Vines in a Cold Climate E-Book

Henry Jeffreys

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 410

Beschreibung

***A New York Times pick for best wine book of 2023!*** 'A tour de force!' - Jancis Robinson 'Henry Jeffreys, who used to work in the wine trade, is an amiable and entertaining guide to 'the English wine revolution'' - Daily Mail 'A fascinating and superbly told adventure' - Independent 'A tremendously gossipy but adroitly helmed examination of where English wine istoday and how it got there' - Telegraph 'An invaluable guide' - Evening Standard 'Delightful details make the book sing' - Times Literary Supplement 'A page-turner' - Financial Times 'Mr. Jeffreys, an English drinks writer, has done an excellent job of telling the story of the quirky characters and visionaries behind the first wave of modern English wines in the 1980s and '90s' - New York Times The definitive story of the extraordinary and surprising success of English wine - and the people who transformed our reputation on the global stage from that of a joke to world-class in 30 years. From an amateur affair made by retirees to a multi-million-pound industry with quality to rival Champagne, the rise of English wine has been one of the more unexpected wine stories of the past 30 years. In this illuminating and accessible account, award-winning drinks writer Henry Jeffreys takes you behind the scenes of the English wine revolution. It's a story about changing climate and technology but most of all it's about men and women with vision, determination and more than a little bloody-mindedness. From secretive billionaires to the single mother farming a couple of hectares in Kent, these are the people making wine in a cold climate.

Leseprobe

Henry Jeffreys studied English and Classical Literature at Leeds University. He worked in the wine trade and publishing before becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster. He was wine critic for The Lady, and his work has appeared in Spectator magazine, the Guardian, the Oldie and BBC Good Food magazine. He has been on BBC Radio 4, Radio 5 and Monocle Radio, and featured on BBC 2’s Inside the Factory (2020). He is the author of the award-winning Empire of Booze: British History Through the Bottom of a Glass (2017), The Home Bar (2018) and The Cocktail Dictionary (2020), and in 2022 was awarded Fortnum & Mason Drink Writer of the Year. He is currently features editor for the Master of Malt drinks blog and drinks writer for The Critic magazine. He lives in Faversham, Kent with his wife and two children.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Henry Jeffreys, 2023

The moral right of Henry Jeffreys to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Map illustration by Jeff Edwards

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 665 3E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 666 0

Printed in Great Britain

Allen & UnwinAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

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CONTENTS

Introduction

  1. False starts

  2. The bloody awful weather years

  3. Ambition and money

  4. Bubbling under

  5. Not going tits up

  6. Money men

  7. Foreign affairs

  8. Fizz wars

  9. Big wine

10. Small wine

11. Organic growth

12. Grape expectations

13. Eastern promise

14. Urban wineries

15. Tourist attractions

16. Reaching the customer

17. Storm clouds ahead

18. Warming up

19. Good for England

Glossary

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

‘The luscious clusters of the vineUpon my mouth do crush their wine’

Andrew Marvell

INTRODUCTION

On a blustery, unseasonably cold May day in 2017, the cream of Britain’s drinks press descended on a field just outside Faversham in Kent for a milestone event in the history of English wine. Taittinger was planting vines in southern England – and we had been invited to take part.

The week before, late spring frosts had damaged vines across the country. Some growers had lost 80 per cent of their crop. Combine that with all the uncertainty about the previous year’s referendum result, in which Britain had voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union, and you might say that Taittinger’s timing could have been better.

The French company had bought the land in 2015, after years of rumours that Champagne houses were looking to make wine in southern England. It was followed, in 2017, by Pommery, which would become the first Champagne house to actually launch an English wine, made in conjunction with Hattingley Valley in Hampshire. Both were following in the footsteps of a lone winemaker from Champagne, Didier Pierson, who had beaten all the big boys to it when he planted vines in Hampshire in 2005 and began making sparkling wines under the Meonhill label (since bought by Hambledon).

To make high-quality sparkling wine by the méthode champenoise, you need grapes with high acidity. They need to be ripe, but not too ripe. With the climate in Champagne getting warmer, southern England is arguably the next best place on earth to grow suitable grapes. It even has chalky soil identical to that of Champagne.

