new industry.
A wine with noble qualities
Given the lack of experience of commercial wine production in England at the time, the difficulties of the climate, the singularity of the principal variety chosen and the lack of an established market for the local product, Hambledon proved remarkably successful. Sir Guy was modest about his wine, though he acknowledged at the RSA lecture that the results had improved with time and added experience. ‘At the outset our wine may have been a little frivolous, but since then it has acquired more noble qualities.’ One Frenchman who tasted it likened it to still champagne, it was listed at a major London restaurant and sold through the Peter Dominic retail chain. It also travelled further afield. Sir Guy’s wines ‘were served on the QE2, in British Embassies around the world, in the Houses of Parliament and in export markets around the world including the USA and Japan’, the website of the present Hambledon Vineyard proudly declares. They were on the menu in 1972 for a dinner that Queen Elizabeth II planned in Paris for President Georges Pompidou, but the arrangements were almost thwarted when French customs refused the import on the grounds that there was ‘no such thing as English wine’. Release of the bottles was secured only as a result of some very straight talking to the customs official by Steven Spurrier, then a wine merchant in Paris. (Spurrier’s career continued as a distinguished wine writer and consultant, and he celebrated fifty years in wine by creating his own sparkling wine vineyard; see Chapter 7 for more on that venture.)
Milldown House, the home of Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones, and the modern vineyard. CHRIS DIXON PHOTOGRAPHY/HAMBLEDON VINEYARD
Guy Salisbury-Jones tried hard to show to potential followers the effort involved in setting up a new vineyard, admitting he had ‘given little serious thought to the endless problems involved in viticulture’ when he planted his own vines. He also spelled out, in detail, the cost. In the early 1970s, to plant a vineyard of 1.2 hectares, the smallest viable size, on already-owned land and create a winery and cellar in existing buildings would mean an investment of some £15,600. Today, the equivalent outlay would leave little change out of £225,000 – and that was for a winery far smaller and equipment much less sophisticated than at twenty-first-century English wine estates. Sir Guy himself surely spent more, for his vineyard was half as big again.
Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones (wearing jacket) with Mr Blackman, friends and family. HAMBLEDON VINEYARD
With the help from 1966 of his manager and winemaker Bill Carcary, he continued to produce wine until his death in 1985. It was very much a family-andfriends operation, as an evocative Pathe film of the 1971 harvest shows, with the grapes being picked into wooden baskets, emptied into barrels, and then crushed by Mr Blackman in something that looks like an oversized mincing machine. The filmmakers remarked on how good the vineyard looked, but had severe doubts over the quality of the end product, commenting that ‘the grapes are too small and too green’ and the pressed juice ‘does not look attractive at all’. They may well have been too pessimistic. The 1969 vintage had been much lauded, described by one enthusiast as lying between ‘a delicate dry Vouvray and a first-class crisp Moselle’, and with another identifying a ‘sweet waft of English flowers’.
Sir Guy’s influence extended far beyond the small village of Hambledon, which probably remains best known not for wine but as the home of modern English cricket. He was founder president of the English Vineyards Association and worked intensively both to establish recognition among British consumers of the new wines being made on their doorstep and, behind the public scenes, to reduce the duty burden on them – a task still faced by his successors.
Hambledon wine continued in the hands of the vineyard’s next owner, John Patterson, for some years more, with further plantings and improved winemaking and storage facilities. By the early 1990s, after Patterson’s death, the few remaining rows of vines were unloved and their crop unappealing – until a saviour appeared, in the form of Yorkshireman Ian Kellett. The story of his revival of Hambledon Vineyard as a leading producer of sparkling wine is told later in this book.
