Ridgeview vines stretching towards the South Downs. RIDGEVIEW ESTATE
SPARKLING SUCCESS: THE BEST CAN BEAT CHAMPAGNE
AFINER FLAVOUR THAN THE BEST CHAMPAIGN.’ Spelling apart, that is the perfect description for the best of English wine in the twenty-first century – except that those words were written more than 250 years ago. By contemporary accounts, the wine made by the Honourable Charles Hamilton at Painshill Park in Surrey did sparkle, but most historic descriptions of English wine refer to its similarity to a burgundian or rhenish style, not fizz.
The champagne-style bubbles began in earnest only late in the twentieth century, after Chicago emigrés Stuart and Sandy Moss had bought the Tudor manor of Nyetimber in West Sussex and set about realizing their ambition to make wine – not just any wine, but one that would be the equal of the most prestigious fizz in the world. In 1998, exactly ten years after the first vines of the noble varieties from which champagne is made were planted, their newly released second vintage – 1993 – was declared the best sparkling wine in the world by judges in one of the biggest international wine competitions.
The Mosses’ wine was not to be alone at the top for long. In 1995, before Nyetimber made world headlines, Mike and Chris Roberts had invested the proceeds of the sale of their computer business in land for vine-growing some 30 kilometres eastwards along the same geological formation. With advice from Kit Lindlar, they also planted the champagne big three, chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier. Ridgeview Estate soon joined the medal laureates.
Ridgeview vines stretching towards the South Downs. RIDGEVIEW ESTATE
It was the beginning of what is now the major focus of English wine. By 2015 an estimated two-thirds of the UK’s average annual production of 5 million bottles was sparkling wine. As more and more of the new English vineyards, most of them concentrating on classic bottle-fermented sparkling wine from the three champagne grape varieties, come into full production, and the bottle total soars to 10 million and above, that proportion is rising. Hugh Liddell, owner of one of those newer vineyards, Cottonworth in Hampshire, cheerfully sums up the situation: ‘The fun has just started!’
There is clearly a big market for fizz in the UK – after the French, Britons drink more bottles of champagne than anyone else. So having a home-grown alternative of similar quality at comparable or even slightly lower prices is good news for patriotic buyers.
Two Renaissance men who made all this possible
Those buyers should raise a glass to celebrate far older British involvement with bubbly wine – way back before the first vintage of Nyetimber, before the first commercial quantity of traditional-method English sparkling wine was produced from the Carr Taylors’ unexpectedly large 1983 crop of reichensteiner, before Raymond Barrington Brock made the first twentieth-century experimental UK bottle-fermented wine, even before Charles Hamilton’s ‘champaign’.In 1662 Dr Christopher Merret, a Gloucester-born physician, scientist and writer, presented a paper to the Royal Society detailing how wine was deliberately made ‘brisk and sparkling’ by the addition of ‘vast quantities of sugar and molasses’. In essence, this was An anonymous portrait of Sir Kenelm Digby. the secondary fermentation-in-bottle technique popularly attributed to Dom Pérignon, described six years before he began his winemaking career at the abbey of Hautvillers. Rather than create bubbles, the monk was in fact more concerned to rid the wine of them.
Written explanation of liquid technique apart, there was practical input too. It was a Briton who invented a bottle that could safely contain that brisk and sparkling drink, avoiding the all-too-frequent explosions of weaker examples. That inventor was Kenelm Digby, a seventeenth-century man of many parts – courtier, diplomat, philosopher, astrologer, alchemist, cookbook author, even privateer. Alongside all those activities he also owned a glassworks where wine bottles were produced in the 1630s. They were a cut above the norm of the time, made from a high-sand-content mix melted in an exceptionally hot furnace. The result was strong enough to withstand high interior pressure, whether from deliberate in-bottle fermentation or from naturally re-fermenting wine. The bottles even looked the part, featuring a punt, the deep indentation in the base that is characteristic of modern sparkling wine bottles. Rivals attempted to claim Digby’s glory, but Parliament confirmed the invention was his alone.
An Anonymous potrait of Sir Kenelm Digby.
If sparkling wine was poured from English seventeenth-century bottles, the original liquid probably wasn’t made in England. Historical sources suggest much came from Champagne as still wine and was modified here as Christopher Merret described. One significant importer is believed to have been Charles de Marguetel de Saint Denis de Saint-Evremond, a distinguished soldier, writer and wine lover who got into political and military trouble in France. He fled across the Channel, where he (and the still wine from Champagne that he brought with him) became a favourite of Charles II. The king rewarded him by appointing him governor of the duck islands in St James’s Park in London, a strange post, but one that gave its holder a considerable income and prestige.
To complete the biography, when Saint-Evremond died aged 90-plus, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, his monument in Poets’ Corner close to that of Shakespeare. And he retains a connection to modern English sparkling wine: he is commemorated in the name of the first estate to be set up in England by a champagne house, Taittinger’s Domaine Evremond.
Building on the pioneering base
And that leads, very suitably, to names already big in the home business. First, an update on Nyetimber. The Mosses’ immediate successor was pop song writer and producer Andy Hill, but in 2006 he sold the Sussex estate, for a reported £7.4 million, to Dutch-born lawyer and entrepreneur Eric Heerema. A man with immense bubbly ambition, he was ready to build on what had led to the ‘incredible thriving industry’ of English sparkling wine, on a far larger, far more commercial scale. That ‘thriving’ description comes from the head winemaker Heerema chose to make it happen, Cherie Spriggs. A Canadian/UK national, Spriggs and her husband Brad Greatrix, both with considerable experience, wanted to move together to a new wine challenge. They had heard of Heerema’s plans and made a direct approach. Happily for both sides, it all fell into place and in 2007 Spriggs was appointed to head the winemaking, with Greatrix working alongside her.
Cherie Spriggs, head winemaker at Nyetimber. NYETIMBER
From the Mosses’ 16 hectares, the estate has expanded to more than 170. There are five vineyards in Sussex: two at Nyetimber itself and three at Tillington, a short distance to the north-west – all on greensand – and two on Hampshire chalk near Stockbridge, an 80-minute drive away. The winemaking has been moved from the estate to a purpose-built facility in Crawley, where access is much easier than through the narrow lanes around Nyetimber, and one of the barns overlooking the house and immediate grounds has been converted to an impressive reception area, though general wine tourism wasn’t on the immediate agenda, Spriggs told me in spring 2017.
But why are the wines special? Spriggs argues that choice of soil is important, reflecting in the taste of the wine. ‘Without question there are clear differences between the chalk and greensand,’ she says. ‘The beauty of greensand is the wonderful brightness of fruit it gives. The flavours are clear and really bright. When you grow vines on chalk soil the way acid is perceived is different. It is perceived earlier, up front, and the overall impression is of acidity being lower: there is no shock of acidity at end.’ Within the vineyards on the same soils the differences from one parcel of vines to another are far subtler, she continues, and understanding all the effects is a continuing learning process. But having such a variety of raw materials for the wines is invaluable – fruit from each of the seventy-five parcels of vines, and from each of the sub-blocks within those, is pressed and fermented separately. The vines themselves can add additional elements: for example, she notes that ‘something special’ comes from the 30-year-old chardonnay plot close to the house. It is because of that, rather than for any feelings of nostalgia for the early days of Nyetimber’s wine, that those vines escaped replacement by more productive youngsters.