On the day of our visit, we piled out of the buses from Ashford station at a nondescript, muddy field in what felt like the middle of nowhere. We had been warned to dress casually and to be ‘prepared for the unpredictable British weather. The event is taking place in a field and we have very limited cover’. Many urban types had not heeded the advice, wearing smart shoes and even heels.

Shivering outside, we sipped tea to warm us up and then strode out somewhat gingerly into the field for the planting of the vines. The rain was horizontal, like you get on Scottish islands. Patrick McGrath a Master of Wine from Hatch Mansfield, Taittinger’s UK distributor and partner in the venture, stood on a box and tried to make himself heard above the wind. Then it was the turn of Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger from the family that owns the Champagne house, dressed up as an English gent in that charming way certain Frenchmen in the wine trade still do.

He insisted that bonds between Britain and France, and more specifically Champagne, would endure despite Brexit. Taittinger’s Kent venture is named Domaine Evremond after Charles de Saint-Évremond, a French aristocratic exile in the court of Charles II who introduced the wines of Champagne to England, where they were served at parties – some say orgies – attended by the king. For this service, Charles made Évremond governor of Duck Island in St James’s Park, which came with a £300-a-year salary.

As the rain got heavier, the PR team cut the speeches short. We were handed ceremonial trowels, given vine cuttings and shown where to plant them. I sometimes wonder how mine is doing, hopefully thriving somewhere in the damp Kent soil.

Did I mention that it was really cold? Our job done, we hurried into the marquee. We couldn’t taste wines from Domaine Evremond – they won’t be released until 2024 at the earliest – so in a clever bit of publicity, Taittinger had invited other Kentish producers to show off their sparkling wines. There were wines from Chapel Down, England’s largest producer, and Gusbourne, one of the country’s most prestigious, as well as newer names like Squerryes (rhymes with cherries) alongside veterans like Biddenden. The quality was high, with none of the searing acidity that has sometimes characterised English wines in the past. Perhaps aware of the comparison, or as a bit of flattery, Taittinger did not offer its standard label, but instead brought out dozens of bottles of its £150 top-of-the-range Comtes de Champagne.

With everyone thoroughly refreshed, it was Taittinger’s turn to speak again. He clearly, gloriously, had had no media training and rambled charmingly on subjects ranging from his recollection of English women encountered in his misspent youth – there’s more than a touch of Évremond about Pierre-Emmanuel – to how Kent held some advantages over Champagne, not least the lack of unexploded World War One munitions in the vineyards.

With the rain, the sweaty marquee, the increasingly drunk guests and the risqué speech, the event had more in common with a British country wedding than an event put on by a French wine company. Taittinger had somehow contrived to make the most English day out possible for the launch of Domaine Evremond. And yet underneath all the fun, there was clearly a deadly commercial intent. Taittinger was investing millions in this.

Finally, Taittinger ended his speech with the thought that perhaps Domaine Evremond would one day attract tourists from France to England. ‘There is this beautiful unexplored island off the coast of France,’ he said. French people coming to taste English wines – now wouldn’t that be something?

* * *

The money, the world-class wines, the slick PR – it’s all a far cry from my first experience of English wine. That was at a wedding in the early 2000s at a country house in Suffolk that made its own wine. I can still remember the peculiar taste: initially quite sweet, then chalky, followed by masses and masses of acidity. This wasn’t a German mouth-watering acidity like you get in a Mosel riesling. No, this was acidity so hard it reminded me of the stone floors of my boarding school. And there was no fruit at all. It didn’t taste like any wine I’d encountered before.

After that, I had English wines occasionally but even the best had a similar lack of fruit and a hardness to them. The problem with England as a place to grow vines is not just that it’s cold, but that it’s also grey and wet. There’s often not enough sunshine to ripen grapes properly and the damp makes them prey to rot. Except in exceptional years, it takes a lot of care to ripen classic French or German grape varieties in this climate.

So English growers planted varieties like müller-thurgau, designed to ripen reliably early in cooler climates. But the growers were often ill-prepared amateurs. Vines were planted in places prone to poor sunlight, bad drainage, frost traps and generally at the mercy of the elements. Winemakers overcompensated for lack of ripeness by adding sweetness in the form of sugar or unfermented grape juice, thereby yielding pale imitations of humdrum German wines. And who needs England’s answer to Blue Nun?