History and cricket commemorated on the bottle. HAMBLEDON VINEYARD
Something similar to the Salisbury-Jones initiative happened a little further south-west in Hampshire, at the third commercial vineyard of the 1950s. This had a far, far older history – it was that thirteenth-century monastic vineyard where King John suggested the abbot should send to France for something better. Margaret Gore-Browne and her rather less vineyard-enthusiastic husband had spent much of their married life in Africa. Back home in the late 1950s, they moved into a large house – fortuitously named The Vineyards – on the edge of the Beaulieu estate, and revived the land’s vinous history, planting mostly müller-thurgau and seyval blanc, plus a few red varieties, and building their winery. They also gained some notoriety for their increasingly ingenious efforts to rid the vineyard of grape-consuming blackbirds and thrushes. A family of young sparrowhawks, raised in a laundry basket and initially fed on dead day-old baby chicks from the kitchen freezer, was one quite successful solution. The enterprise continued for some fifteen years, and Margaret Gore-Browne’s contribution to the growth of English and, notably, Welsh wine is remembered in the resplendent Gore-Browne trophy she donated in her husband’s memory, which is awarded to the best wine in the annual UK competition. In the mid-1970s the vineyard passed into the hands of the Montagu family and has remained as a small feature of the modern Beaulieu estate.
The Gore-Browne trophy. TOM GOLD PHOTOGRAPHY/WINEGB
Between the start of Hambledon and that of Beaulieu there had been another pioneer, Jack Ward. With a friend, Ian Howie, he had founded the Merrydown cider and fruit wine business at Horam in East Sussex in 1946. In 1954, he moved into real wine, planting a little under a hectare with an assortment of grape varieties. He’d hardly had time to establish them properly when it was decided to sell the vineyard for development. Ward persevered, planting again. The two sites available were far from ideal, the heavy soil of one – a former brickworks – requiring major drainage work and composting effort before vines could produce even small crops.
A co-operative approach to put wine on shop shelves
Alongside the company’s own vineyards, there was a more important development for English wine – the Merrydown Co-operative Scheme. More and more small vineyards had been planted in the 1960s, and Ward realized that supporting these was the best thing he could do to promote the product that so enthused him. He set up a contract winemaking operation, with a co-operative, non-profit-making rationale. Growers handed over their grapes and either paid the full cost of turning them into wine or received a proportion of the final product, with the remainder retained by Merrydown to turn into a blended wine sold under a single label. It was exactly what the new industry needed, and a high proportion of England’s growers with grapes to harvest took advantage of it – including Princess Margaret, whose few bunches of fruit came from wall-trained vines at Kensington Palace.
In The Wines of Britain and Ireland, Stephen Skelton was enthusiastic: ‘At a time when good equipment and technical knowledge were both in short supply, it had certainly enabled many vineyards to get a properly made and presented commercial product on the shelf.’ But, as English vineyards grew in size and their vines matured, producing larger crops, more of them moved away from the co-operative scheme to set up their own wineries. Commercial considerations prevailed and by 1980 all Merrydown grape wine operations, contracting as well as growing, were abandoned.
What of these larger 1960s and 1970s vineyards now? Many are names only in England’s vinous history. But one that flourished, and where control has moved on to generations two and three of the family, is Biddenden Vineyards, close to Ashford, the oldest in Kent and one of the longest-established anywhere in England. It came about, remarkably, because of a BBC Radio Woman’s Hour broadcast. Richard and Joyce Barnes owned an apple farm, and the late 1960s were a bad time for growers of traditional English varieties, with the burgeoning supermarkets demanding granny smith and golden delicious rather than cox or russet. The effect was felt even in cidermaking, which was Biddenden’s speciality. Wine grapes, suggested the speaker on that 1967 radio programme, might be an alternative for the apple growers, for the required growing conditions of the two were comparatively similar.
Joyce Barnes listened with interest and broached the subject with her husband. Soon, Richard Barnes was off on an exploratory trip to Europe (no internet then for instant research) and in 1969 the first Biddenden vines were planted, the plot a tiny forerunner of the present 9 hectares. Given the advice of the time, the early choice was largely germanic varieties – but not entirely. Tucked behind the winery, whose tanks peek over the top of the plot, are two rows of venerable pinot noir vines, planted in 1972. Tom Barnes, Richard’s grandson, couldn’t tell me whether they were the oldest examples of the variety surviving in England, but he suspected there could be few challengers. They remain generously productive and the family have no plans to grub them up in favour of new vines; they will simply fill in the gaps as the least-sturdy elders reach the end of their life.
