Peter Hall, the survivor. AUTHOR
A TOUR THROUGH MORE OF THE VINEYARDS
WINE IS A VERY INDIVIDUAL PLEASURE, AND the choice of vineyards profiled in this book is definitely my own, though I have tried to offer a selection of big and small, still and sparkling, conventional and organic, tourism-oriented or centred solely on wine. They are only a single-figure proportion of the total and many, many more will be of similar appeal to anyone wanting to understand English wine. If you’ve never tried it but are tempted, if you know a little but want to learn a lot, if you’ve had a less than enjoyable example years back but are wondering what the latest wines are like, go to all the vineyards you can, see the places, meet the people and taste the wines. That way it will all make much more sense, and once back home there will be few greater wine pleasures than picturing in your mind the vines whose fruit is in the glass in your hand.
This chapter is the result of my own explorations in 2017 (as were the sparkling wine producers’ profiles in Chapter 7). There is every likelihood that the places I’ve visited and the people I’ve talked with will long remain important in the English wine industry, continuing to offer excellent wine and a welcoming experience to visitors. But if there have been changes by the time you read this book, I hope you will still enjoy the stories – and discover your own alternative experiences.
For all of the vineyards that welcome visitors, whether listed here or not, do your homework before turning up. Many may close for the winter or open only on particular days of the week; some will happily let visitors stroll through the vines unguided while others offer only advance-booked tours; most sell their own wines and may have on-site shops stocking other local produce; and some will run restaurants or cafés or even provide accommodation. Be aware that bad weather may force last-minute closures, and vineyard work – spraying or harvesting, for example – may restrict access.
Individual vineyard’s websites should be the most up-to-date source of information, but for a broad overview of what’s where and whether visitors are accepted, seek out the free Vineyards Map of England and Wales from WineGB or consult the UK Vineyards Guide by Stephen Skelton. Both are regularly updated. There are regional maps and wine trails, too, an interactive map on the WineGB website and one useful example of the increasing number of other good sources of online information is www.winecellardoor.co.uk.
Which way is best to order the virtual visits provided here? Regional or alphabetical would be the most obvious, but I’m going for themes: it makes sense to look at how the very biggest producers, for example, go about their business, or how those who follow the organic route compare, or why some make both sparkling and still wines while others stick with a single style. First of all, though, something else. In all the discussion about place and soil and weather and grape variety, about size or speciality, about bubbly or still, another crucial factor can too easily be forgotten. People make wine. Some – though I haven’t met any in England – are insistently interventionist, manipulating their grapes and creating a product that bears little relation to what it is made of and where it comes from; others prefer to let nature take its course as much as they dare; and many more fall somewhere in between. But for me there is a category beyond any of these, where wine transcends the way in which it is actually made and where the final liquid reflects most of all the individual personality of the person who creates it.
So first off let’s meet Peter Hall.
Peter Hall, the survivor. AUTHOR
Breaky Bottom, near Newhaven, East Sussex: sparkling survivor, despite the odds
That reflection of personality, I’m convinced, is why Peter Hall’s wines have consistently been loved by serious wine commentators, have received gold medal after gold medal after gold medal, and have been enjoyed at the highest tables in the land.
The place contributes, too. Breaky Bottom is snuggled deep into a hollow of the South Downs, in Hall’s description, ‘two hills from the sea’. There is, Oz Clarke has said, ‘no more beautiful vineyard in Britain’. Hall is one of the institutions (in the best possible sense) of English wine. He planted his first vines in 1974 and, despite the area more than doubling since, they cover less than 2.5 hectares, equal to a mere 1 per cent of the land owned by his nearest wine neighbour, Rathfinny, 11 kilometres eastwards across the downs as the crow flies (or, more appropriately, the pheasant, for reasons that will soon become clear). To quote Oz Clarke again: ‘He has been felled by money, bureaucracy and nature, but has always struggled back to his feet and continued to make one of England’s greatest sparkling wines.’
At Breaky Bottom, that often over-used designation microclimate is, for once, correctly applied. Exceptionally, the north-facing vineyard flowers and ripens first, while everything happens later at its rather more exposed south-facing partner. The breeze that is common to both reduces disease; the shape of the landscape shelters the vines from the prevailing south-westerly wind. ‘Vines HATE wind’ is Hall’s mantra.
Such insistence on being right is surely why Breaky Bottom has survived as a vineyard well into its fifth decade, despite tribulations that would have forced any less stubborn a grower to quit. The floods came first, five of them, as heavy autumn rains poured off the bare arable fields above. The fifth, in 2000, was the worst. It severely damaged the vines and devastated the cottage with which Hall had fallen in love as a young worker on the farm and which he had slowly improved from a one-down, two-up, water-less, power-less near-hovel to a family home. He and his wife lived in a caravan for more than two years while the effects of the flood were resolved. After that came the pheasants, as a shooting estate replaced conventional farming on the land around the vineyard. With virtually no natural wooded habitat available, the birds descended on the vines, says Hall, and grapes destined for 30,000 bottles of wine were lost over successive seasons. More years of argument, litigation and insurance claims finally brought ‘very small recompense’.
Throughout, wine continued to be made. Initially, Peter Hall had run the land as an animal-based smallholding, with pigs, sheep, calves and chickens. The suggestion of vines came when the owner of a vineyard on the Isle of Wight visited and remarked how suitable the site was for what then was a very new crop for twentieth-century English farmers. Easily available grape varieties were few, and the possibility of sparkling wine was never mentioned, so Hall settled for the germanic classics of the period, seyval blanc and müller-thurgau: ‘seyval had the edge, though I did make some very good müller-thurgau.’ The golden haul began, with an International Wine Challenge top medal for the 1990 seyval. He planted more of the variety, pulled up the müller-thurgau, and from 1996 decided to indulge his love of fizz by making traditional-method sparkling wine. More medals. From 2002 he added champagne variety vines, chardonnay principally, to the seyval and continued with sparkling wine alone, both pure seyval and classic blends. These too struck gold. He grins: ‘By golly, it has worked.’
His success is, he says, not down to climate change: ‘I’m a cautious and responsible global warming sceptic,’ he stressed as a warm March sun shone on his vines. He concedes that there is now rather less ‘BAW’ – ‘bloody awful weather’ – than in the 1970s and 1980s, but believes the successful shift in grape varieties has come about because growers understand their vines so much better and select clones more suitable for England’s climate. At Breaky Bottom Hall grows cuttings from his existing vines, with the intention of avoiding disease in new rootstocks.
There is less ‘bloody awful weather’ affecting Breaky Bottom these days. AUTHOR
In an effort to indulge his love of fine, elegant white wines he did try experimental plantings of Loire classics back in the 1970s, but their acidity was overwhelming. Now, if he was starting again, he would most likely plant only the three noble champagne grapes, just as so many of the new boys on the block have done. And as the French should, too. ‘If you are a canny head of a champagne house you should look at the UK. No other country in the world can get similar quality,’ he told me, emphasizing also how very much cheaper vineyard land is in England than in Champagne. The exponential growth of English sparkling wine seen over the last decade ‘isn’t finished yet’, he adds.
Hall is intensely close to his land, seeing himself as one individual in a history that stretches back 300,000 years – he has Acheulean hand axes found in the vineyard to prove it. ‘I love this little valley.’
Camel Valley, near Wadebridge, Cornwall: sunny spot, smiling sippers
Visits to Breaky Bottom are necessarily by appointment: apart from factors such as Peter Hall’s need, as an almost entirely one-man operation, to spend most of his time among the vines, access is by a poorly signed 2-kilometre track, heavily rutted and certainly no route for wine tourists looking for a smart day out. At Camel Valley, where personality – that of the Lindo family – is also paramount, things are rather different. Brown tourist-attraction signs lead visitors off the nearby Padstow to Bodmin main road, along a winding lane and up the hill into the vineyard and a generous car parking area. Close by are cycle racks for those two-wheeled visitors detouring from the Camel Trail along the valley bottom: they, like hikers, approach on a path through the vines.
Bob, Annie and Sam Lindo welcome some 30,000 visitors a year. Their tasting room opens on to a broad terrace overlooking the vines, and the product of the grapes below is poured in tasting samples, as half or full glasses, or sold by the bottle. It’s a place to sit and sip in the sun, above the south-facing slope whose warmth, unusual even in gentle Cornwall, prompted Bob Lindo to plant vines in the first place.
Camel Valley’s south-facing vineyards, seen from the opposite side of the valley. CAMEL VALLEY WINES
That hadn’t been a long-determined choice; rather, quite literally, it was linked to an accident. He and Annie had bought 33-hectare Little Denby Farm in 1982, well in advance of his planned retirement from the RAF, where he had reached the rank of squadron leader. They chose Cornwall because land was cheap, and thought probably they would continue keeping sheep and cattle. So much for look-ahead planning. When a devastating mid-air crash in 1986 left Lindo with severe spinal injuries, he was invalided out of his career as a pilot, spent months in rehabilitation and in 1987 became a full-time farmer.
He quickly realized just how warm that field below the farmhouse was – each summer the grass turned brown – so why not try vines, ‘just for fun’? In 1989, he and Annie planted eight thousand (there are four times that number now) entirely by hand, the beginning of a venture whose success is evidenced on the loaded shelves of the trophy cabinet alongside the Camel Valley tasting bar. The awards – trophies, bests-in-class and medals of every hue – don’t come only from UK-based competitions, prestigious as the International Wine Challenge and the Decanter World Wine Awards are. Many have been won in worldwide sparkling-wine championships.