Cherie Spriggs has put her own mark on the wines, with the aim of making them more appealing. Some commentators use the word ‘feminine’, which she takes ‘as a compliment’. From the beginning she was adamant on the importance of quality control. Also, she puts almost all of Nyetimber’s wine through malolactic conversion, except in the very ripest years. ‘Every wine country in the world has an Achilles heel. Perhaps in England it is too much acidity. Why not use malo? It’s a wonderful non-invasive way to soften acidity.’ Winemakers must always remember, she says firmly, that they are creating something that should give pleasure, and there must be balance and harmony in their wines.
Ready to walk the greensand: boots at Nyetimber. AUTHOR
Despite Nyetimber’s importance in proving the world-beating quality of English sparkling wine, the estate can’t sit back on its laurels, Spriggs insists. Key to winemaking success is to evaluate the available fruit and decide how to turn it into the best possible wine. It’s demanding, she says. ‘This is the hardest job I have ever had – I love it.’ Heerema is closely involved in all that goes on and he knew from the outset that his investment would not be for short-term gain but for long-term progress. ‘He doesn’t think in years, he thinks in generations,’ says Spriggs. His children are too young to be thinking of future career paths, but might this be the start of a wine dynasty of very unusual national origin (Heerema’s wife is Scottish)?
England’s first sparkling wine dynasty
It certainly wouldn’t be the first example of England’s sparkling wine industry spanning more than a single generation. At Ridgeview, which followed hard on the heels of Nyetimber and has a similarly impressive haul of gold and silver ware, the next generation’s commitment is complete. The English wine world went into deep mourning when Ridgeview founder Mike Roberts died in 2014. He was a much-loved figure, ready with advice and help to all those with bubbling ambitions, and his name is still on many lips. But Ridgeview remains the Roberts family business. Son Simon is the winemaker, daughter Tamara is the CEO and daughter-in-law Mardi is in charge of marketing. They cherish and celebrate that family ethos.
Over the quarter-century since the first vines went into the clay-with-limestone soil looking south towards Sussex landmark Ditchling Beacon on the South Downs, the business has expanded hugely. Now the 7-hectare vineyard at Ridgeview itself provides only a small part of the fruit that goes into present bottles; grapes are sourced from a further 50 hectares of vines owned by partnership growers. The biggest of those partners is Tinwood, 45 kilometres to the west at the base of the downs, which has a 25 per cent share in the business, a co-operation that works well for both parties. It’s not just the broad sourcing of fruit that sets Ridgeview apart from many other, more self- contained producers of sparkling wine. It also makes wine under their own labels for customers such as Marks & Spencer and Laithwaite’s, and it keeps its winery equipment in efficient use by contract winemaking for other growers, either direct from their grapes or by completing the complexities of turning their still wine into fizz. Much credit is due to Ridgeview for putting English sparkling wine into the glasses – and smiles on to the faces – of so many new consumers. Also, via placements from nearby Plumpton College, the Roberts family have helped to train many of the winemakers now in charge of England’s leading sparkling wine cellars. Mike Roberts’ legacy is his family’s continuing and very special contribution to what he loved so much.
From the beginning, the family were determined to get it right. Vine clones, winery equipment, yeasts for first and second fermentations, winemaking advice: all followed the champagne lead. Given the similarities between the two regions, it was so logical for southern England’s wine producers to go down that same route, Mike Roberts argued. The scale was small initially, with expansion at a pace that the business could support. The latest advance has been a second winery, ready for the 2018 harvest and almost doubling production capacity, to a potential approaching 500,000 bottles a year. And with the steady, sensible progress has come the opportunity to hold back wines to increase the reserve stock, to move from vintage to non-vintage (NV) for the signature range. The change happened early in 2017 for chardonnay-led Bloomsbury, followed soon afterwards by Cavendish traditional blend and Fitzrovia rosé. Their capital-themed names are Mike Roberts’ tribute to Christopher Merret, who practised in London, with Fitzrovia included because Roberts’ office had been located there. The NV wines are in no way radically different from their vintage predecessors: the move is all about consistency and assuring a style that is familiar to drinkers, year on year, exactly as the big champagne houses do. But there will still be vintage individuality in the top-end wines, for the best of both worlds.
Like her father-in-law, Mardi Roberts is adamant that the terroir argument in English sparkling wine stretches far beyond whether or not vines are planted on pure chalk soil. ‘We see terroir as a bit of everything – climate, soil, talent of viticulture and winemaking.’ Diversity in the raw material is to be celebrated, as is the increasing number of growers who produce fine wine, she says. Informing potential consumers is vital, too, and wine tourism is important in achieving that. Cellar-door visitors at Ridgeview have been doubling year on year and they are drawn because of the quality of the wine, not by add-on attractions. This is how great English sparkling wine began, and will continue.
The very highest of ambitions
Alongside the familiar names, many new ones are emerging. The most audacious of all recent vineyard initiatives is that of Rathfinny Wine Estate, set high on the South Downs above the picture-postcard East Sussex village of Alfriston. The ambition of owners Mark and Sarah Driver can be summed up in a single four-letter word: huge. The estate itself stretches over almost 250 hectares, two-thirds of which are destined for vines, all due to be yielding close to capacity by 2023. And while at a good number of the vineyards in the far south of England you can almost smell the sea, here you can actually see it.
Rathfinny is some retirement project, but for Mark Driver retirement has come unusually early. After building a successful hedge fund management company he took the decision in 2010 to step back from high finance. He was forty-six and had no very clear plan of how to occupy himself, other than an intention to buy land. Entirely accidentally, when scanning the A–Z list of available university courses with his eldest daughter, he reached ‘V’ and found viticulture. ‘I had no idea that you could study viticulture in England,’ he told me. An idea was born – but English wine? ‘I’d tasted it back in the eighties, and it was awful.’ Perhaps things had changed, so he set up a blind tasting, comparing English sparkling wines with similarly priced champagnes. There would be no challenge, he thought. He found his francophile anticipation was entirely wrong, and his decision was made. Instead of looking for a non-specific estate, he moved to searching for one where he could grow grapes and create his own challenge to England’s best fizz.
‘I love wine, and in twenty-five years in the City, with a fair amount of entertaining, I got to drink some pretty special wines.’ His own had to match them. As part of the new plan, he was determined to increase his knowledge, so he enrolled on the winemaking foundation degree course at Plumpton College. But before he had attended his first lecture he had become the owner of what looks set to be England’s largest wine estate. The majestic South Downs site had become available while he was sailing – his and Sarah’s hobby – in the Mediterranean: ‘I looked on Google Earth and thought, this is wonderful.’ The deal was done, and planning the estate’s new role became course projects for Driver and fellow Plumpton students. Beyond that, the Drivers have become important supporters of the college’s broader work, funding a research winery, opened in 2014, that brings the Rathfinny name to the wine students from around the world.