Across the sheltered valley from the pinot noir, the major variety – occupying just over half of the total vineyard area – is ortega, which also dates back to the early days of Biddenden’s involvement in wine. It flourishes on the sandy loam-over-clay soil, surviving bad weather, appears in bottle in near-dry and off-dry versions and has brought a number of respected awards to the Barnes’ display shelf. Why, says marketing manager Victoria Rose, abandon a vine which has such happy results?
The ortega has compatriots in the vineyard. Reichensteiner and scheurebe, with pinot noir, are the components of a traditional-method sparkling white, bacchus provides an aromatic dry white and two more still wines come from dornfelder, a light red and a medium-dry rosé. But among the total of eleven varieties now planted are others that are a much less conventional sight in England. Gamay is made into a rosé sparkler, and gewürtztraminer is being trialled.
Ortega, major variety at Biddenden Vineyards. BIDDENDEN VINEYARDS
Biddenden may have a lengthy history, but the estate’s insistence on quality and consistency is very modern. That approach should be obligatory for every vineyard in the UK, Rose believes. Given how many drinkers are still unfamiliar with the home product, if they encounter a bad example they won’t condemn only that individual wine, she warns: ‘They will say English wine is terrible, full stop.’
Next, a very different approach
The direction taken by another crucial pioneer husband-and-wife team in modern English wine was radically dissimilar to Biddenden’s largely germanic approach – although by the time their first vines went into the ground almost two decades had passed since the Barnes’ first plantings. It wasn’t just the vine choice; the individuals involved could hardly have been more different.
Stuart and Sandy Moss hailed from Chicago. They were both successful business people, he in the manufacture of medical equipment, she as an antiques dealer, and they had travelled frequently to England. By the early 1980s, they were looking for an idyllic retirement home, and Sandy Moss had an ambition to become involved in wine. ‘All I ever wanted was a small English house, two acres of vines, my spinning wheel and a never-ending bottle of port,’ she told a Daily Telegraph journalist five years after the release of their first wine. That wine started what was to become a relentless haul of trophies and medals. ‘We never expected to do things on this scale,’ she added.
When they saw Nyetimber, a medieval gem that Henry VIII had gifted to Anne of Cleves, the first part of Sandy’s dream was achieved, though ‘small’ is hardly the adjective most people would use to describe the half-timbered manor house with its terraced gardens, pools and 40-plus hectares of land. First mention of the estate – then medium-sized and home to nineteen families – came in Domesday Book, and it is surely appropriate that a highly significant modern change should have happened precisely nine hundred years later. In 1986 the Mosses became the new owners of Nyetimber, and two years later they planted their first vines. Not the germanic favourites: no, the Mosses had haughtier aims. They wanted to make sparkling wine to match the quality of the world’s best. They turned for advice and practical help to Kit Lindlar, who was then essentially England’s lone specialist consultant on bottle-fermented sparkling wine and had been influential in persuading a number of small growers in Kent towards the champagne grape varieties. As a result, the vines set into Nyetimber’s greensand-based soil were the classics of French fizz, chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier. More than that, the equipment to turn their grapes into wine, and more advice, came from Champagne.
There was profound scepticism from many, but not all, leading figures in the UK industry, which was then almost entirely focused on still wines. Around the same time, Chris Foss had initiated the first wine courses at Plumpton College, an hour’s drive further east in Sussex. Foss, a microbiologist by training, came from a sound wine background – a family vineyard in Bordeaux, which he had run until the decision to sell up brought him back to the UK and, given the paucity of winemaking opportunities, a teacher-training course. He was offered a job managing Horam vineyard, but his income would have been peanuts, even compared with a teacher’s salary. Then came the Plumpton possibility. As the thirty-year anniversary of his employment there approached, he recalled how it all began: ‘I went along to the college. They said, here’s a desk, let’s have some wine courses, you start in September.’ The space provided was less than ideal for teaching a subject in which appreciating aromas was important. ‘The wine centre was in the poultry area, an unused shed. It was difficult tasting – everything still smelled of chicken.’