Camel Valley, at 10 hectares, is Cornwall’s biggest vineyard and its from-the-beginning production total hit 1 million bottles in 2008. On the traditional English wine scale that’s a sizeable operation, though against the new big investors it’s tiny. There is no City profit behind the business, no massive bank loans. Bob Lindo is immensely proud of the fact that Camel Valley has been built up as a result of its own success. When money is made, it goes back into upgrading equipment, creating better visitor facilities, improving existing buildings or constructing new ones. It has allowed forward-thinking son Sam – in charge of winemaking and garlanded with English winemaker of the year accolades – to go ahead with what the family calls a ‘shed to end all sheds’. That, explains his father, provides the kind of storage space more usually seen in champagne cellars, giving a reserve against inevitable vintage fluctuations. It’s an example of how the family works together yet separately, with acceptance of each other’s ideas rather than argument.
Thus it is Annie Lindo who makes all the decisions about Annie’s Vineyard, the seyval blanc vines that lie immediately below the tasting terrace and are the source of Annie’s Anniversary, surely the most personal of all English sparkling wines. Annie alone has tended the vineyard since its planting, and Sam created the wine to mark the 100,000th time she’d pruned a vine, the millionth cut she’d made by hand with secateurs and her twentieth vintage.
Darnibole bacchus vines, on a very special site. CAMEL VALLEY WINES
The tackle-and-sort-any-problem-yourself approach startles some recruits to the small staff team. Bob Lindo smiles as he recalls the surprise of a new winemaking assistant when he learned he was expected to fix himself the piece of kit that had just gone wrong – but that’s how Camel Valley works. There is plenty of sensible ‘greenness’, too, as solar panels generate all the electricity needed, with some left over to sell to the national grid, and grape waste is fed to dairy cows (before fermentation, of course, or they’d be rather too happy creatures).
Sparkling wine has become the main focus, with seyval blanc remaining alongside newer plantings of chardonnay and pinot noir and retaining its place as a major component of the flagship Cornwall Brut. All the sparkling wines are vintage, a deliberate decision. ‘I want every year to be a memory of what the year was. I don’t want a homogenous product,’ is Bob Lindo’s reasoning. Similarly, he doesn’t want to ape champagne. ‘The challenge is to make a different wine, and you can now.’
Bacchus is the still star, and Lindo had, just before the Brexit negotiations overtook smaller matters, persuaded the EU wine authorities to accept the Darnibole vineyard, where the bacchus ripens at unusually high sugar levels, as being sufficiently special to be given protected designation of origin status (PDO). In fact, the EU went further than he asked, including much more of Camel Valley’s vineyard area in the Darnibole PDO, which could open up further individual quality labelling opportunities for the wines.
Discussion of such designation, though, is rather too technical for most of those who would rather simply enjoy the year-round tasting opportunities, summer tours and the chance to sip in the sun. Should visitors be tempted to remain for longer, Camel Valley is one of a number of English vineyards with on-site accommodation. At the two cottages available for weekly rental, the Lindos are now welcoming the sons and daughters of those who stayed in the early days. Day visitors, too, return regularly. The bicycles parked in the rack when I was there belonged to a young couple from the Midlands who frequently holiday at Padstow and each time head along the Camel Trail to the vineyard. That’s good for future business, Bob Lindo predicts: ‘There’s no doubt which wine they’ll choose for their wedding, and then for the christenings. . .’
Leventhorpe Vineyard, within the city boundary of Leeds, Yorkshire: the warm north
Right at the very opposite end of England’s wine lands from Camel Valley lies the 2-hectare vineyard that George and Janet Bowden established in 1985, not far from where the Cisterican monks of twelfth-century Kirkstall Abbey most likely had their vine plots. When I met George Bowden at the English Wine Producers’ May 2017 trade and press tasting, just about every other grower there was reporting damage, quite often severe damage, from the previous month’s wicked air frost. ‘Not a bud touched,’ he told me.
That fits with his experience when he first saw the Leventhorpe site. There was snow everywhere, except on one south-facing field that was basking in sun. Even so far north, even before much sign of warmer growing seasons, it was the perfect place for vines. A light, quick-draining sandy loam soil lies above cracked sandstone, warming rapidly in spring, and there are both protective trees and water (the River Aire, the Aire and Calder Navigation canal, and a series of small lakes) all around. The grapes ripen well and yield generously, so Bowden rarely chaptalizes his madeleine angevine and needs to add only a very little sugar to the seyval blanc. Even in 2012, when the results from most of southern England’s vineyards were dire, Leventhorpe’s bottles were winning gold and silver medals. The wines are distinctive, remarkably aromatic and – the seyval especially – even more characterful and expressive after an extra year or so in bottle. There should, their maker argues, be a law against selling English wine too soon.
George Bowden and the pride of Yorkshire. LEVENTHORPE VINEYARD
George Bowden has long had a serious interest in wine – to explain how that came about would take an impossible amount of time, he told me. His non-wine professional background is as a chemist and geologist, and expertise in both has contributed to his success in growing vines successfully and making good wine. ‘Land dictates the wine,’ he emphasized, launching into a comparison between his site and the finest in Burgundy. When our discussion moved to winemaking, it quickly became far too technical for inclusion here. But he summed up his approach very simply: ‘There is no point in making wine in Yorkshire unless you make the quality.’ And he insists that this philosophy should apply throughout the UK.
Far from everything about Leventhorpe is dourly scientific and serious. Bowden takes great delight in recounting how one of his customers, a former coach with the French rugby union squad, introduced his colleagues in Les Bleus to the Yorkshire product. Tasting it blind, they thought it must come from the south-west of France. If the French won the World Cup, suggested the ex-coach, they would be rewarded with Leventhorpe madeleine angevine, while if they lost they would have to make do with French wine. The motto on the Leventhorpe labels, ‘pretium victoriae’ also reflects George Bowden’s sense of fun. The words translate literally from the Latin as ‘the price of victory’. They were reputedly used, so the story goes, by Roman general (and later emperor) Vespasian as he stalked out of the senate hearing after successfully defending himself against indictment for spending too heavily – notably on the use of elephants – during the campaign to conquer Britain. Bowden is at pains to argue, however, that much more appropriate than the literal translation is his preferred ‘worth the effort’: a sentiment that might well, he suggests, be relevant for much of England’s wine.
Such special characters apart, there are others in the UK wine industry who put their individual mark on their wines in another way, by making them according to very personal principles.
Davenport Vineyards, near Rotherfield, East Sussex: where organic is right for the next generation
‘I’d always wanted to do it,’ was Will Davenport’s response when I asked why he had committed to organic vine-growing and winemaking. ‘This is the place where my kids are brought up.’ When he planted vines in the early 1990s on a little over a hectare of land previously grazed by dairy cows at Limney Farm, on the East Sussex/Kent border, he didn’t completely eschew chemicals, but that changed in 2001. He hoped the greener approach would succeed – ‘I would have dumped it if it didn’t’ – and he was helped by the conviction of a German consultant who assured him that, if his soil was properly balanced and rich in the natural bacteria that swallow up mildew spores, all would work well. The alternative was to use vast quantities of chemicals to tackle botrytis, for which he could find no environmentally friendlier control. The strategy worked. ‘My biggest worry was that the vines would just get wiped out by mildew, but that has not proved a problem at all.’
Davenport’s wines are highly respected among fellow professionals, and not simply because they are organic. Consumers like them too, meeting them mostly in restaurants, though there are some direct sales via the website and the local Waitrose. ‘Organic helps – it gets people interested in looking at the wine,’ their maker says. But it has to be good: ‘There’s no point in selling rubbish wine and saying it is organic.’ As most sales are through the trade, his income per bottle is much less than those who sell at the cellar door receive, but then he doesn’t have to provide a smart public-welcoming façade to the warren of former dairy buildings that house his winery.
Will Davenport: ‘There is no point in selling rubbish and saying it is organic.’ AUTHOR
With a total of 10 hectares of vines, all grown according to the same green ethos, divided between Limney Farm and his parents’ farm in Kent, Davenport is probably the largest UK organic producer, but quality is more important than quantity, he insists. He aims for the best possible grapes, that he can largely ‘leave as nature intended’ in the winery. ‘If you need a lot of intervention, that means you haven’t got good grapes.’ In both vineyards and winery he works generally to Soil Association standards, which set lower limits of sulphur, for example, than the EU organic rules. Much effort goes into soil improvement, with huge amounts of green-waste compost applied in the vineyard. If there is a powdery mildew attack, he picks off affected leaves into a bin bag and disposes of them, or uses a little sulphur for prevention and potassium bicarbonate for control. Nettle and comfrey infusions also help the vines resist disease. The wines are fermented using natural yeasts, organic sugar is used if alcohol levels need boosting, minimal fining and filtering is practised, and there is ‘no GM anything’. What Davenport does is ‘part science, part intuition’, but it is always methodical. ‘You’ve got to be more on the ball than a non-organic person.’
Davenport’s commitment goes beyond the actual growing and making. The whole operation is close to being carbon neutral, with surplus electricity from solar panels offsetting the diesel needed to fuel his tractors. He doesn’t heat his winery in winter and limits its summer temperature with an evaporative cooler that sucks air through a wet cardboard membrane; cool England, he points out, needs much less energy expended on summer temperature control than most other wine-producing countries. His wine goes into lightweight bottles, saving nearly 2 tonnes of glass a year without the people pouring his wines even noticing the weight difference. ‘That makes complete sense – they do the job, look the same and I feel better.’ Yet he believes no other UK winery follows his example.