Sarah and Mark Driver among the Rathfinny vines. VIV BLAKEY/ RATHFINNY WINE ESTATE
Buying an estate of that size, planting so many vines, building a state-of-the-art winery designed to cope comfortably when Rathfinny is at full 1-millionplus bottle production, plus associated work converting ruined barns into comfortable, bespoke-fitted accommodation for visitors and seasonal staff, planting some 10,000 trees, developing space for tours and events (Rathfinny is fast becoming a rather special wedding venue), and much more, doesn’t come cheap. In spring 2017, with plenty still to do, Mark Driver was prepared to say only that his investment at that point had topped £10 million.
From the outset, the intention had been to create a fully commercial business: ‘I don’t want to do this as a hobby.’ Rathfinny won’t be perfect, he accepts. ‘This is a completely new industry and we will make mistakes. But as long as we learn we will take the industry forward. We’re looking to get more things right than things we get wrong.’ One early mistake was to indulge his love of riesling and plant the variety. That didn’t work. Though the grapes appeared ripe, ‘we just didn’t get the flavour’. In April 2017, chardonnay vines replaced the failed riesling.
The Drivers’ confidence is infectious, but not everyone in the English sparkling wine industry is as sanguine about Rathfinny. The major question is whether vines will flourish on so exposed a site, where many of those 10,000 new trees were planted as windbreaks, themselves needing protection as they established. There is natural shelter, Mark Driver told me, looking out on the spectacular 180-degree view from the estate office window and pointing to a ridge that lies in the way of the prevailing south-westerly wind. Being so close to the sea, he added, has the advantage of reducing the risk of late frosts – which, if they do occur, tend to roll down to non-planted areas rather than damage the vines.
Time will tell whether the site is viable and how its sparkling wines, released from 2018, will be received. Driver is optimistic. England is now the best place in the world to grow sparkling wine grapes, he says, with the current climate much more favourable than that of the Champagne region. A longer, slower ripening time brings full phenolic ripeness, with good fruit flavours and the right balance of sugar and acidity. English sparkling wine is right not only for the domestic market but also for worldwide sale. ‘The UK is a massive importer of wine, a massive market for sparkling wine. It is not a question of why should we produce sparkling wine, but why not. English sparkling wine is the best sparkling wine in the world and its quality will continue to rise. Being part of it is exciting.’
A Frenchwoman’s English enthusiasm
While Rathfinny attracts much public attention, Exton Park Vineyard has a quieter profile. But, from its first releases in 2015 it has proved, under the very assured control of head winemaker Corinne Seely, that great sparkling wines can be made on southern England’s chalk hills. The vines grow, again high, south-east of Winchester on land that local watercress and supermarket salad magnate Malcolm Isaac bought in 2009. The three champagne classics had been planted there over the previous six years and initially all the grapes were sold to the nearby Coates & Seely estate. But in 2011 Isaac decided it was time to create Exton Park’s own wines. Which was when Seely was drawn in, offered a blank drawing board and a very generous budget to create exactly the winery she wanted if she would accept the post of head winemaker. How could she refuse?
Although the site is high and open, it is further inland than Rathfinny. Seely has no problem with the exposure – though her assertion when we walked the vineyard early in 2017 that ‘there’s no frost’ was over-optimistic, as the lowest-lying area suffered on those exceptional nights that followed in April – and she is ecstatic about the geology. ‘I’m amazed by the soil. There is more chalk here than in Champagne.’
Never before, in a flying winemaking career that has taken her from Bordeaux to the Douro, from Australia to Languedoc, has Corinne Seely worked so closely with a vineyard manager. Fred Langdale, who studied at Plumpton after a stint in New Zealand’s Central Otago region, and whose previous English experience was at Davenport and Nyetimber, describes Exton Park as ‘a viticulturist’s dream’. Both he and Seely revel in the diversity of the 22-hectare vineyard itself and the different rootstocks, different vine clones, different density of planting there. For Seely, who ferments each variety and every plot separately in her galaxy of small tanks, that is reflected in the ready-to-blend juice: for example, from the 2016 harvest she had a palette of twenty-three different potential components available for the delicious pinot noir-dominated Exton Park Brut. Her creed is: ‘The winemaker’s role is to interpret terroir, to be as neutral as possible to let that and the vines speak.’
A winter morning at Exton Park – frost before the buds burst is no problem for the vines. EXTON PARK VINEYARD
From the moment of her appointment, a decision was taken that was unusual for England: only non-vintage sparkling wine would be produced. One-third of the harvest goes into reserve wines, to provide the ‘library’ that allows consistent wines to be achieved year on year, whatever the weather does. It is another example of the investment that Isaac has been happy to make, as is the solar-powered winery, with its two Bucher nitrogen-blanket presses. Grapes travel from vine to winery in five minutes, says Seely with little understatement, ‘and it would be crazy to lose that freshness by oxygen contact during pressing’. Such protection is essential during the unusually long, slow pressing on which she stubbornly insists. Successfully avoiding any oxidation of the juice is one reason why she creates such delicately coloured and freshly flavoured wines.
There is no intention to extend the vineyard area (which should in the best years produce some 100,000 bottles), to use grapes from elsewhere or to undertake any contract winemaking. Nor will the estate become a wine tourism destination. For Seely, the future for Exton Park is simple: to be ‘one of the best ambassadors of English wine’. She explained why: ‘I believe in English terroir and I want to show people we are not just making a copy of champagne, we are making our own style of sparkling wine. I am very proud to be here at this beginning of the blossoming of the English wine industry. But we are not there yet. There is a long staircase to climb and we are in the middle of it now.’
New wine with old roots
Over the hills to the south-east, 7 kilometres from Exton Park, lies the vineyard where twentieth-century commercial viticulture was founded. How much has changed at Hambledon, sixty years on. Here, as at Exton Park, a huge hole has been dug into the chalk, to provide a new cellar with a constant 10-degree celsius temperature for the storage of maturing wines. Alongside it, a tasting room can immediately demonstrate the geology that owner Ian Kellett believes is so crucial: ‘This is not just chalk, not just Champagne chalk, but the chalk of the very best part of Champagne, the Côte des Blancs.’
Hambledon is another to focus firmly on non-vintage wines, which are made under the direction of a winemaker from Champagne, Hervé Jestin – the biggest name on his CV is 6-million-bottle-a-year Duval-Leroy. In France now Jestin works on a much smaller scale, seeking the very best in champagnes, and he is happy to be involved in England as well. The freshness, acidity and fruit, he says, resemble what was great in champagne thirty years ago. Kellett has total confidence in his ability: ‘He is one of the world’s best winemakers. He has made 250 million bottles of champagne!’