English wines, with a few exceptions, were novelties, sold to holidaymakers in southern England. Or so I thought. In fact, there was a quiet revolution going on in the English countryside. It had been noticed by some pioneers that southern England’s marginal climate was ideal for making sparkling wines and boasted chalky soil just like that in Champagne. An American couple with no winemaking experience, Stuart and Sandy Moss, planted the classic Champagne grapes – pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay – at Nyetimber in West Sussex. 1992, their first vintage, won a gold medal at the International Wine and Spirits Competition.

I tasted my first English sparkling wine in the late noughties. It was made by Ridgeview, one of the country’s largest producers, in East Sussex, and I liked it. Though the acidity was a little racy, it was clearly a very well-made wine. But it was another wine, also made by Ridgeview, a few years later that really changed my perceptions of English wine. It came from a tiny plot which has now been pulled up near Reading called Theale vineyard owned by the Laithwaite family, the people behind Britain’s largest mail-order wine merchant. It was appley and rich, and much more delicious than any Champagne at the same price.

Others clearly thought so too. It became quite the thing to conduct blind tastings of the best sparkling wines, and the English ones often came out on top. The first was the so-called ‘Judgement of Parsons Green’ organised by wine consultant and Master of Wine Stephen Skelton in 2011 with a Ridgeview Grosvenor Blanc de Blancs 2007 emerging triumphant. It was followed by various other ‘Judgements’ culminating in 2016, when, at a competition in Paris judged by actual Frenchmen, a wine from Nyetimber beat France’s finest. It was like Agincourt all over again. The newspapers had a field day.

But it wasn’t just in the news pages that English sparkling wines were proving popular. They were also winning over drinkers. Bars like London’s St Pancras Hotel began offering English wine as the house fizz, instead of non-vintage Champagne. Vineyard planting increased from around 1000 hectares in 2005 to nearly 4000 in 2018. Seventy per cent of this was used to make sparkling wine but the still wines were coming on rapidly too. Bacchus, one of those Germanic crosses with its crisp nettle, grapefruit and elderflower flavours, was touted as England’s answer to sauvignon blanc. By 2010, wines like Chapel Down Flint Dry were ubiquitous in British supermarkets and people were opening them without that knowing wink that said ‘It’s English, can you believe it?’

Unlike the sparklers, however, it took me much longer to come round to the joys of England’s still wines. In 2011, I started a wine column for The Lady magazine. The pay was terrible and erratic, but I stuck it out because it amused me to introduce myself at parties as the wine critic for The Lady; people would then treat me as if I had stepped out from the pages of P. G. Wodehouse. The editor, Rachel Johnson – sister of Boris – asked me to write something on English wines. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed.

At the time there was a shop in London’s Borough Market called the Wine Pantry that sold only English wines. My wife and I went down one day and met with Julia Stafford, an English wine evangelist who ran it. We tried bottle after bottle and I found several whites that really impressed me. Some were made from the usual crosses designed for cool climates, like bacchus and huxelrebe, but there were also French varieties like pinot blanc and pinot gris, and some of them were pretty good. My mind was beginning to open.

I started coming across landmark English still wines: an exceptional 2013 chardonnay from Gusbourne; a pinot noir from Bolney, the first English red where I actually wanted to finish the bottle; another chardonnay, this time from Kit’s Coty, Chapel Down’s single-vineyard premium range. And it wasn’t just the French varieties – an ortega, a German grape, grown by Biddenden in Kent, tasted wonderfully distinctively English. Then there were organic blends from Davenport in Sussex.

With crippling frosts at the start of the growing season, 2017 was a terrible vintage for many growers but the following year was a corker, with some vineyards able to get their red grapes riper than ever before. Gusbourne in Kent made its best-ever pinot noir in 2018, one that amazed me with its ripeness and perfume. Here was a red that wasn’t just good for England, it would have been notable if it came from France or Germany. Now there’s even riper pinot being made by a vineyard in Essex called Danbury Ridge. Its 2020 vintage had a brightness of fruit that was positively Californian.

So how did we get, in 30 years, from boarding-school acidity to making pinot noir that gives Burgundy a run for its money? It’s a fascinating story of triumph and disaster, full of larger-than-life characters with big ambitions. Most of the story takes place since the 1990s, but the roots of English winemaking stretch back to medieval times and perhaps even further to the Roman occupation.