At Limney Farm, pinot noir and auxerrois, an Alsace variety rarely seen in England, grow in 60 centimetres of loam overlying iron-rich sandstone on a steep, west-facing slope, their grapes destined for white and rosé sparkling wine. Average yields in East Sussex are much lower than at the warmer Kent sites, where he has the three champagne varieties for more sparkling wine, plus extra pinot noir for still wines. There, too, are the very first vines he planted, in 1991, the germanic varieties – bacchus, ortega, siegerrebe, faberrebe and huxelrebe – which make up the aromatic, refreshing Horsmonden dry white that demonstrates why these grapes still firmly deserve their place on England’s wine list.
Albury Organic Vineyard, near Guildford, Surrey: a schoolboy dream comes of age
On the North Downs in Surrey, a more recent organic enterprise is the realization of Nick Wenman’s long-held dream, a dream revealed in his pre-legal-drinking-age schooldays. He perturbed his headmaster more than a little by choosing as his economics prize book The World Atlas of Wine. ‘When I retired, what else could I do. . . ,’ he says today.
That early retirement, from IT, came in 2006. Within two years, Wenman had negotiated a long lease on an ideally located site and was ready to plant. The Surrey hills site was a fortuitous choice, for recent research indicates that vines were grown there in the 1640s: the rows running down to a lake shown on a contemporary etching are near identical to the eighteenth-century Painshill Park layout. John Evelyn also mentioned the vines, in a 1670 diary entry. From the beginning, Wenman’s intention was to reject a chemical-based approach. ‘Organic felt right. I decided I had to do it to start with, otherwise I would never do it.’ His mentor was Will Davenport; his advisor, Stephen Skelton, ‘tried really hard’ to convince him that organic was not the best way to go (yet Skelton accepted his client’s doggedness, and continued his consultancy).
Beyond a gut feeling that the green approach is good for the planet, Wenman does admit to a more mercenary incentive. There should be, he feels, a niche market for organic English wine and, like Davenport, he believes that making it does attract extra attention. A decade on, he is well aware of the difficulties and acknowledges his own ‘extreme’ naivety at the beginning: ‘I completely underestimated the amount of work and money required.’ Most of Albury’s 5 hectares of vines are the champagne varieties, plus a little seyval blanc and an even tinier quantity of pinot gris. The intention has always been to focus largely on sparkling wine, although the still Silent Pool rosé has gained a cult following after being chosen as one of the wines served on the Royal Barge in the 2012 Jubilee River Thames parade. There is the potential, in time, to double the vineyard size.
Following the organic route makes sustainability of yield an even bigger issue than it is for conventional growers, Wenman says. ‘Yields are definitely lower, possibly by fifteen to twenty per cent, because of being organic.’ But, whatever the growing principles, the major cause of yield variation is weather, and the 2017 late-April air frost was a cruel reminder of how much a single night of temperatures falling below minus 2 degrees celsius can severely reduce the year’s potential harvest. The new growth on 80 per cent of Albury’s vines was badly damaged. It was one of the hardest moments in Wenman’s vine-growing experience, but he is steadfast: ‘We won’t give up!’
Weather apart, one problem in the vineyard is management of weeds: young vines especially find the competition unwelcome. Spreading thick layers of wood chips is the solution. Another issue is disease control. The vineyard’s seyval blanc in particular is too often hit by botrytis, though powdery mildew is rare. Wenman uses minimum quantities of copper and sulphur, and is hopeful that a bark-based alternative to the former will gain EU approval. Biodynamic sprays are also in the programme. ‘We just have to be on the ball all the time.’
He points out that in the UK all vines are affected by the limited time between harvest and leaf fall, leaving little opportunity for the plants to build up reserves for the following year: another reason for low grape yields. Yet green harvesting – removing some bunches to give those remaining a chance to ripen better – is a regular, necessary practice at many vineyards, including Albury.
In years when their crop is particularly poor, organic growers don’t have a potential escape route that is open to those less concerned about chemicals, Wenman adds. There are no organic grapes that can be bought in to supplement their own harvests.
Albury’s vineyard manager, Alex Valsecchi, had viticultural experience from her native Italy and from New Zealand before moving to England and the Royal Horticultural Society Wisley garden, where the vineyard, and the rest of the fruit, was her responsibility. She is chalk to Wenman’s cheese. She was, he grins, nicknamed Chemical Allie when she arrived at Albury. ‘Am I convinced about organic growing? No! But fundamentally anything can be done if you are willing to do it and to do it properly,’ she told me. ‘Do I like the results? Of course I do.’ As does her family in Italy, who happily drink the Albury rosé she regularly takes home. ‘It’s definitely a challenge to grow vines in this country, but wherever you grow vines you force them to do something they don’t want to do naturally. But we are not here to produce a barolo or an amarone. We are here to produce sparkling wine.’
The last stages of that process are the responsibility of the Litmus Wines team, close by at Denbies, where the winery is one of the few in the UK to comply with the EU rules for organic winemaking. These insist that yeasts and sugar must be organic, specify permitted stabilization materials and set lower limits on sulphites, sugar and de-acidification. The rules were introduced in 2013, ending the rather odd situation in which, Europe-wide, wines could be labelled only as ‘made from organic grapes’, not more straightforwardly ‘organic’. Wenman doesn’t feel confident to do his own winemaking, even if he had the cash to build and equip a winery, and he is happy with the Litmus arrangement. ‘We are involved in every major step of the process.’ With champagne specialist Matthieu Elzinga, one of the three Litmus partners, monitoring the ripening grapes and advising on harvest times as well as producing the final bottles, ‘it’s almost as good as having your own winemaker’.
Oxney Organic Estate, near Rye, East Sussex: green expression of PR
There’s a particular memory I have of my early spring visit to Oxney: the near-croquet-lawn perfection of the grass between the rows of hard-pruned vines. That green image perfectly expressed the spirit of the 8.5-hectare vineyard, part of a very much larger mixed farm bought by Norwegian-born Kristin Syltevik, who had worked in top-end public relations, and her partner Paul Dobson, a former golf professional, in 2009.
The estate, all run organically, is on the East Sussex/Kent border, overlooking the Isle of Oxney in the River Rother valley. There are pedigree sheep, arable fields, swathes of wildflowers, winter-flooded meadows that attract migrating birds, coppiced woodland and, of course, the vines. The barns that Syltevik has converted into three holiday cottages echo the overall sustainability theme, with heating from the estate wood-chip burner and power from renewably sourced electricity, and two shepherds’ huts in the vineyard provide further atmospheric accommodation. People love the place and local volunteers work in the vineyard, where one block has been named after an exceptionally loyal helper.
The 32,000-plus vines, chardonnay, pinots noir and meunier and a little seyval, were planted from 2012 to 2014, a good proportion by hand. Everything happens on the spot, with a small but perfect winery inside a former oast house, where winemaker Ben Smith and consultant winemaker David Cowderoy have crafted much-admired wines – the second vintage pinot noir rosé was named best still rosé in the 2016 English and Welsh Wine of the Year competition. The first classic blend sparkling wine was released in late 2016.
Why, I asked Kristin Syltevik, change career in such a fundamental way? Not one reason but many, she replied. She welcomed the challenge to learn something entirely new. She and Dobson had the land, and she could see its potential. Working organically fitted with her own convictions. She relishes the closeness to consumers. Most tellingly: ‘It is lovely that people have such a pleasure from what you have done.’
The new life isn’t easy, with Oxney’s vines facing the inevitable risks: frost, hungry wildlife (fencing keeps out rabbits and deer but not badgers) and fungal diseases. To combat the last, she makes her own preventative nettle and comfrey infusion and also uses a garlic and citrus mix, plus bacteria to attack botrytis. Sulphur and copper treatments are kept to minimal levels, more biodynamic than organic, and spraying is precise. She sees all the effort rewarded as the grapes are pressed, with the results different from each clone, each plot. Her enthusiasm is infectious when she describes the fine blanc de blancs anticipated from one champagne clone of chardonnay that flourishes particularly well at Oxney.
One other pleasure, which didn’t always exist in the PR world, is the friendliness of her newly chosen business community and its willingness to help a newcomer. Just a short while before I visited Oxney, she had gratefully accepted the loan of an essential item of winery equipment when her own broke down.
These three organic growers are among the bigger followers of the anti-chemical route. But they’re very small fry compared to the UK’s major wine producers.
Chapel Down, Kent: the biggest of all
No other UK wine producer yet reaches close to the 700,000-bottles-a-year total of Chapel Down, but what the warmly welcomed wine tourists see there is quite a modest affair. There is, naturally, loads of wine on the shop shelves (plus beers – Chapel Down also has a brewery – and other goodies), a restaurant where I had what was definitely the best meal of my vineyards-of-England tour, and a smart new view-overthe-vines tasting room. But the scale of the place is not at all overwhelming. Even the surrounding vineyards are quite limited in area. They include Spots Farm, the 2.33-hectare plot planted by Stephen Skelton in 1977. Then, the farm had just been bought by Skelton’s father-in-law and, given its closeness to sea level, good light soil and shelter-providing hedges, was thought to be an excellent site for vines. And so it was, proved when 1980 Spots Farm seyval blanc, only the second vintage, took the English Wine of the Year title in 1981. Skelton sold the vineyard and winery in 1986, though he continued to make the wines, but another nine years were to pass before before Chapel Down moved in.