During the first year, Foss organized a field trip to Champagne. Why, he wondered, wasn’t there more interest in the region among those making wine in the UK? It was the nearest established wine area, and in many ways the most similar in terms of soil and climate. England, he believed, should be making sparkling wine, even though he wasn’t optimistic then that champagne grapes would ripen – ‘chardonnay berries were like frozen peas’.
The students on the trip were enthusiastic and a masterclass in Sussex with a champagne oenologist followed, with Stuart and Sandy Moss in attendance. Sandy, by then enrolled at Plumpton, asked Foss for help to find further expert support as she began her new career in winemaking. The choice was Jean-Manuel Jacquinot. For Foss, Jacquinot is ‘the unsung hero of English sparkling wine’, with an invaluable consultancy role in many more early ventures into English fizz. All his professional experience apart, the Frenchman had the essential qualification of speaking the language of those he mentored, learned by working in a vineyard in Poonah owned by the father of a Plumpton student.
Chris Foss in the Plumpton College winery: England should be making sparkling wine. IAN PACK/PLUMPTON COLLEGE
At Nyetimber the vines flourished; from 1989 to 1991 more land was planted, bringing the total vineyard area to some 16 hectares, remarkably large by the standards of the time; and by 1992 there were sufficient grapes for a first vintage to be made by Sandy Moss, with Jacquinot looking over her shoulder. Stuart Moss took responsibility for marketing.
Plenty of today’s most serious producers of English sparkling wine turn some of the grapes they pick in the first few years into still wine, so that its release the year following harvest can bring at least some income to set against the massive initial investment. The Mosses didn’t go down that route; instead, they made their entire crop into sparkling wine and left it gently maturing until they believed it was ready to drink. The reaction in 1997, when that 1992 all-chardonnay blanc de blancs was released, was awe and astonishment. ‘The collective crashing of jaws to the floor could be heard in London when the wine came top of a blind tasting of sparkling wines in Paris – yes, Paris, France,’ wrote that same Telegraph journalist.
A more measured comment comes from Stephen Skelton, on his English sparkling wine website: ‘Suddenly, everyone woke up to the fact that good wine, even stunningly good wine, could be made from hitherto seemingly unworkable varieties – chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier – and what was more, the wine could be sold at a premium price.’ Skelton admits he had been sceptical when he first heard of the Mosses’ plans and, even after those first medals, in his 2001 The Wines of Britain and Ireland, he described chardonnay as a grape ‘for the brave and patient’. A few more years changed his view. ‘As a variety for the UK, chardonnay appears to be more and more at home,’ he wrote in his comprehensive Wine Growing in Great Britain (2014).
Nyetimber has gone from strength to strength, though its ownership has changed – the Mosses sold the estate in 2001 and returned to the States soon afterwards. English sparkling wine had moved on, said Stuart Moss, and his and Sandy’s very personal approach needed to be replaced by something much more big-business-like. As it certainly has, at Nyetimber and at scores of other serious, professional estates. We’ll meet more of the people concerned in the next chapter.
The alma mater of England’s winemakers
At this point, it is worth looking more closely at what the wine centre at Plumpton College has achieved. ‘There isn’t anybody in English wine who hasn’t been to Plumpton,’ says Foss, with only a little exaggeration. The long list of names includes Mike Roberts and Owen Elias, as well as many of the younger generation now making multi-medal-winning English fizz.
