Oz Clarke at the presentation of the inaugural UK Wine Awards in July 2017. He and Susie Barrie (in background) co-chaired the judging panel. TOM GOLD PHOTOGRAPHY/WINEGB
THE FIRST ENGLISH VINEYARD I VISITED WAS Staple St James, whose wind-swept acres sprawled above Wingham on the Canterbury to Sandwich road. My mum took me there to meet a wonderfully bucolic, rubicund fellow called Bill Ash, who made bone-dry whites whose prickly, hedgerow scents, seasoned by the salty whip of the northerly gales sweeping up from Richborough, I can still taste today. I don’t remember the sun shining much at Staple. I don’t remember it being warm at all. And I’m not sure that the vines are there any more. But I remember proud Bill in his lumberjack’s shirt, arms akimbo, gazing out over his struggling vines as the breezes flapped at his ruddy pink cheeks. I hope he knew what important work he was doing. Because his dry huxelrebe had as much a sense of place and person and pride as any wine out of France.
And when I became a wine pro – well, I struck lucky again. I clambered and clattered and slithered and stumbled my way down to a hidden eyrie, a tiny golden spot of fairy magic in a fold of the Sussex South Downs. Breaky Bottom. Probably the most beautiful vineyard in Britain. So delicate, so fragile, so precious and held in the loving, caressing bulldog hands of Peter Hall. You learn more about wines, and vineyards, and life – yours, his, what life has been, what life could be – by an expedition to this tiny paradise than you will from any other vineyard in the land.
And this is the greatest joy of Liz Sagues’s new book. Whereas I, despite my tremendous enthusiasm for the vineyards that increasingly fan out across our lovely England and Wales, simply haven’t visited anything like enough, Liz has. And her book shows it. From the very first chapter she isn’t merely giving you the dry facts of vineyards, their history and their wine. Every chapter is imbued with a sense of the people, a sense of the places – the fields, the rocks, the cliffs and glades; the wispy mist, the sleeting rain, the pale, brave sunshine – all of those things that give English wine its unique character. Through her, I can feel the damp and the dry. I can sense the canny, the clever and the callow, and, as I read her words, I can taste the truly original flavours that only our vineyards and our winegrowers can create.
Let me take a couple of sections. The one on ‘grapes’. With the current rush to plant the classic champagne varieties, this could be a paean to pinot noir and chardonnay, with the other less fashionable grape varieties trailing muddily behind at a respectful distance. But no. In we dive with two of the most important of Britain’s grapes – bacchus and seyval blanc. It’s fascinating to read that Norfolk, of all places, with its cooler summers, but drier, sunnier autumns, may provide the perfect site for bacchus. It’s a delight to get caught up in the arguments about seyval blanc, one of Britain’s most controversial varieties. Owen Elias, for ten years chief winemaker at Chapel Down, the UK’s biggest producer, calls seyval ‘hideous’, while Peter Hall at Breaky Bottom delights in his seyval as ‘elegant, sweet-natured’. And their supporters are fairly evenly divided.
Well, if you want to know more about such people, such grape varieties, and what wines they really produce, at the heart of the book is a memorable run of virtual visits to the vineyards. But Liz isn’t just telling you about soil and sunshine, crop levels and canopy management. ‘People make wine,’ she states bluntly, for better or worse. ‘The final liquid reflects most of all the individual personality of the person who makes it.’ The fact that Liz starts with Peter Hall at Breaky Bottom, goes on to the Lindo family at Camel Valley in Cornwall, and continues with three fascinatingly different views of the possibilities, the pleasures and the perils of organic grape-growing and winemaking in these isles, shows her as a true enthusiast. But she is also an honest critic and a doughty digger after all the myriad of details, opinions and emotions that churn together at the heart of our English wine revolution.
Oz Clarke
Oz Clarke at the presentation of the inaugural UK Wine Awards in July 2017. He and Susie Barrie (in background) co-chaired the judging panel. TOM GOLD PHOTOGRAPHY/WINEGB