There is a further link with that particular French wine region at Hambledon. Looking out from the top of the winery, vines can be seen high on the skyline on Old Winchester Hill to the north. This is the Meonhill vineyard, planted in 2004 by champenois Didier Pierson. After a decade, Pierson returned home and, although he retained a consulting interest in the winemaking, the vineyard became part of the main Hambledon estate.
Chardonnay is the main focus of the modern plantings, flourishing as it never did in the days of Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones, and a variety of clones and rootstocks in all three noble varieties provide a broad blending choice for Jestin. Contract winemaking helps make best use of serious investment in equipment – crowd-funding and EU grants have contributed to the cost of that. But if the label says ‘Hambledon’, the wine will have come only from Hambledon-grown grapes. That reminds me of an issue Salisbury-Jones had over whether he should make sparkling wine. If he did, he told a questioner in the 1970s, he would need to bring in grapes from other vineyards and so couldn’t put his vineyard’s name on the bottles. No, he said, if it couldn’t be called Hambledon, he didn’t want to make it.
Like the unpressed grapes, I journeyed up three levels in the winery lift to where the two Coquard presses sit, with space for a third alongside. From pressing onwards, all transfer through the winery is by gravity, to ensure the gentlest handling of the wine-to-be. The scale is big – there is capacity to make 1.1 million bottles a year. Sales supremo Steve Lowrie anticipates there will be a ready market for them all. ‘We’re two-and-a-half to three years ahead of where we expected demand would be,’ he told me as construction began on the new cellar in spring 2017. ‘We can sell all we produce. Five years ago we were begging sommeliers and trade buyers to come and taste. Now they are asking us.’
Ian Kellett has brought a unique combination of previous skills to the estate he has owned since 1999 (and he also brought in his builder brother Philip, to take charge of the hole-digging). His academic background is in biochemistry, his high-flying City career was in global equity research focused on the food and drink sectors, and he has studied winemaking at Plumpton College. The path he is on now is far from low cost – around £10 million has been spent – but he promises that his past experience and contacts have given him access to the further funds that will be necessary to achieve Hambledon’s ambitions. Much more rewarding, he argues, is to build a big business from a small base than to start with a fortune. ‘I want to take England’s earliest vineyard and develop the brand to the size of Pol Roger – one million bottles a year,’ he said when Hampshire’s vineyards held a group tasting in spring 2017. ‘There is decent English sparkling wine and there is spectacular English sparkling wine. We are aiming to make the best English sparkling wine bar none, to become the standard bearer for English sparkling wine.’
Another county . . .
So far, all these sparkling wine estates have been located in Hampshire or Sussex. The UK county with the largest vineyard area, however, is Kent, and it is here that further ambitious plantings of the three champagne varieties have been taking place. The first by a major champagne house in England understandably caused something of a media storm. But, close to Taittinger’s much-publicized vines at Chilham, others are growing, with much less hype.
Ruth and Charles Simpson made their decision to become vignerons – the French term is deliberate, for reasons that will soon become clear – in the most unusual of locations, Azerbaijan. Newly married, their careers had taken them both to that troubled place. We must, they decided, do something different. An idea began to grow. Wine was a shared pleasure and, although they had no viticultural or winemaking background, the thought of creating their own, of controlling the whole process from vine to bottle, appealed. They were to prove quick learners. Initial plans were to head to Australia, but what actually happened, says Charles Simpson, was ‘a new world project in an old world area’. ‘It was never our intention to end up with what we have got – an amazing sixteenth-century château. It was way more than we could afford, a recurring theme of our lives.’ The many UK consumers of wines from Domaine Sainte Rose in the Languedoc surely delight in the fact that the couple didn’t take the advice of their consultant, James Herrick, to ‘sit down in a dark room until the thought had gone away’.
Why, though, leave southern France’s sunshine for cooler, damper Kent? First, as they made clear to me, they haven’t abandoned the Languedoc. Domaine Sainte Rose had reached optimum size and there were no plans to expand. They are happy to leave its day-to-day running in the hands of the competent team there; the commercial side, where the Simpsons’ expertise is much harder to replace, can be handled from England and on regular trips back. Second, it was time to make a decision about their daughters’ secondary education, and England was the choice. And third, English wine had become a serious proposition. Serious enough then – 2012 – for an estate agent to be advertising a site in Kent as ideal for viticulture. That meant a premium price had been put on the land, much more than regular agricultural use would have justified. As part of the bargaining process, the would-be buyers pointed out that such optimistic promotion was all very well, but until vines were planted and thriving, there was no guarantee of the site’s suitability. They recognized, though, the potential for making fine-quality sparkling wine there. ‘It was the ideal project and a very exciting one,’ Ruth Simpson told me. The two blocks that most tempted them were ‘in our minds the perfect spot’ – south-facing, good slopes, chalk 30 centimetres below the topsoil, old woodland around for protection, in an area with some of the highest sunshine hours in the UK. They ended up buying 30 hectares rather than the 10 they had intended.
It was, they say, the Languedoc all over again – buying into a wine area where land was undervalued compared with the likes of Bordeaux or Burgundy and therefore more affordable. ‘It’s very much the same spirit – get in early, be part of shaping and establishing an area.’
But this time around they have the experience to be independent, to avoid following exactly the same route as many other new English sparkling wine producers. Not for them the same vine suppliers and planting teams, nor necessarily the same vineyard and winery equipment. The nurseryman they knew from Sainte Rose brought 40,000 vines to Kent in a white Transit van, ‘and we made huge savings’. Their experience has taught them where they do need to invest. For example, a nitrogen-blanket Bucher press is important to protect newly picked grapes from too much oxygen contact. And they have experience of producing bottle-fermented sparkling wine, which they have been able show to potential buyers long before release of their first English wines. Still wines – a blanc de noir pinot and a chardonnay – sit alongside the fizz, but the Simpsons’ English focus is very strongly on sparkling wine, with a broad choice of clones and rootstocks to give a diversity of flavours in the base wines and complexity in the finished result.
The French do it . . . vine planting on Simpsons English estate. SIMPSONS WINE ESTATE
But, as was the case in France, the new business will stretch them. ‘Viticulture so much further north is an incredible challenge, in terms of winemaking, in what we are doing and most importantly knowing where we are going to sell the wine,’ says Charles Simpson. That last issue has been sorted, initially at least. Within six months of the 2016 grapes being picked, more than half of the 22,000 bottles from the vintage had been sold, and paid for, two years before their release.
And the English weather has smiled on them. Their first two harvests, in 2015 and 2016, were excellent, so much so in 2016 that photos of the grape pickers posted on Facebook convinced many followers that the location was the Languedoc, not Kent. An encouraging initial stock of wine has been cellared, but they are reckoning on facing two catastrophic years every decade. Such anticipation comes, again, from experience: ‘We did learn from the school of hard knocks – second time around we know what we are doing.’