From the original poultry shed, the department shifted to a much larger one, where there was the luxury of water, refrigeration and considerably more equipment. A new, purpose-built centre came into use in 2006, with a £500,000 extension opened in 2014 by the Duchess of Cornwall; sponsors included Rathfinny (the Rathfinny Research Centre), Château de Sours and Merrydown (the Jack Ward Laboratory). Wine studies are tailored to students’ needs, both in the hands-on growing of vines and turning their fruit into wine and in wine business management. A link with the University of Brighton has formalized the qualifications: there are foundation diplomas and degrees, BSc and BA honours degrees, a post-graduate masters programme, all available full-time or part-time. Short courses cover the principles of vine-growing and winemaking, while other sessions work towards the Wine and Spirit Education Trust diploma.
Not the keys to the door, but to vine-growing and winemaking: Plumpton College student Sally MacGarry. PLUMPTON COLLEGE
Government money helped with the introduction of the practical Wine Skills training programme for UK wine producers, providing day sessions and seminars on such subjects as vineyard sustainability, the safe use of pesticides and the business aspects of sparkling wine production. The original two rows of vines have gone, replaced by 8 hectares of commercial vineyard, producing 20,000 to 30,000 bottles a year from the champagne varieties and, as befits a research organization, a host more including the UK’s biggest range of piwis, the new generation of disease-resistant vinifera vines. The wines are a commercial project, with still and sparkling styles, but buyers also have the chance to try students’ state-of-the-art experiments, such as the college’s first skin-contact white wine.
Post-graduate research activity continues to grow. ‘We want to be the research hub for the industry, solving problems as well as educating,’ says Foss, who has moved from being a one-man band to heading a staff of ten. So there is the pan-Europe project with the aim of developing viticultural techniques to face up to climate change, more locally related work on yeasts for second fermentation, development of a new bacterium for malolactic conversion, and much besides. The choice of nearby Brighton as the location for the 2016 International Cool-Climate Wine Symposium ‘helped put us on the map’ – an understatement indeed for an event that attracted 600 delegates from thirty countries for three days of discussion on every aspect of making fine wine in cooler places and marketing the results.
Wine students come to Plumpton from all corners of the world and take back what they learn. This small English agricultural college is now internationally important.
This is also a good moment to look at the broader structure of the UK wine industry. Until the end of 2017 there were two central bodies, the United Kingdom Vineyards Association (UKVA) and English Wine Producers (EWP). The former was born out of the English Vineyards Association (EVA), set up in 1967 with Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones and Jack Ward as its inaugural president and chairman respectively. Despite a limited budget, the EVA did all it could for its growing membership. It provided practical help through events and publications related to wine vine-growing, represented growers’ and winemakers’ interests in discussions with government bodies, promoted members’ wine to consumers, introduced and implemented a pre-EU quality control scheme and further encouraged quality through the annual Wine of the Year competition. When it morphed into the UKVA in 1996, the organizational structure changed, but the association retained all elements of its support and advisory role for the people who grew the vines and made the wines.
The EWP was set up in 1993, its aim to raise the public profile of English and Welsh wines. It provided the answers to the media’s questions about English wine, instigated such successful happenings as English Wine Week and the annual trade tasting, showed the wine-interested public how to find their way to the vineyards and wine-related events, and ensured the availability of a host of accessible online information, from the latest news of the industry to the places where wines could be bought.
In summer 2017, after lengthy discussions, members of the two bodies agreed to their merger, effective from 1 January 2018, a move that makes very good sense both for those in involved in producing the UK’s wine and for those who enjoy drinking it. The new Wines of Great Britain Limited (WineGB) has taken over the roles of the bodies it has united, but most crucially it provides a single, stronger voice for the industry and a clear vision for its future. The change is not abrupt: chosen as first chairman of WineGB was Simon Robinson of Hattingley Valley Wines, who immediately before had been chairman of EWP, with as his deputy Peter Gladwin of Nutbourne Vineyards, the last chairman of UKVA. WineGB, they said, will develop the strengths and skills of the two previous organizations, supporting vineyards large and small, as well as working to boost exports, attract investment and encourage wine tourism. ‘We also have the opportunity to build a strong generic brand for our wines.’ The noise about English wine isn’t going to quieten for a long time yet.