That modest area of vines at Tenterden, 10 hectares, is only a taster. Chapel Down has extensive vineyards elsewhere, including the prime Kit’s Coty site on the North Downs chalk. This is the source of Coeur de Cuvée 2013 blanc de blancs, which raised eyebrows throughout the industry when the 1,600 bottles went on sale for £99.99 each on St George’s Day 2017, topping the price of England’s previously most expensive sparkling wine by £25. The grapes from the 80 hectares planted in north Kent fill two articulated lorries every day during harvest time, and fruit from a further 60 hectares will add to those loads. More new vineyards will join these as suitable sites are found. Chapel Down also has long-term contracts with other grape-growers, in Kent, Essex and Sussex. With its own vineyards, there are well over twenty locations from which the fruit comes. Head winemaker Josh Donaghay-Spire and his colleagues watch over all the vineyards, advising the growers, aiming for quality and avoiding problems that might mean the rejection of any part of the crop. In addition, further supplies of grapes are bought on the ‘spot’ market, from non-contracted growers, sometimes from as distant as Dorset. By 2023 Chapel Down intends to produce 1.4 million bottles a year.
That scale makes Donaghay-Spire go to work with a smile on his face. Provided he delivers the regular goods – ‘we cannot run out of some wines, like the brut non-vintage, as it’s in all the big supermarkets’ – he has room to experiment. ‘Standard wines are all very well, but we have less credibility as winemakers if we are not pushing the boundaries, particularly at this nascent stage of the industry.’ So he can make six different wines from bacchus grapes, for example. He can try out skin contact in white wines, use wild yeasts for fermentation, make small batches of wines from unusual grapes such as albariño, even venture into orange wine. ‘We have to keep things interesting for us and for consumers. And the lessons from these wines will trickle down into large-volume wines.’
Since he arrived at Chapel Down in 2010, Donaghay-Spire, another of the highly skilled Plumpton College graduates, has made a clear mark on the wines. He isn’t a fan of high-acid results, so almost all go through malolactic conversion, allowing a lower dosage (the addition of sugar in the final top-up liquid) in the sparkling wines. He has reduced levels of preservative sulphur, arguing that English wines aren’t intended to live for decades, and has also significantly increased the use of oak barrels in the winery.
Production is split roughly half-and-half between still and sparkling, with bacchus the most important grape in the former. But that is the only germanic cross in the planting plans. Instead, the emphasis is on chardonnay, pinot noir, pinot meunier and pinot blanc. Though there are non-vintage sparkling wines, most bottles carry the year of harvest: ‘We have to celebrate vintage differences.’ Those differences do cause difficulties, however. In wet 2012, for example, none of the top-of-the-range wine was made; instead, the limited amount of fruit that could be harvested from those best vineyards went into the wines that Chapel Down needed for its big, regular customers.
Josh Donaghay-Spire in the Chapel Down winery. CHAPEL DOWN
Does he see a global warming effect, good or bad, I asked Donaghay-Spire. ‘Possibly the ripening season is earlier, there is lower acidity, higher sugars, which are all to the good,’ he replied. But most if not all of that could be due as much to the better professional understanding and skill of those now growing grapes in the UK, he added. ‘There have been major leaps in site selection, clonal selection, varietal selection.’
Donaghay-Spire has overseen the move of some of the operation from the Tenterden base to a new warehouse and distribution centre at Ashford, where the riddling and disgorging of the sparkling wines also takes place. It saves a lot of articulated lorry movement on narrow Kent roads and has freed up space for expanding the Tenterden winery. There is, he adds, an engineering side to his work: ‘They didn’t teach me that at Plumpton. Here, you have to turn your hand to everything.’
Even if Chapel Down is big in wine terms, with fifty full-time employees, it is hardly a large-scale business in the broader world. It does, though, innovate way beyond normal wine business practices. In September 2014 it was the first publicly listed company to offer shares through equity crowd-funding. Not only did the initiative bring in almost £4 million, to help expand the vineyard area, but it also attracted close to 1,500 new shareholders. As long as they hold their shares, they receive a substantial discount on Chapel Down wines. But more important to Donaghay-Spire is their role as ambassadors. ‘They have bought into the brand, they buy, they tell the story.’
The story is spread, too, by the 40,000 people who visit Tenterden each year and taste the wines. The man who makes them is keen that more and more should come. ‘I want Chapel Down to be the opposite of those exclusive champagne cellars where you have to call and might get an appointment if you are lucky. We are all about inclusivity, bringing people here, showing them how wine is made, why this bottle costs more than that bottle, making a connection with them that they take away.’
Denbies Wine Estate, Dorking, Surrey: on a grand scale
But for the unusual uniformity of its rows of green plants, Denbies could strike the uninitiated visitor more as a large-scale garden centre than a vineyard. Go through the front entrance of the imposing building, turn right and the ‘garden centre’ experience continues: a big and broadly stocked shop, a bright café beneath an atrium, a gallery displaying local artists’ work, upstairs a restaurant with a fine view. Outside, paths lead to a farm shop, an area selling plants, even a bed and breakfast lined up for conversion to a boutique hotel. Chief executive officer Chris White makes no excuse for all this. More than that, he celebrates the large-scale leisure experience open to all. It is intended to bring Denbies wines before as many people as possible, as well as providing income – close to half the business’s total – to help sustain what for three decades has been England’s largest single-site wine estate.
Denbies, introducing English wine to a wide audience. DENBIES WINE ESTATE
Certainly, Denbies can take credit for introducing a very large number of consumers to English wine, particularly through the own-label bottles it supplies to supermarkets. ‘Some people are snooty about that, but we think it is very important. It gives people a much wider access to English wine and through economies of scale we can guarantee quality and consistency,’ White told me.
There is, as well, plenty of wine-associated activity for the 350,000 visitors who arrive each year. An extensive programme offers vineyard tours in a tourist train or a horse-drawn carriage, tasting in the atmospheric cellars, visits to the winery, food and wine matching, day-long wine workshops, sessions combining cheese-making and winemaking, and much more. September sees the annual Bacchus Marathon, while in October there is a chance to join in the harvest. The indoor tours take in a film that celebrates the thirty years of Denbies (very informative and a cut above many winery videos); outside, there are options to add a glass of fizz en route through the vines. With all these opportunities, my wine-educator tour guide Victor Maguire pointed out, thousands of the visitors leave with an understanding of the basics of grape-growing, winemaking and the story of English wine. Others simply enjoy walking on the 11 kilometres of footpaths that run through the vines and the extensive woodland surrounding them. Or they come to Denbies as wedding guests or to attend a variety of functions, from murder mystery evenings to tea dances.
A green sea: Denbies vineyard. HELEN DIXON/DENBIES WINE ESTATE
There is a lengthy agricultural history to today’s vineyard, whose name comes from John Denby, who farmed the land in the sixteenth century. By the 1850s, the owner was builder Thomas Cubitt, whose construction legacy includes much of Belgravia in central London, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and part of Buckingham Palace. The 100-room Italianate mansion he built on his huge new Surrey estate does not survive, however: it was demolished in 1953, and much of the land was split up and sold. Some 250 hectares, though, remained in the hands of Cubitt’s descendants until 1984, when it was bought by Adrian White, chairman of a major water-treatment company and Chris’s father. He had intended to run the land as a conventional farm, but that didn’t make business sense (some parts sloped so much that combine harvesters had to creep across with crab-like sideways caution), so an alternative use was needed. Felicitously, there was an expert on hand. From his home in Dorking, consultant geologist Richard Selley looked out over White’s land. He realized how suitable it would be for a vineyard. ‘Just for a joke, I thought I would write a little consulting paper just as I would for an oil company or similar business,’ he explains in the A Year in the Vineyard film that is shown to visitors. Little did he anticipate the result. Nor perhaps, looking back rather further, would Adrian White’s father, a strict teetotaller, have appreciated the wine-producing route his son and grandson decided to follow.
From the first planting of just over a hectare in 1986, Denbies’ vineyard has grown almost a hundred-fold, with a little more expansion planned. Only Rathfinny, when fully planted, is in line to overtake it as the UK’s largest single-site vineyard. A silty clay loam soil overlies chalk, and there is shelter from much of the prevailing wind. From the beginning, noble grape varieties were chosen alongside the germanic crosses, the likes of riesling, pinot blanc, pinot noir and chardonnay, and the experimentation continues. Denbies was the first English winery to bottle sauvignon blanc, it is championing the new solaris variety, it has released a zero-dosage (no added sugar) blanc de blancs sparkling wine, and in favourable vintages it makes a super-premium dessert wine from late-harvest ortega.
Denbies has the only mechanical harvester in the UK. DENBIES WINE ESTATE
Though Denbies’ own production is huge, grapes are bought in from other vineyards in the south-east, to meet a growing demand and also because, as Chris White says, ‘we don’t want to have all our eggs in one basket’. He admits that success can have a downside – in 2013 the company was ‘really strapped for wine’ because so much had been drunk during the 2012 London Olympics and Royal Jubilee celebrations, leaving reserves too low. But with an average production now of 450,000 bottles a year, that problem shouldn’t occur again.
There is serious investment in the winery and outside. Denbies is the first UK vineyard to bring in a mechanical harvesting machine, which speeds up the picking process. The estate is also pioneering the use of the frost-busting Tow and Blow moveable fan that towers over the vines, though unfortunately even that level of technology couldn’t counteract the severe air frost of late April 2017. A new minimal pruning technique is practised on müller-thurgau vines planted on lower-lying land, which, if frost doesn’t cause problems, brings a fine harvest. Herbicides are no longer part of the chemical armoury, in an increasing commitment towards greener practices in the vineyard. The winery operates to EU organic standards, as its contract wine-making customers include organic vineyards.