Two sites, for security and variety
Among England’s most ambitious sparkling wine producers, there are some who prefer not to keep all their eggs in a single county basket. Gusbourne splits its vineyards between Kent (its first and larger site, 60 hectares) and West Sussex, half that area. There are obvious differences in soil: on the Kent site it is heavier, clay and sand, slower to warm in spring but holding its heat well to speed up autumn ripening; the Sussex vines are on flint and chalk.
In Kent, the vines grow on the Saxon shoreline, an escarpment just above the present coastal plain, with plots varying from 5 to 45 metres above sea level. The site is 10 kilometres from the coast – Dungeness power station is on the horizon – and the sea breeze reduces disease risk by wafting away mildew spores that would settle in more stagnant air. Winemaker and company CEO Charlie Holland describes the growing principles as ‘responsibility, sustainability’. Herbicides are being phased out, though fungicides remain essential; grass or cover crops are grown between rows to avoid soil compaction. Roses, traditionally planted in vineyards as an early warning of disease rather than for decoration, grow at the end of each row here. They are red when the vines are pinot noir, pink for pinot meunier and white for chardonnay.
Despite this very modern use of the land, there is, says Holland, ‘an enormous sense of history’. The estate dates back to 1410 and the three-geese crest of its then owner, John de Gusbourne, is revived in the label of the wines. A bomb crater remains from the Second World War, and Civil War musket balls are turned up by vineyard tractors, as was a 4,000-year-old flint scraper that could have been used by prehistoric fishermen to skin their catch. ‘People have been working this land for thousands of years. It makes you feel very insignificant,’ says their twenty-first-century successor.
Back in the present, Gusbourne wines are highly regarded, with justification. Charlie Holland’s approach is straightforward: ‘There are no real secrets, only time and patience.’ Having the two separate vineyard areas is valuable, and not just for the differences between the fruit from each. Harvests can vary between the two, sometimes one compensating for a bad year at the other. No grapes are bought in, or sold. Pressings of fruit from the fourteen individual plots and from the forty different clones are kept apart as much as possible, to provide a huge choice of components for the sparkling wine blending process. ‘Some blends present themselves immediately, others take six weeks to create,’ Holland told me. Fine still pinot noir and chardonnay are made, too, but they are secondary to the fizz.
With most of the vineyard plantings in or near to full production, the latest investment has been in creating a new visitor centre, ‘a proper experience, not just a shop’. ‘We want to show people what we have.’ And with London an hour away there is a big potential audience for one-off events as well as regular tours and tastings. What is poured into visitors’ glasses will normally be finished wines, but I was privileged to be led through a selection of 2016 tank samples, before the base wine had undergone second fermentation. In Champagne, the experience would have been pretty hard going; here there was an enjoyable fruit character alongside the necessary acidity. I would have finished off, most happily, a glass rather than a sample of the blanc de blancs base. It had the salty tang that Holland seeks in that particular wine. ‘I’m looking for minerality, an almost saline flavour,’ he explained. ‘Certain sites here have that salty character, a terroir effect.’
All Gusbourne sparkling wines are vintage, and Holland was particularly happy with the juice from the 2016 grapes, which gave a huge variety of flavours, needed virtually no sugar addition to achieve the desired final alcohol level and was high in acid. ‘I like to reflect every year, to show our difference, the slightly different interpretations.’ But reaching the heights he is aiming for needs very considerable amounts of that essential patience: ‘Getting to know your vines is a ten-year process; getting to know your wine is also a ten-year process.’ Given what had been achieved before the end of the first decade, the future should be exceptional.
Charlie Holland: ‘There is a terroir effect.’ GUSBOURNE
Time now to journey from east to west, to another county where there is chalk and fine fizz. Looking out over the bowl of land that is the Spurrier family’s Bride Valley Vineyard, near Bridport in Dorset, it is easy to understand why sheep have largely – though not entirely – made way for vines. The view is spectacular, the slopes inviting, the topsoil soon gives way to the western English edge of the chalk that stretches across to Champagne’s vineyards. This, says the estate website, is ‘where the English countryside sparkles’.
One wonders, perhaps, why Steven Spurrier waited so long before persuading his wife Bella that the main crop from her farm should be wine rather than lamb and wool. As everyone with any professional or serious amateur interest in wine knows, the man behind the Judgement of Paris immersed himself in communicating about wine – as a critic, writer, teacher, consultant, retailer – from that French revolutionary time onwards. ‘The unsung hero of the wine world’, ‘inspirational’, ‘without doubt one of the most influential wine professionals of our time’, ‘a joy to go tasting with’, ‘always ahead of the curve’: these and many more tributes flowed when he was made Decanter magazine’s Man of the Year in 2017. Only in 2008, as he celebrated five decades in wine, did Spurrier decide it was time to create his own and join the English sparkling wine revolution.
Steven and Bella Spurrier. BRIDE VALLEY VINEYARD
Bride Valley, where vines have replaced sheep. BRENDAN BUESNEL/BRIDE VALLEY VINEYARD
The Bride Valley site is high, with vineyards running up from 75 metres to almost 170. Two large blocks of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier were planted in 2009, with later additions, of chardonnay in particular, to reach the present 10 hectares. The approach by vineyard manager Graham Fisher is pragmatic, ‘sustainable rather than organic’ farming. Herbicides were on the way out when I visited in spring 2017 and wildflowers were in, to encourage the right environment for natural predators. ‘With somewhere like this you don’t want to screw it up by spraying vast quantities of chemicals,’ says Fisher. So some sheep have stayed, as ‘organic lawnmowers’.
The wine is made by Ian Edwards at his Furleigh Estate, 15 kilometres away on the other side of Bridport. He believes in minimal intervention, and the resulting Brut Reserve NV is delicate and complex, while the vintage Bella Rosé has added fruit intensity. In both, there is a higher proportion of pinot meunier than many growers choose. It helps to define the wines’ character. Champagne makers have told Bella Spurrier that they can detect a similarity to wines they knew from the 1970s, but they are no longer planting the grape as rising temperatures have robbed it of acidity. That is certainly not a problem at Bride Valley, where it is difficult to ripen pinot meunier fully on all but the most favourable slopes.
Despite the challenges posed by a place exposed more than many to the rigours of the English climate, there is a happy community feel to the Bride Valley estate. The family involvement stretches down a generation – the Spurriers’ daughter Kate is in charge of marketing – and local people help with the harvest, although the estate isn’t open to visitors. Small is beautiful seems an apt summing up, all the more so as the Bride happens to be southern England’s shortest river, a mere 11 kilometres from its source to the English Channel.