This book is not a guide to English wine – your favourite producer may not even be mentioned. Very quickly in my research, I realised that there was too much going on to include everyone. Instead I’ve picked a small group of people and producers who are emblematic of the rapid changes within the industry. I have concentrated on southern England, as something like 90 per cent of the wine made in Britain today comes from grapes grown in this part of the country (though there are at least two excellent producers in Wales). There’s a bibliography at the back for those who want to explore further.

My aim is to show how English wine went from a joke to world class in 30 years. There’s no doubt that the changing climate has played a huge part in this story. Global warming has so far been good for English wine, though it hasn’t all been positive. Warm winters followed by cold springs bring the risk of frosts like those which wreaked such havoc in 2017. If warming continues at the same rate, southern England could become too hot to make its new-found signature wines.

But this isn’t a book about the weather, either. It’s about cooperation and conflict, inspiration and perspiration, hope and doubt. Most of all, it’s about a few determined, some might say bloody-minded, people. From the City types with nothing but a dream and a spare few million to a single mother working a few acres in Kent, it’s the story of a handful of men and women who ignored the doubters like me and decided that not only could you make drinkable wine in England, you could make something truly world class. And all from our cold, damp climate.

CHAPTER 1

False starts

‘The whole company said they never drank better foreign wine in their lives’

Samuel Pepys

Searching for evidence of historical winegrowing in England can take you to some funny places . . . like California. There’s a wine made by Richard Grant, a Napa Valley producer, called Wrotham Clone Reserve Pinot Noir. It’s named after an obscure version of the pinot noir grape that comes not from France, but from a village in Kent between Sevenoaks and Maidstone called Wrotham (pronounced ‘root ’um’) where it was found growing against a wall. All very mysterious.

The vine was discovered by an English wine pioneer called Edward Hyams, who was born in Stamford Hill in London in 1910. Photos show a man who in later life sported an enormous moustache like Georges Clemenceau. But don’t let his Edwardian appearance fool you – there was something of the Tom Good from The Good Life about Hyams. A historian, sci-fi novelist, journalist, ecologist, horticulturist and pacifist, he was a founder member of the organic farming body the Soil Association. After the Second World War, in which, despite his pacifism, he served in the RAF and Royal Navy, he moved with his wife to Molash in Kent to pursue his interest in horticulture, particularly vine growing. The idea was to be fully self-sustainable. In his memoir From the Wasteland, published in 1950, he admitted that part of the reason for his interest in viticulture was so that they would be able to drink a litre of wine a day between them. Which sounds like as good a reason as any.

This was at a time when there had not been any commercial vineyards in the British Isles for 35 years. Not only did Hyams grow and attempt to make wine, with varying degrees of success, but he was a proselytizer for English wine, writing books and newspaper articles on the subject as well as being a regular voice on the BBC. He was always on the hunt for evidence of historic viticulture, and one day in the 1950s he struck gold when he discovered a strange grape variety growing wild in a churchyard in Wrotham.

That Wrotham vine is thought to have been around 200 years old when it was discovered. With its white-dappled leaves, the vine resembled pinot meunier (the name ‘meunier’ means ‘miller’ because the vine leaves were said to look like they had been dusted with flour).1 How it got to Kent is a bit of a mystery. One theory is that it’s the same variety as a vine identified by Sir Joseph Banks at Tortworth in Gloucestershire, known as Miller’s Burgundy (named after a Mr Miller rather than because of its dusty leaves). Banks, who lived from 1743 to 1820, was a botanist and a member of the Royal Society. In a picture by Joshua Reynolds that sits in the National Portrait Gallery, he looks a dashing sort of fellow, every inch the dishy, romantic scientist of the popular imagination. Sadly in his later years he cut rather less of a dash, as he suffered so badly from gout that he struggled to walk and had to be wheeled around.

Two centuries later and with his flair for publicity, Hyams surmised that pinot noir was brought to Britain by the Romans, a claim that has since been repeated in much literature on the subject. Most books on English wine start with the Romans planting vines in England. It’s a tantalising link, especially as one of the most popular grapes in England is called bacchus, after the Roman god of wine and merriment. Sadly, bacchus as a variety actually dates back just to 1933, comes from Germany and was only planted in England in the seventies.