Chris White is justifiably proud of how much Denbies can spread the word about English wine to consumers who previously knew little about it. ‘When people leave here after the tour they have a much greater appreciation of what goes into their bottle of wine. They see how much investment and time goes in. They’re sold on it.’
Lyme Bay Winery, near Axminster, Devon: much more liquid than wine alone
Lyme Bay is a place with, unusually, no vineyards within sight. But among UK wineries Lyme Bay is a very unusual set-up in a number of ways. It’s a non-stop operation, its 350,000-litre-capacity tanks in busy use all year round. They contain more besides the juice of English wine grapes, however. The day I was there plastic picnic goblets were being filled with Spanish red for supermarket customers, cider was fermenting and a team was out picking young nettle leaves for the kind of country wine you’d expect to be made in a WI member’s kitchen. What is a talented Plumpton wine graduate whose experience stretches as far as France, California and Australia doing here?
In 2015 Liam Idzikowski was headhunted by his friend James Lambert, managing director of the expanding company that began life as a cider producer. Lyme Bay founder Nigel Howard, a London banker, had initially simply wanted to move away from the city, but his rustic dream has developed into a highly sophisticated operation, even though it is set deep in the east Devon countryside. By the mid-2000s he had realized that making wine could fit very well into his successful, broader-than-cider drinks company. In 2009 and 2010, 26,000 vines were planted on two sites totalling 7 hectares ‘within a stone’s throw’ of the winery. From the outset, the English wine initiative has had to be a properly commercial addition to the business, needing to pay its way or face abandonment. To achieve that, it needs a very much larger quantity of grapes than those two vineyards can provide. The extra fruit is sourced from other growers, some as far away as Essex, but the transport operation is well organized, with grapes in the winery and pressed within twelve hours of picking.
To Idzikowski, buying in grapes from carefully selected and monitored growers makes a lot of sense. ‘For us it’s all about consistency and quality. Probably the best way in England is not to depend on one site.’ Diversity of origin brings extra dimensions to the wines, with a blend of very aromatic but somewhat green bacchus from Devon with riper Essex grapes, for example, resulting in a wine with far more character than ones made from the individual components alone.
Idzikowski is in charge of all the half-million litres of liquids produced each year by Lyme Bay, but his greatest enthusiasm is clearly for the English wine and the opportunities he has with such a broad terroir tapestry of grapes. He showed me an immensely promising pinot noir, ageing gently in barrel, from grapes grown in Essex. Unlike the Lyme Bay Shoreline blend or the own-label wines (the National Trust is one customer), that pinot will never be a large-production wine, so there is small-scale as well as large-scale potential for his skills. He is a great fan of fruit from Essex, where growing-season temperature averages close to 1 degree celsius above that in Devon. ‘It’s one of my favourite places for grape-growing, but it will never become as fashionable as Kent.’ The Garden of England is more likely to become the Bordeaux of England, he predicts.
The Lyme Bay Winery shop, wines and much more. AUTHOR
Beyond believing in the necessity of good grapes, Idzikowski is an avid user of technical advances to aid winemaking; he believes they are invaluable in a big-volume operation. He is proud of the winery’s well-equipped laboratory where there is, for example, a piece of kit that can measure the oxygen level in a filled, sealed bottle of wine – particularly useful when checking samples.
Big as Lyme Bay Winery is compared to most of its grape-wine-only compatriots, it is very welcoming to visitors, who can buy its products, and other local edible temptations, in the well-stocked shop. The stainless steel tanks are clearly visible behind the counter, and here’s an intriguing thought for buyers of Shoreline or pinot noir rosé, or any of the other wines: the tank in which it was made might a short time earlier have held mead or country wine. With impeccable cleaning in between, of course.
Bolney Wine Estate, near Haywards Heath, East Sussex: red is big and even bubbly
England isn’t big on red wines, but Bolney produces more than any other winery, and the results are impressive. Much of the success is down to location – the vines are planted in a warm, very sheltered hollow below the lip of the South Downs, where heat-retaining sandstone lies beneath the sandy/loam or clay topsoil. It was once a chicken farm, but in 1969 Rodney and Janet Pratt saw its potential for the vineyard they wanted to create. Their first planting in 1972 was of only a little more than a hectare, but over the years the area under vines has grown almost sixteen-fold, and a new winery is allowing production to expand to 300,000 bottles a year. It remains a family business, with the Pratts’ daughter Sam Linter in charge of winemaking, and Sam’s daughter Charlotte also involved, though in a media rather than winery role. Clearly, Bolney is another multi-generation English wine business.
As is the case in so many longer-established vineyards, the choice of varieties has changed, with more concentration on familiar international grapes than on the germanic crosses. Some of the latter are still favoured, however, with new plantings of bacchus producing a splendidly clean and aromatic wine, while some of the would-be advances have proved premature. Even a warm English spot wasn’t right for merlot, as Sam Linter found – the young chardonnay vines that visitors see from the café terrace replace that particular experiment.
Sam Linter and the Bolney vines. GRAEME ROBERTSON/BOLNEY WINE ESTATE
Pinot noir has long ripened well here, and has contributed much to Bolney’s red reputation, with successive vintages taking silver medals in the 2015, 2016 and 2017 International Wine Challenge. Rondo and dornfelder are planted, too, the latter appearing in the unusual guise of a traditional-method red fizz that spends a year on its lees. Unlike sweet new world sparkling syrah, it’s a dry wine, though full of dark summer fruits, which its makers like to drink with cold meats. All three red varieties go into a rosé that evokes strawberries all the way through, from colour to scent to flavour. A series of medal-winning sparkling cuvées combine the classic champagne grapes, and the dry still pinot gris regularly sells out before the next vintage is ready; the 2016 carried off two trophies in the inaugural UK Wine Awards and helped Bolney win the title of winery of the year.
Bolney epitomizes a lot of what is so good about English wine now. Most crucially, the product is excellent, but there is much more. Considerable effort goes into wine tourism, and the experience is welcoming and enjoyably educational. I remember how impressed I was the first time I did the tour – it was a very effective explanation of how grapes are grown and turned into wine, comprehensive yet easily understandable – and a repeat experience ten years on was just as good. Things have advanced in terms of space and facilities, including the inviting first-floor café with its terrace overlooking the vines, but the guide’s wine knowledge was as formidable and well presented as before. For the paying customers (fortunately for the future of English wine, most I met were in their twenties and thirties) the tour demonstrated very clearly how much care and effort goes into the making of both still and sparkling wine in England – and by the end of the visit they appreciated how the price necessarily reflects that. Maybe, one couple said, to nods from others, English wine still wouldn’t be their everyday supper wine, but for a celebration or to accompany a special meal with friends they’d put it at the top of their to-buy list. Spread that attitude through the whole UK wine-buying public, and sales will soar.
Among the UK’s modern vignerons there are plenty whose previous careers are invaluable in their new one. It’s rather different from the days when the ‘retirement project’ vineyards, set up with minimal knowledge or understanding, were too often the norm. As Kit Lindlar, the doyen of English sparkling wine advisors, once said, the only qualifications required to set up a winery were ‘a Major’s pension and a double-barrelled surname’.
Pebblebed Vineyards, close to Exeter, Devon: a local product for local sale
Geoff Bowen, formerly a geologist specializing in ground water assessments, is one who can put previous professional expertise to good use, identifying sites that have the right potential for vine-growing, from the roots down at least. Pebblebed is more than a pretty name for a wine business. It also expresses the vineyard geology, as does a small display intended for visitors. Along the edge of the winery wall, almost like a flower bed, sits a narrow patch of pebbles, rounded from underwater movement. They are from a unique local geological feature, the Budleigh Salterton pebblebeds, laid down by a huge river system 200 million years ago, which appear on the modern soil surface in outcrops close to the vines.
The pebbles at Pebblebed. AUTHOR
Sheep among young Pebblebed vines. AUTHOR
But this wine story is rooted in something other than geology and south Devon’s temperate climate. Those factors were not its prompting. Quite simply, there was the need to find some practical use for an area of south-facing land that came with a house that one of Bowen’s friends had bought. Vines, said Bowen, and a community vineyard came into being, with ten families chipping in £100 each to pay for the planting of a couple of thousand square metres. Almost twenty years on that vineyard is one among several: the Pebblebed vines cover 10 hectares and average a production of 50,000 bottles a year, half still wine, half sparkling. Ambition is limited, in a rather particular and commendably green way, to ‘produce a local product for local sale’. Bowen is very reluctant indeed to sell beyond a 15-kilometre radius of Exeter, and his USP is simple: ‘Exeter’s own wine’.
Rather a lot is consumed even closer to the vines. Part of the Pebblebed operation is a wine bar in riverside Topsham, a mere 3 kilometres from the winery, where there are opportunities to taste and drink alongside simple but tasty food, an ideal combination. Beyond that, the wines are popular for corporate events in and around Exeter.
The varieties that do best in south Devon’s warm but rather wet climate are the germanic crosses, with seyval blanc enjoying the conditions most: ‘It’s bullet-proof. We have no need to use pesticides or fungicides on it.’ Bowen has tried the champagne varieties, but they’re not happy, and he would not choose them if he was planting anew. He largely follows organic growing practices. Why should he risk his own health, he argues, by being in the middle of a cloud of chemicals spraying out from the tractor he’s driving? ‘It’s all about producing good wines, and if we can achieve quality with organic practice that’s all to the good.’