The farmer’s daughter comes home
The Spurriers decided not to invest in their own winery, hence the involvement of Furleigh Estate. This is the vineyard and winery project of two actuaries, Rebecca and Ian Edwards, with a shared passion for wine. Their main site, tucked away deep in the Dorset countryside, chose itself. The former dairy farm was where Rebecca Edwards grew up, though meanwhile her father had sold it. He had never imagined it as a vineyard, but he lived long enough after the couple bought it – they exchanged contracts on Christmas Eve 2004 – to see the new venture take off. With a second vineyard near Charmouth, the Edwards have just over 7 hectares planted, with germanic varieties for still wines alongside the champagne classics. It is a small but smart operation, with Ian Edwards – who studied at Plumpton once he had taken the decision to change career – in charge in the winery, and Rebecca handling administration.
Promise for the future: the next generation of Edwards will benefit from their parents’ investment. AUTHOR
Recognition came fast, with the first vintage, 2009, of the Classic Cuvée carrying off a gold medal in the 2012 Effervescents du Monde competition. It was the first English wine to do so, and one of only 38 gold-medal winners among more than 500 sparkling wines lined up before the judges. That wine also won the English wine trophy at the 2013 International Wine Challenge. The medal haul has continued, and is one of the enticements for visitors to brave the narrow lanes to visit Furleigh, to tour the vineyard, glass in hand, and try more wines in the attractive tasting room. How many visitors manage to spot, in the winery, the names of the Edwards’ children embossed on three of the fermentation tanks? They are there, the guide suggests, as a promise of compensation to come after their parents spent the next generation’s heritage on the best winery equipment.
Let’s find some more to taste
There are so many more excellent sparkling wine producers, but too little space to profile them in detail. Here, though, are a few tasters.
Coates & Seely, near Whitchurch, in Hampshire’s Test Valley, has some very prestigious French connections: co-owner Christian Seely is the head of AXA Millésimes, charged with running top wine estates in Bordeaux, Languedoc, the Douro Valley and Hungary (though none in Champagne). The English estate, developed from a germ of an idea in 2006 by Seely and his ex-City-financier friend Nicholas Coates, is establishing its own prestige status in the UK, carrying off the supreme champion trophy in the inaugural UK Wine Awards in 2017. The wine so lauded was La Perfide 2009 blanc de blancs, one of the first wines made at Coates & Seely. Besides awarding it the champion title, the judges named La Perfide best overall sparkling wine and best sparkling blanc de blancs. They also rewarded its pink twin sister with the best sparkling rosé trophy.
The Coates & Seely Wooldings vineyard. DANIEL DYTRYCH/COATES & SEELY
The partners do enjoy gentle digs at the French. The rather obvious ‘perfidious Albion’ implication is matched by their use of the term ‘méthode britannique’ to describe how their wines are made. They have also tried, without too much success, to introduce ‘britagne’ as the generic name for classic-blend sparkling wines from the northern shores of the English Channel.
It took more than a year from the initial business plan to finding the right vineyard. Wooldings lies in a steep, sheltered valley on the north Hampshire downs, where heat-retaining flints litter the soil and chalk is never far from the surface. Conveniently, Nicholas Coates lives close by. Part of the land had already been planted with champagne-variety vines, and in 2008 more went in. But the 12 hectares aren’t enough to feed the state-of-the-art winery, so typically 25–30 per cent of the grapes are bought in from other Hampshire chalk-based vineyards.
Recognition of the wines, the UK supreme champion award in particular, has delighted both partners. Seely regards it as strong confirmation of the reasoning behind the estate, a belief ‘that it might be possible to make sparkling wines here in England, from specific sites, in our case Hampshire chalk, that would be expressions of something uniquely English and that could one day be ranked among the best sparkling wines in the world’. It is, he adds, a ‘miracle’ that such high quality has been achieved in so short a time.
Domaine Evremond, Chilham, Kent, is coming into that ranking contest with a very relevant heritage – its vineyard is the first in England created by a champagne house. With a great media flourish, Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, president of Champagne Taittinger, his wife Claire and daughter Vitalie dug into the chalky soil of a former apple orchard not far from Canterbury on a damp May morning in 2017 and planted the first of the pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay vines on the 40-hectare site. They are destined to provide, once in full production, some 300,000 bottles a year, the first release scheduled for 2023. The site is not as high as some, at around 80 metres, but windbreaks are still needed and Italian alder trees, the choice for many vineyards, went in ahead of the vines.
Domaine Evremond planting: Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger (right) with Patrick McGrath, managing director of Hatch Mansfield, and Stephen Skelton watching on the sidelines. THOMAS ALEXANDER PHOTOGRAPHY/DOMAINE EVREMOND
The estate’s name commemorates the seventeenth-century importer of pre-fizz wine from the Champagne region, Charles de Marguetel de Saint Denis de Saint-Evremond, who we met earlier in this chapter, and the initiative is a joint venture with UK wine agency Hatch Mansfield, which imports Taittinger champagne. Appropriately, Hatch Mansfield has a long involvement with English wine – it introduced Castell Coch’s wines to Londoners in the 1890s. Friends of both companies are backing it, too. The aim, says Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, is ‘to create something special to show our appreciation of the UK support for Champagne’.
Mannings Heath, close to Horsham, West Sussex, is another of the new breed of high-input commercial investments, and its first vines were planted just a week earlier than Domaine Evremond’s. With more added in spring 2018, the total vineyard area is 14 hectares. The sparkling wine culture is very serious, under the direction of Johann Fourie, former chief winemaker at South African giant KWV, but the vineyard isn’t a stand-alone project. It is part of a South African concept, a golf and wine estate. Why all this South African emphasis? Mannings Heath, already an established golf club, was bought in 2016 by Penny Streeter, an astute businesswoman, born in Africa and owner since 2013 of Benguela Cove vineyard and its associated restaurants and hotel in the Cape wine region. The less popular of the two courses at her new Sussex enterprise was halved in size, and the classic champagne varieties have replaced golfers on what were the fairways and greens of the discarded nine holes.
Viticulturist Duncan McNeil believes the sheltered site and deep silty, sandy loam over a sandstone subsoil should encourage great fruit flavours in the grapes. Even more crucial than soil, he argues, is climate – and those sheltering trees protect the Mannings Heath vines from the prevailing winds. ‘The heat generated here won’t be blown away.’ Frost protection would not be necessary, he told a questioning journalist at the vineyard press launch. ‘The best way to prevent frost damage is: don’t plant vines in a frost-prone site.’
Johann Fourie also makes the Benguela Cove wines – he was happy to seize the opportunity to move from a huge operation to somewhere much smaller and more specific. He splits his time between the two hemispheres, but is increasingly at Mannings Heath as the vines crop in wine-realistic quantity. The chance to be in at the beginning of a new venture, to take his passion for sparkling wine further and to work in a cool-climate region ‘ticked all the boxes – how could I say no?’. He is looking to make chardonnay-dominated wines, with elegance and finesse. The first should be available in 2023.