And there is good generally in the home product. ‘If you’re thinking of a healthy wine it has to be English.’ With an average alcohol content of 10.5 per cent, he points out, that means as much as a third less alcohol than in a 14 per cent hot-climate wine, and a third fewer calories.
Stopham Vineyard, near Pulborough, West Sussex: engineering skills introduced in the winery
If happy plants are responsible for a better-flavoured product, the vines that Simon Woodhead has planted on a south-facing 5.6-hectare slope in the South Downs National Park, with their roots in free-draining sandy soil, should produce fine wines. And they do. The site is low and sheltered, and the vines look down to the River Arun, gleaming in the sun. Around, there are mature trees, new hedgerows and long-planted ones, and grass growing between the rows of vines. The countryside is calm and quiet, raptors soar (their prevalence deters smaller birds with a taste for ripe grapes, valuable when yields are already low), and there is no pressure to replace the vines with any more intensive crop.
Woodhead’s first visit to the site came at an opportune moment. He was studying vineyard establishment at Plumpton and had been invited to a friend’s party at Stopham manor house. ‘I saw all these sandy, empty fields. They ticked all the boxes.’ Wine was to be a new career for the engineer who designed sensors for Formula One racing cars. McLaren had made him redundant; he had gone to Spain to learn the language, had become fascinated by the wine and was considering starting an import business. Hence the Plumpton course. But he decided he wanted to make wine rather than simply sell it. First, ‘I had to find rich friends who had money to invest . . .’
His engineering background is another example of past career put to present use. It has prompted the creation of much bespoke equipment in the small winery (discussed in the previous chapter). Also, his childhood enthusiasm for gardening shows in the careful attention he and assistant winemaker Tom Bartlett pay to the vines. Measured end to end, the rows run for 26 kilometres: ‘A lot to prune!’ They are productive now, but the lack of natural nutrients in the soil meant they were slow to establish. Manure from the cattle on the main Stopham farm, plus compost and fertilizer, encouraged them and continues to be necessary. The first were planted in 2007, with the aim from the beginning to make the best possible still white wines. A decade on, even with sparkling so predominant, only a tenth of Stopham’s production bubbles. Pinot blanc and pinot gris, plus some bacchus, provide the still whites; dornfelder becomes rosé; and chardonnay, pinot noir and auxerrois go into the sparkling. To develop maximum sugar levels the grapes are left to ripen as late as possible, until cold or botrytis makes harvesting essential, and then comes Woodhead’s inventive approach in the winery.
Visitors on pre-booked tours are very welcome at Stopham. It’s an interesting place for any wine lover, and with Woodhead or Bartlett as guide, every question will receive an authoritative answer.
Polgoon Vineyard, Penzance, Cornwall: fishing for a land use
The previous career of Polgoon owners John and Kim Coulson may not have contributed much towards their wine initiative, but it is a story well worth sharing. Formerly fish merchants, they sold the business and invested in an old farmhouse to accommodate their growing family, planning to build holiday homes on some of the accompanying land. That didn’t work out, so an alternative was needed. Various farming options were considered and rejected, until they met Bob Lindo of Camel Valley Vineyards. Vines it had to be and, like Stopham’s, those at the top of the site have a splendid view, looking out over Mounts Bay to St Michael’s Mount.
The Coulsons’ first wine, from the 2006 harvest of pinot noir and rondo, took the best still rosé title in the UK Vineyard Association’s annual wine of the year competition. Cheekily, it beat the entry from the Coulsons’ Camel Valley mentor. But the soggy summers of 2007 and 2008 meant disaster for the grape harvests, so cidermaking – including cider created in the sparkling wine way, with second fermentation in bottle – was introduced to keep the business afloat. More recently, there has been further investment and kinder weather. Among new plantings, bacchus particularly has flourished, and there have been more awards for both still and the newer sparkling wines.
The vineyards that follow now don’t group thematically, so be a happy, randomly wandering wine tourist and keep on reading. Several are away from the southern counties where vine concentration is strongest. Talk to their owners or winemakers, learn how well the chosen sites suit vine-growing, taste the excellent wines, and you may wonder why there isn’t more movement outwards.
Rodington Vineyard, near Telford, Shropshire: an unusual family heritage
This is probably the most unusual of all the commercial vineyards included here. Rodington is the Midlands expression of a Punjabi farming heritage and was established in 2009 by Ram Dass Chahal, his wife Nirmala Devi, their daughters Manjit and Karin and sons Jai and Sagreev.
In the Punjab, Ram Dass Chahal grew up on the family farm, producing beet, corn and animal food. In England, his vegetable plot – a welcome relaxation from work in a Black Country foundry – soon overwhelmed the family’s back garden. Next came an allotment. Then, as a retirement project, he bought a plot of land on the edge of Telford intending to plant an apple orchard. Close by to the south lies the Wrekin; on the western horizon rise the foothills of the Welsh mountains. Nirmala Devi takes credit for the change of plan from apples to vines. By chance, she read a newspaper article on the increasing interest in English wine: ‘I gave him the idea,’ she proudly told BBC Radio 4 On Your Farm reporter Sybil Ruscoe in autumn 2016 as the last of the year’s grapes were harvested.
Rodington Vineyard and the blue tractor that features on the wine labels. RODINGTON VINEYARD
Expert advice was sought, the sandy soil was deemed perfect for vines and planting began, with the 4 hectares becoming home to solaris, ortega, bacchus, seyval blanc, rondo and pinot noir, the red varieties cropping particularly well. It is very much a family enterprise, with the younger generation juggling full-time jobs with the demands of pruning, picking and other essential viticultural tasks. Family and friends join in for the harvest, which often carries on into the night. ‘We’re out with our mobile phones and torches,’ Manjit Chahal told the radio interviewer. ‘We’ve even thought of miners’ helmets.’
‘I wanted to plant something people could come round and enjoy,’ Ram Dass Chahal added. But beyond giving pleasure through year-round opening, Rodington has been developed as a serious vineyard project. The family advanced cautiously, making sure initial plantings would flourish before adding more. The grapes are picked at optimum ripeness and the wine is made at Halfpenny Green Vineyard, forty minutes’ drive to the south-east, where founder Martin Vickers and winemaker son Charles carry out contract winemaking for more than thirty vineyards as well as processing their own crop. (Halfpenny Green’s own wines carried off five medals in the 2017 International Wine Challenge.) The Chahals’ grapes, winery manager Ben Hunt told Ruscoe, consistently come in at above-average quality.
The wines are quality products too. Highlight of the numerous awards they have received was a silver medal in the 2016 International Wine Challenge for the Solaris Dry 2014. The judges loved its intense aromas and ‘lively juicy green and red apple flavour’. But however far the project progresses, the Chahals won’t forget its beginnings. The name on the wines is Blue Tractor, and the label shows that venerable, essential piece of agricultural equipment, the first they could afford when they bought the Rodington site.
Nutbourne Vineyards, near Pulborough, West Sussex: also keeping it in the family
One lasting memory I have from a calvados discovery tour in France is of a masterful father ensuring each of his sons followed a profession that was valuable in maintaining the family cider and calvados business. One was an accountant, to do the books; a second was a farmer, to ensure there were sheep to graze beneath the apple trees; a third made wardrobes from worn-out calvados barrels, which gave a wonderful scent to the clothes stored within. Nutbourne reminded me of that.
Peter Gladwin, who owns the vineyard with his wife Bridget, is a high-level special events caterer, with royal happenings and prestige locations featuring on his company CV. Two of his sons have followed him into cooking and serving food, running their own restaurants, and the third is a farmer. So, Nutbourne wine is important on the catering company and restaurant lists, and the restaurateurs serve meat from their brother’s farm as well as foraging for other ingredients in the hedgerows around the vineyard. The bulk of the wine reaches consumers through these family businesses, with the rest bought by visitors to the vineyard or sold locally to other restaurants and hotels.
Here again, as in so many of the UK’s vineyards, visitors are warmly welcomed, simply to walk through the vines or picnic, to join a formal tour or tutored tasting, or to arrange a corporate dinner or wedding reception in an evocative location. A former windmill with a balcony overlooking the vines, a purpose-built wine lodge and a smart marquee are the focus for all these, but the family emphasize that Nutbourne is a working farm and ‘bigger on atmosphere than frills’.
Owning a vineyard hadn’t been on the agenda for Peter and Bridget Gladwin. In 1991 they found the house they wanted – and it happened to come with already-planted vines, mostly such germanic varieties as huxelrebe, reichensteiner and bacchus. Those remain the main components of their best-selling wine, the aromatic Sussex Reserve, a ‘field blend’ determined by the vineyard’s crop each year and the first English still wine to win a gold medal in the International Wine & Spirit Competition. Some of the vines are well over thirty years old, but continue to produce good-quality grapes, if in small quantity, and the Gladwins like the style of wine from them.
Under the couple’s stewardship, vineyard area has expanded to 10 hectares and the original varieties have been joined by a little pinot blanc and rather more pinot noir and chardonnay. Those two, plus reichensteiner, make the pink-tinged sparkling Nutty Brut. It’s intriguing, says Bridget Gladwin, that this excellent-value bubbly can, in the same competition, carry off a gold medal alongside a bottle that costs at least half as much again. ‘There are so many sparkling wines out there.’ Since 2010 the Nutbourne wines have been made at the small on-site winery, where stainless steel modernity rubs shoulders with such classics as an eighty-year-old dosage machine. The winery is presided over by Owen Elias, ensuring not only quality but also character in the wines.
Three Choirs Vineyards, Newent, Gloucestershire: on to the next generation, of vines as well as people
Rare is the situation in the UK that vines need to be replaced because they’re simply too old to be sensibly productive any more. At plenty of vineyards there has been replanting because of a change in the fashions for flavour or style of wine, but at Three Choirs there is an issue of age. The first vines were planted in 1973, and for once in those pioneering times the initiator was someone with experience of wine – Alan McKechnie, a local wine retailer who owned a fruit farm where grapes were to prove as happy as apples. From early on, his farm manager, Tom Day, was enthusiastic in developing the project. There is a human, as well as plant, generational story here: Day’s son Simon, after time at Three Choirs, has branched out to become a respected consultant and winemaker in his own right, and son-in-law Martin Fowke celebrated thirty years as the Three Choirs winemaker in 2018.
From the one-fifth of a hectare beginning to the present 30 hectares, the familiar germanic grape varieties have been the most important, and won’t vanish yet: ‘We have to keep our style, which is very popular,’ said winery manager Kevin Shayle as he poured samples at the EWP 2017 tasting. ‘We have to get the right balance between that and moving with the times.’ Part of that ‘right balance’ has seen a change in emphasis from volume to ‘producing the very best wines possible’, as more and more Three Choirs bottles are sold locally rather than through the big supermarkets. The time when anything English was considered inferior is long gone, Shayle notes; now it is concern over the distances consumables travel and enthusiasm for local products that are proving to be major factors for buyers. He is delighted, too, that The Wine Society selected a classic Three Choirs blend as the first English wine to bear its ‘Society’ own-brand label. ‘That is a real stamp of approval.’ Shayle is another experienced voice in the industry to predict that still wines could regain popularity and move up to equal the sparkling quantity.
At Three Choirs’ Gloucestershire vineyard germanic varieties remain paramount. THREE CHOIRS VINEYARDS
With a long practice of welcoming visitors at the main Newent site, an emphasis on function activities at 2014-purchased Wickham Vineyard in Hampshire, and a selection of wines that range through fizz and blended or single-variety whites to oak-aged red, Three Choirs well understands the way to entice more wine drinkers to pour English into their glasses.
Sixteen Ridges, Shrawley, Worcestershire: where a reluctant farmer finally made the right decision
As a site description, the name just about says it all: Sixteen Ridges was an ancient arable field, the ridge and furrow pattern still clearly visible. But before the vines could be planted, a herd of cows had to relinquish their favourite pasture. Farmer John Ballard had sought the advice of consultant Simon Day about turning some of his land into a vineyard – and that one field, Day told him, was by far the best place. For a good while, Ballard wouldn’t countenance moving his cows, but in 2007 he was finally persuaded to allow vines onto the 2.4-hectare bowl-shaped field looking southwards down to the Severn Valley. Sandy loam topsoil lies above old Devonian sandstone, so drainage is good. Fruit ripens well, there is a sensible yield and the site was frost-free even in 2017, when clouds over Worcestershire gave welcome protection as so much of England’s wine lands froze. Pinot noir and seyval blanc grapes go into white and pink sparkling wines and still rosés, but the wine that has attracted most attention is the Early Red, from pinot noir précoce, an earlier-ripening relative of classic pinot noir.
Simon Day: enthusiastic about the potential of Herefordshire and Worcestershire. DUNCAN LOUGHREY/SIXTEEN RIDGES
Sixteen Ridges is far from Day’s only interest, however. The vineyard project has expanded to include a second site, Redbank, near Ledbury in Herefordshire, where the soil above the sandstone is much more clayey and colder, though richer in nutrition for the vines. Once established, they do really well, and Day is delighted with the quick development of the bacchus planted there. Pinot noir and pinot noir précoce have followed. The winery built at Redbank makes the wine for both sites.
On a wider scale, when we talked in 2017 Day was optimistic for the wine future of Herefordshire and Worcestershire. Vineyard size would increase, as more would-be producers identified the potential of the area. ‘We have everything that Kent has but a little bit better,’ he emphasized, citing the success of asparagus crops (he could, perhaps, have expanded his comparison to include the Loire Valley, where vines are even more abundant than the stalky delight). The up-and-down topography is vine-friendly, frost is unusual, and, although there may not be the peak summer temperatures of some southern English locations, overall the climate is good by UK standards.
Despite his parents’ insistence that he should get a ‘proper job’, Day couldn’t resist a wine career route, which has taken him as far afield as Brown Brothers in Australia as well as to La Mare in Jersey and Denbies and Lamberhurst in England. Then, when his father retired from the Three Choirs, ‘I came back to carry on what he had started.’ But he had further ambitions, which in addition to the vineyards have taken him into consultancy, vine supply and contract winemaking, within the umbrella company Haygrove Evolution. A lot of English wines reflect his skill.
a’Beckett’s Vineyard, near Devizes, Wiltshire: small is big in the west
Paul and Lynn Langham’s vineyard proudly proclaims its position as Wiltshire’s largest – but at barely 4 hectares that is tiny by standards further south-east. Still, from small beginnings great things grow, so who knows what the future holds for vines in this part of Wessex? The geology is excellent, greensand over chalk, similar to Ridgeview and Nyetimber, says Paul Langham, and he argues that there is less variability of weather here, further away from the sea. Over the years since 2001, when the couple planted their first vines, growing season temperatures have risen and that makes chardonnay a more realistic inclusion in the vineyard.
a’Beckett’s offers plenty of variety for its size: its vine list is pinot noir (more than half the total), chardonnay, auxerrois, reichensteiner and seyval blanc. The auxerrois has thrived and provides an appealing point of difference. It is used both for a still wine and a sparkler, the latter named after Lynn’s carpenter father Victor, who, despite not drinking alcohol himself, has supported the vineyard venture by helping to build the winery and joining the picking team. The still auxerrois was the first a’Beckett’s wine I encountered, and I was impressed. Overall, still wine is the emphasis, in 2017 accounting for around 70 per cent of production, but demand more than personal choice is the prevailing influence.
Winbirri Vineyards, on the edge of the Norfolk Broads National Park: East Anglia gives the south coast a run for its money
‘East Anglia is the best place in Britain for bacchus,’ says Lee Dyer and he has justified his belief by winning awards for his own wine (see Chapter 4). The variety is ‘the jewel in the crown’ of a region that has huge potential for still wines in particular, he continues – there is more sun and less rain, especially as the grapes ripen. ‘The flavour profiles and aromas we can achieve here from our vines are second to none.’
The vineyard, 10 hectares and expanding, was established in 2007 by Lee’s fruit-farmer father Stephen. Lee took charge three years later, his previous lack of wine experience countered by intensive courses at Plumpton College, and commercial-scale plantings began, though Winbirri remains a family operation. Soil is light sandy loam above clay and the four vine sites were chosen to avoid frost pockets. In the very modern winery, fermentation temperatures are controlled by computer and maximum effort made to avoid oxidation and minimize use of sulphur dioxide, but Lee Dyer is insistent that what matters most is growing grapes of the highest quality. Alongside bacchus, the focus variety, there is pinot noir, solaris, rondo and seyval blanc. Unusually, more than one third of production is red wine, and that – from pinot noir especially – will remain important, alongside more sparkling wine. ‘But,’ said Dyer after the Decanter award, ‘I’m certainly not jumping on the bandwagon and only heading in a sparkling route. The trophies we’ve won for our bacchus prove that our still wines can beat any English sparkling wine.’
Dyer emphasizes his long-term commitment to career and place, and to putting East Anglia more visibly on the UK vineyard map: ‘I’m looking forward to giving Sussex, Kent and the rest of the south coast a good run for their money over the next few years.’ That might prove a repeat of the past, for the Winbirri name in Anglo-Saxon means ‘wine grape’ and there is plenty of evidence that the Saxons were active in and around the local village of Surlingham.
Giffords Hall Vineyard, near Long Melford, Suffolk: a different kind of employment
Linda Howard, another advocate of East Anglia’s wine potential, admits she abandoned much of her business sense (she used to run an employment agency) when she first saw Giffords Hall: ‘I fell in love with the place.’ There were vines already, first planted in the 1980s by John Kemp on the sandy/clay soil of an ancient glacial river bed, but tending them was an entirely new experience for Linda and her husband Guy. ‘We learned from the ground up.’ Bacchus is among the vines that occupy just over 8 hectares of the Howards’ land – hardly surprising, as more than half of all the bacchus grapes harvested in the UK come from East Anglia. But madeleine angevine is more important. A fizz and a dry still wine are made from it, plus a pale, fresh and very appealing rosé where the colour is from the addition of a little rondo. The rosé comes in magnum as well as bottle, a summery treat that more still wine producers might copy. In many of its grape choices, Giffords Hall characterizes current practice: it also grows pinot noir and pinot blanc, two more of the varieties on the increase in the area. ‘Our wines have a delicate floral character very typical of the region,’ Linda Howard emphasizes.
Kemp, the vineyard’s originator and renowned for being one of that rare UK breed, a winemaker who foot-trod his grapes, bowed out from his long vinous career reluctantly. He continued with a small area of vines after selling Giffords Hall in 2004 and finally retired only in 2011. Even then the grape connection wasn’t over. He and his wife Jeanie commissioned a local architect to turn their redundant winery into a carbon-neutral home, and in 2016 it was declared greenest building in the Suffolk ‘green Oscar’ awards.