Johann Fourie, Penny Streeter and Duncan McNeil as the first vines are planted at Mannings Heath. AUTHOR
Wiston Estate, Washington, West Sussex, has a South African connection, too, in the person of Pip Goring. The gestation period for her vineyard, however, was far longer than for Streeter’s. The land has belonged to the Goring family since 1743, used to grow crops and raise beef cattle and sheep. When Pip married owner Harry, she brought an interest in wine from her home in Cape Town – her French Huguenot ancestors had established a vineyard in Franschoek. But it took thirty-four years to convince her husband to convert
6.5 of Wiston’s 243 hectares to vines. Chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier went into the chalk-based soil in 2006. Dermot Sugrue – who had just left Nyetimber – came on board as winemaker, and a winery was created in a disused turkey factory, its two levels allowing the pressed juice to move by gravity from the upper to the lower for the rest of the minimally intrusive processing.
The intention, right from scratch, was to make ‘terroir wines’, Sugrue declared to the crowds round the Wiston table at one of 2017’s major bubbly trade shows in London. ‘Eleven years down the line we feel vindicated. The wines are a true expression of sense of place.’ While he recognizes, in a very similar way to Cherie Spriggs, the differences between grapes grown on chalk or on greensand, he was not yet ready in 2017 to accept the argument that grapes from Sussex and Hampshire chalk have separate identities. Differing winemaking styles have more effect than county boundaries, he argued.
Charles Palmer Vineyards, close to the sea at Winchelsea in East Sussex, is another of England’s family farms where the crop has changed. Its eponymous owner was born in New Zealand, came to his family’s home county as an eight-year-old and followed his parents into conventional agriculture. In 2006 he planted his first 2 hectares of vines and is moving towards ten times that, anticipating a 50,000-bottle production when the wines from 2019 – his tenth vintage – are ready for sale. The classic trio of varieties, all for sparkling wine, have their roots in soil more burgundian than champenois and are planted at low density, to give room for disease-preventing air movement and to encourage fewer but riper grapes than would be found on more crowded vines. Investment is carefully measured, but Palmer is well aware that scaling up is potentially the profitable route – the vineyard ‘has to stand on its own feet’. Importantly for that, the wines are very good indeed.
Hattingley Valley, near Alresford, Hampshire, is the achievement of a long-term dream by owner Simon Robinson, lawyer by profession. It’s a big set-up, with 24 hectares of vineyards on two sites plus plenty of contract winemaking work. And it made big news in May 2016 when a link-up with Pommery was announced, with Thierry Gasco, chef de cave at the champagne house, working with Hattingley Valley head winemaker Emma Rice on a cuvée carrying the Pommery name. Wines from Pommery’s own English vines are likely to follow. Just before that announcement, but rather less widely publicized, was the introduction of the first apprenticeship scheme in the UK wine industry, in which Robinson’s company is in partnership with the Worshipful Company of Vintners. First recruit on the two-year full-time scheme, which blends practical work in the winery with study at Plumpton College, was Zoë Driver. Seven months after she started at Hattingley Valley, and to coincide with National Apprenticeship Week 2017, the former travel industry worker gave an enthusiastic interview. Despite the ‘hard, frustrating, laborious’ work, she was relishing the opportunity. ‘As clichéd as it sounds, I actually look forward to going to work every morning – I love what I do.’ Her ambition is one day to make her own wine.
Inside the Hattingley Valley winery, with Coquard press and oak barrels. HATTINGLEY VALLEY
Hattingley Valley’s core wines are from the champagne varieties, characterized by discreet inclusion of wine fermented in old burgundy barrels. There has, as well, been an experiment with bottle-fermenting a blend of bacchus and pinot gris; the result is an attractive, fruit-led wine that hints at the potential for good English fizz at slightly lower prices – a challenge to crémant rather than to champagne.
Hattingley Valley’s James Matyear lays out boxes ready for the harvest at Cottonworth Vineyard. THE ELECTRIC EYE PHOTOGRAPHY/ HATTINGLEY VALLEY
Fox & Fox, with vineyards around Mayfield in East Sussex, regularly makes a sparkler from pinot gris with just a touch of chardonnay. Pinot gris is much underrated, says co-owner Jonica Fox, arguing that the long English ripening season allows its grapes to develop great aromatics and depth of flavour. There is a mosaic of soils in the two vineyards, which together total 10 hectares: sands, silts and clays overlying sandstone and shale. ‘Mosaic’, appropriately, is the name of the classic-blend cuvée.
Greyfriars, on the Hog’s Back in Surrey, bottle- ferments a noble but non-champagne variety, sauvignon blanc. Interesting as that is, it is incidental to the main emphasis on more classic styles of sparkling wine from the champagne grapes – the oaked blanc de blancs and rosé brut are garlanded with silver medals. Mike and Hilary Wagstaff bought a small existing vineyard, already concentrating on champagne varieties, in 2010. They have added a further 15 hectares of vines, intend to plant more and are expanding the on-site winery to handle an anticipated 100,000-bottles-ayear production.
Bluebell Vineyard Estates, in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, is hardly little Switzerland, despite the slopes of its 25 hectares of vineyards around the winery
and further afield in Sussex. Yet it is experimenting with a grape popular below the Alps but hardly seen in England other than in private gardens. Chasselas, winemaker Kevin Sutherland believes, could be turned into decent entry-level sparkling wine or, in very good years, a still dry white. Time will tell, but the grape-handling skill is there. Sutherland’s lengthy commitment to English wine shows in the very fine classic wines he makes. Notable among these is a late-disgorged blanc de blancs 2008, an impressive example of the richness and depth Sussex-grown chardonnay fizz can acquire if given years resting on its lees in a calm cellar. He makes a very enjoyable traditional-method seyval blanc too.
Something else ensures Bluebell is memorable: the slogan that reflects the previous use of the vineyard land around the present winery. The late twentieth-century occupants were pigs, some 10,000 of them. Inevitably, the ‘swine into wine’ moniker has stuck.
Hush Heath Estate, Staplehurst, Kent, where vines grow in deep Wealden clay soils, also has an unusual emphasis to its wine. But unlike those estates introducing bubbles in non-champagne-variety wines, its point of reference is colour. Rosé has been Hush Heath’s calling card since the first vintage of Balfour Brut in 2004, which carried off a gold medal and trophy at the 2008 International Wine Challenge. Now, alongside the continuing vintage rosé releases, there is a non-vintage dry rosé, classic-method white and red fizz, plus rosé, white and red still wines. Next to the vines, extended to cover 20 hectares, are apple orchards, and winemakers Owen Elias and Victoria Ash create smart 8 per cent alcohol sparklers from cox, egremont russet and bramley juice – one of those is pink, too.
Never a pig in sight: Bluebell’s land is now for vine, not swine. BLUEBELL VINEYARD ESTATES
At Hush Heath, as at Nyetimber, there is a timbered Tudor manor house, built in 1503 as home for two families of wealthy weavers. That date is commemorated in the label, Balfour 1503, of the non-vintage wines introduced in 2015. Owner Richard Balfour-Lynn acknowledges that vines were initially a hobby. They are very much more than that now.