Albourne Estate, near Hurstpierpoint, East Sussex: a growing new career
In the UK wine industry there is understandable scepticism over some new entrants (as there was over plenty of their predecessors): people with no background in any kind of agriculture and no long-cherished ambition to make wine. Alison Nightingale is one of the newcomers firmly countering such doubts. She and her husband, Nick Cooper, chose their fleeing-from-London location simply as somewhere calm to bring up their children, and while he continued commuting she looked for a new career she could combine with family responsibilities. Wine, she decided, could be ‘a more creative, fulfilling and balanced path’. Fast forward just over a decade (which included four years of part-time study at Plumpton College) and Nightingale was becoming a name of note: from 2015 her Albourne Estate wines have carried off major awards and regularly sell out. Bacchus, ortega and pinots blanc, gris and noir go into still wines and the three champagne varieties are destined for fizz – the first, launched in summer 2017, a blanc de blancs.
Before wine, Nightingale’s main career direction was in multi-national marketing, and that expertise shows in what are probably the most distinctively attractive of all English wine bottle labels, illustrating the wildlife around the estate – buzzard on the bacchus and green woodpecker on the Estate Selection blend are examples – the work of local artist Louise Body. Sustaining that wildlife is part of the estate philosophy, with solar panels and high levels of building insulation keeping energy use green and the non-vine areas maintained as grassland and hedgerows to high environmental stewardship standards.
Tinwood Estate, near Chichester, West Sussex: where vines replace vegetables
Tinwood Estate is another of the many vineyards in the far south of England where you can almost smell the sea, which here lies 9 kilometres to the south. This is one of the large new vineyards in Sussex, with a little over 25 hectares of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier planted from 2007 at the foot of the South Downs. Vines should feel at home here, as there is every likelihood that the Cistercian monks at neighbouring Boxgrove Priory had produced wine for their own consumption many centuries earlier. The soil is very vine-friendly, well-drained flinty loam above the layer of chalk that is starting to head down below the English Channel before its emergence in Champagne, and the location offers plenty of warm sunshine and little risk of frost.
What’s unusual is the modern link with one of the pioneers of English sparkling wine, Ridgeview. In 2006 Mike Roberts, Ridgeview’s founder, sold a 25 per cent share in his business to the Dekker family, who had long grown vegetables and arable crops on the Tinwood land but, at the instigation of son Art, were moving into wine grapes. It suited both parties. The arrangement guaranteed the Roberts family a necessary additional supply of meticulously cared-for grapes as they increased the production of their signature sparkling wines; Art Dekker had no plans to build a winery but wanted to be able to sell wines with a Tinwood label, so having access to Ridgeview’s winemaking facility was ideal.
Lodges with a view of the Tinwood vines. AUTHOR
While visitors do not have the chance to see how wine is made, there is plenty of alternative entertainment, with a variety of tours and events. Some visitors don’t even need to drive home, for three purpose-built lodges, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the vines, are available to rent. Just a couple of kilometres or so from the vineyard lies one of Sussex’s most popular attractions: Goodwood, historic home of the Dukes of Richmond and Gordon, with its racecourse, motor circuit and small aerodrome. Dekker told me of one lodge guest, in his seventies, who came to stay and fulfilled three of the items on a bucket list of wishes: flying in a Spitfire, driving a racing car and tasting English sparkling wine.
Painshill Park, Cobham, Surrey: eighteenth-century splendour restored
Charles Hamilton would surely be a happy man if he could return today to the elaborate landscape park he created in the mid-eighteenth century. Not only has the Painshill Park Trust – whose president is a Hamilton descendant – restored the elaborate planting, fanciful follies and sinuous lake, but there is more. The vineyard from which Charles Hamilton made wine ‘with a finer flavour than the best champaign’ has been re-created, and sparkling wine is again being made from its grapes. All that makes Painshill Park one of the most appealing places for a historically minded wine tourist to visit, bringing together the past and the present of Britain’s wine story.
The vines now growing on the 1-hectare south-facing hill sloping down to the lake are pinot noir, chardonnay and seyval blanc, their grapes turned into a white and a pink fizz. Although Charles Hamilton made his wines on site, there is no winery now, so the grapes go off to Bluebell Vineyard Estates on the edge of Ashdown Forest in central Sussex, a specialist in sparkling wines since its establishment in 2005. The result comes back for sale in the park’s shop, and proves that Charles Hamilton’s choice of site still makes excellent sense more than 250 years on.
The restoration of Painshill Park is a remarkable story. First, a little history. The 34-year-old ninth son of the sixth Earl of Abercorn came to Painshill in 1738, inspired by two Grand Tours in Europe to create through ‘living paintings’ a style of garden then unknown in England. Charles Hamilton’s aim was to move away from formality to something much wilder though still carefully designed. His plantings, notes the current Painshill Park Guide, ‘were at the cutting edge of English landscape design’ and with them, the new species he introduced and the classical follies he built, he ‘changed the face of the English landscape forever’. Creating so elaborate an estate over three decades cost a huge amount of money and in 1773 Hamilton was obliged to sell, paying off his debts and moving away. The buyer, Benjamin Bond Hopkins, MP, an eccentric with a reputation for being tight with money despite his personal wealth, built himself an impressive new mansion and maintained the park, though his design ideas differed somewhat from those of Hamilton.
A succession of owners followed Bond Hopkins and by the 1970s little of the original grandeur survived. The park had been split up and the parts sold off, with the house converted into private homes. A group of concerned local residents, with the support of the Garden History Society and the Georgian Group, persuaded the local authority – Elmbridge Borough Council – to buy some 63 hectares of Hamilton’s site, by then a Grade I listed landscape, before all traces of his dream vanished. The Painshill Park Trust was established, restoration began and the result is the delight today, the wine included.
Sharpham Vineyard, near Totnes, Devon: battles past, history present
Sharpham is another place where eighteenth-century history is important, though the actual vineyard roots don’t dip so deep into the past. The mansion that sits atop the estate’s vine-clad slopes is the product, literally, of the capture of the richest prize of the Seven Years War. Captain Philemon Pownoll made a lot of money when he took the Spanish treasure ship Ermiona in 1762. With it, he bought the Sharpham estate on the banks of the River Dart and commissioned a fine Palladian villa to replace the existing Tudor house. Sadly, he was killed in action before he had a chance to enjoy the result. Skip on to the 1960s and ownership by the Ash family, and the plan was to make cheese from the milk of their newly acquired herd of Jersey cows. No, scoffed the experts, no one will want it. Wrong – the cheese proved immensely popular and remains so, though the cows now graze on pastures a few kilometres away, close to the modern dairy that twenty-first-century health controls require.
With cheese, why not wine? Maurice Ash, who loved all things French, decided there must be vines. His initial few hundred square metres grew to 3.4 hectares, the vine variety increased, visitors on the themed retreats (from the mid-1980s Sharpham became a charitable trust promoting well-being and sustainable living) enjoyed the product, with Sharpham cheese, and the modern pattern was established. The oldest vines date from the 1980s and germanic varieties predominate, with madeleine angevine particularly happy in the rich red Devon sandstone soil on a site where frost is rare and the windbreak trees are sufficiently spaced to allow a breeze to stir away fungal problems. The choice of raw material is expanded by grapes from the 8.5-hectare Sandridge Barton vineyard across the Dart, bringing in bacchus, pinot noir, chardonnay and more madeleine angevine. With that broad palette, Sharpham offers fifteen different wines, ‘so everyone will find at least one wine they like’ said assistant winemaker Tommy Grimshaw, pouring them one after another into my glass.
A splendidly scenic site for vines: Sharpham vineyard in a meander of the River Dart. SHARPHAM WINE AND CHEESE
As we walked the vineyard, that rich red soil added to the rainbow of mud my boots have collected over the years. Glass in hand, allowing me to sample the finished product beside the plants from which it came, Grimshaw introduced me to more of Sharpham’s pre-wine history. Like the visitors who wander through the rows of vines dropping steeply down towards the river, we arrived at Philemon Pownoll Quay. This was the eighteenth-century unloading point for the ships bringing building materials for the new villa – including the Portland stone that was a gift to the captain from a grateful government. Sitting there on a sunny summer evening, with a refill in that glass, the river flowing past, perhaps a family of seals cavorting in the water – that’s English wine bliss.
Certainly many wine tourists are tempted by what Sharpham offers. Some 10,000-plus visitors come each year, and buy half the estate’s wine. Almost all of the rest is sold locally. ‘The vast majority have never tried English wine before and lots of them come because they want to find out more,’ explained Grimshaw.
The history lesson wasn’t over, nor was the wine walk. Further along the riverbank the wreck of the SS Kingswear appears. Former ferry on the river, she was a hospital isolation ship in the First World War. Even at the end of her life not everything was left to rust away in those familiar waters, for the engine was removed and powers the current river ferry. Then a steep push up the hill, past the 1970s Lamborghini tractor that has been kept long beyond its deserved retirement date because it is small enough to fit between the rows, took us to the reward of more wine to taste and a café serving food cooked over vine trimmings.
The most modern history at Sharpham lies in bottles. Its wine library is a comprehensive source of everything produced since 1996 and just occasionally there is a chance to try a venerable bottle. Grimshaw recalls the 2004 Estate Selection with enormous pleasure: ‘It tasted extraordinary.’ And from the old to the new: one of the four madeleine angevine wines made at Sharpham is Devon’s answer to beaujolais nouveau, from vine to bottle in four weeks so that it can go on sale the same day as the French classic. It came about with true national spirit, as a small but pertinent retort to the French ban on UK beef in the time of BSE.
And on that very patriotic note, we’ll end our tour.
Sharpham’s vineyard dips down towards the River Dart. SHARPHAM WINE AND CHEESE