Cottonworth, in Hampshire’s Test Valley, is the English expression of owner Hugh Liddell’s wider experience, although here the pinot noir and chardonnay varieties he first worked with making still wines in Burgundy are destined entirely for sparkling wine production. The farm has been in the Liddell family for four generations, but the wine initiative began only from 2005, after Hugh Liddell’s return from a spell in Burgundy. With chalky soil and gentle slopes below 100 metres in height, it was a ‘no brainer’ to plant the three classic champagne varieties. His view of terroir is somewhat broader than that usually offered: he includes the history and traditions of the wine-growing region alongside the more conventional factors of soils, climate and human input. He acknowledges, however, that history and tradition are ‘something we don’t yet have in England’. Liddell is one of several of the new generation of wine producers who argue that England is very much a new-world wine country, despite its location on the edge of the old wine world. That new-world freedom from long-established rules has the advantage of allowing innovative thinking.
Cottonworth’s grapes, from the 12 hectares of vines, soon became too much for the small on-site production facility, and winemaking moved to Hattingley Valley, ‘a Titan of English wineries’ in Liddell’s description. He enjoys the character that Hattingley’s practice of barrel fermentation for some base wine gives to the finished fizz.
Jenkyn Place Vineyard, on the eastern edge of the Hampshire chalk, between Alton and Farnham, was first and foremost chosen by Yorkshire-born property investor Simon Blagdon as a family home. What to do with the abandoned hop fields around the seventeenth-century house was a secondary consideration. But the hop poles were ugly and needed to go. Blagdon admits he had ‘no desire to have a vineyard’, until he tasted Nyetimber’s wine. Those former hop fields were deemed ideal for vines, the first were planted in 2004 and by 2010 they covered the full 5 hectares available. As ever in England, there have been good years and bad. In 2011 and 2012, no wines were made under the Jenkyn Place label and the grapes were sold to others. Blagdon retains his Yorkshire frankness: ‘The grapes were terrible, so I thought I would let someone else make bad wine with them.’ Good years have seen the wines, made at Wiston by Dermot Sugrue, win many medals – including in China’s biggest wine competition.
Court Garden, Ditchling, Sussex, is a very near neighbour to Ridgeview, and it was at the suggestion of Mike Roberts that the Corney family planted vines there in 2005, initially selling the fruit to Ridgeview. It was a good moment to diversify from sheep farming, which was still suffering the impact of the 2001 foot and mouth disease outbreak. (Sheep do remain on the farm, with a valuable role of tidying among the vines in winter.) Soon an on-site winery was built, with Plumpton-trained Hugo Corney – ‘a refugee from the accountancy industry’, says father Howard – making the wines. Two, both blanc de noirs from the 2010 vintage, make an interesting comparison. There was more base wine than was needed for the normal cuvée, so some of the spare spent time in oak barrels, to good effect.
All of Court Garden’s wines come from on-site grapes, from vines growing in greensand-based soil. But to Howard Corney, the importance of soil is ‘overstated – vines are very tolerant’. English weather has far more influence on results, he believes.
Harrow & Hope, Marlow, Berkshire, like so many of the new sparkling wine vineyards, is on chalk, but chalk that presents a particular challenge. The vineyard site is an ancient Thames gravel terrace, the chalk overlain by clay soil thickly set with flint, which is ‘a nightmare to work and cultivate’. So much so that the trials of creating the vineyard are remembered now in the name, inspired by broken harrows and the hope for the future of this small family enterprise.
Wine is in the blood. Henry Laithwaite, who has set up the business with his wife Kaye, is son of Tony Laithwaite, the man behind 700,000-customer Laithwaite’s Wine, whose involvement with wine began five decades ago. Back from making wine in Bordeaux, because they wanted to raise a family in England, the couple were happy to start their 6.5-hectare venture in the Thames Valley – the slopes are ideal and there are high summer temperatures, though the frost threat remains (their vines suffered in 2016 and 2017). First harvest was in 2013, and the wines have joined the medal-winning list. They are hoping for even better results in the future: it will, they accept, take time to appreciate fully the subtleties of the site. Land along the river from Marlow to Henley might become as desirable to future vine-growers as the Côte d’Or, Henry Laithwaite suggests, if only owners with no interest in wine would part with it.
He and Kaye pay tribute to many people in the industry who have helped them, notably the late Mike Roberts and Australian sparkling wine guru Tony Jordan, whose input into the winemaking on regular visits they value immensely. Around a third of the wine is fermented in well-used bordeaux barrels, which Henry Laithwaite argues gives a textural difference from stainless steel and is an advantage when grapes ‘are not necessarily as ripe as you might like’. That, plus malolactic conversion, means less sugar is needed at the dosage stage. Keeping a good stock of reserve wine is part of the long-term plan, and the brut reserve has been non-vintage from the beginning.
Henry and Kaye Laithwaite: still understanding the subtleties of their Thames Valley site. MARTIN CROOK/HARROW & HOPE
Westwell Wines, below the Pilgrims’ Way on the North Downs in Kent (an appropriate location – remember Chaucer’s heavily imbibing Canterburybound travellers), is an example of how smaller, lesser-known producers can shine in the most distinguished of company. Westwell, owned by John and Rids Rowe, carried off the International Wine Challenge 2017 English Sparkling Trophy for its ‘layered and creamy’ Special Cuvée 2014. There are 3.6 hectares of chardonnay and the two pinots, plus another 1.6 hectares of ortega for still wines. The vineyard may be small but the Rowes’ ambition is big – to make the ‘ultimate’ English sparkling wine. John Rowe brings in his quality assurance experience at Proctor & Gamble to contribute towards that, and spreads his expertise to others in his new business. History plays a part, too. He has roots in wine – his mother comes from an Italian viticultural heritage stretching back generations.
Digby Fine English, Mayfair, London, with no vineyards at all, is rather different from all these, except that Dermot Sugrue, Wiston’s winemaker, is part of the team. This is a ‘négociant’ operation: the company buys in grapes for its wine rather than growing its own. The idea came to founders Jason Humphries and Trevor Clough ‘like a lightning bolt’ as they visited a winery in Oregon. ‘You should never follow a business dream that starts on holiday,’ says Clough, but they did. Neither has a wine background, so, rather than join the planting horde, they decided on their different approach. They source the raw material, on long-term contracts, from vineyards through Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. From it they create two premium vintage wines, white and rosé, made only in the best years, and a white and rosé at a more introductory level.
Export, particularly to the USA, is crucial to the initiative’s success, and Digby was the first English sparkling wine to win major retail distribution in Australia. Just before the announcement of their trophy win in the first UK Wine Awards, Clough set out their ambition: ‘Our goal is to become the English luxury brand of fine wine. We have put a lot of effort into the lifestyle side of the business.’ Paying for the right presentation as well as the right product is money well spent, he says. And the origin of the name of the company? Remember the Englishman who invented the bottle strong enough to allow wine to bubble away without shattering results.