Tacitus wrote of Britain that ‘the sky is obscured by constant rain and cold, but it never gets bitterly cold.’ Though he never actually visited, the Roman historian’s assessment sounds pretty accurate. According to analysis from tree rings, it was likely that the climate in Roman Britain was about 1˚C warmer than it is today. Hence it would have been perfectly possible for the Romans to grow grapes here – though if they did, no conclusive evidence survives. We know that plenty of wine was drunk in Roman Britain, as broken amphorae with wine residues attest, but it was most likely imported. Just as it is now, Britain was plugged into a sophisticated trade network where wine from warmer climates could be brought to these shores more easily than growing grapes on a damp, dark island. This would be a perennial problem for England’s winemakers: why struggle to make what you can more easily import?

The balmy climate of Roman Britain didn’t last. Around 400 AD it became colder and wetter. There’s a theory that this cooler weather hastened the decline of the Western Roman Empire as northern tribes moved in to escape the cold. The climate change certainly ended any viticulture that was going on in Britain. By the 10th century, however, the climate had begun to warm up again. This was the start of the medieval warm period that would last until around 1300. The Domesday Book lists vineyards all over the south of England but particularly in East Anglia and the South West. Some of these were long-term enterprises, as Hugh Barty-King writes in A Tradition of English Wine: ‘Many vineyards which had featured in the Domesday Survey were also being worked into the fourteenth century.’ Oddly, vines were thin on the ground in the heartland of modern English wine, Kent and Sussex, perhaps because the areas were still heavily forested at the time.

According to Hyams,2 England’s vineyards were not of insignificant size, nor were they just the preserve of monasteries. The 12th century chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote of his home county of Wiltshire that: ‘The vines are thicker, the grapes more plentiful and their flavour more delightful than in any other part of England. Those who drink this wine do not have to contort their lips because of the sharp and unpleasant taste, indeed it is little inferior to French wine in sweetness.’ There’s a detail of a grape harvest in a carving in Gloucester Cathedral, and there is evidence for grape growing in place names containing ‘win’, ‘wyn’, ‘vyn’, ‘vin’, ‘vine’ or ‘vyne’. Indeed, the city of Winchester in Hampshire may be named after the vine. The poet Robert of Gloucester wrote how, ‘London is known for its shipping. Winchester for its wine.’

In 1154, King Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine. The couple did have a vineyard in England, at Windsor, not far from where the Laithwaite family has now planted grapes in Windsor Great Park, but the influx of wine from Bordeaux and the surrounding area which was now under English control was a blow to the home-grown product. Hyams wrote that, ‘The infant English industry was overlaid at birth by its immensely vigorous Gallic mother.’3 Now there’s an image. Even after England lost control of Aquitaine following the end of the Hundred Years’ War at the battle of Castillon in 1453, French imports continued. It wasn’t just coming from France either – wines from southern Spain and the Canary Islands, Madeira, Portugal, Italy and Cyprus were common too.

In his diary, Samuel Pepys boasts of the variety of wines in his cellar in 17th century London: ’At this time I have two tierces [a small cask] of claret [red Bordeaux] – two quarter-casks of canary [wine from the Canary Islands, probably not dissimilar to sherry], and a smaller of sack [sherry] – a vessel of tent [red wine from Spain], another of Malaga, and another of white wine, all in my wine-cellar together – which I believe none of my friends of my name now alive ever had of his own at one time.’ There were no English wines in his cellar but in his diary he did mention visiting Hatfield House, north of London, where Lord Salisbury had a vineyard. He also visited a vineyard belonging to a Colonel Blunt near Blackheath, though sadly he didn’t comment on its merit. But another diarist, John Evelyn, tried Blunt’s wine, and pronounced it ‘good for little’.

Like Pepys, Evelyn was a noted drinks enthusiast, a member of the Royal Society and a cider maker. Evelyn also wrote a book called Pomona, aimed at landowners, which argued that rather than make or import wine, the English should drink high-class cider instead. He wrote: ‘Our design is relieving the want of wine, by a succedaneum [substitution] of Cider.’ It wasn’t for another three years, in 1667, that Pepys first recorded his thoughts on English wine, when he wrote about one made by Admiral Sir William Batten from grapes grown in his garden at Walthamstow, then a village outside London. Pepys wrote of trying ‘a bottle or two of his own [Batten’s] last year’s wine, growing at Walthamstow; then the whole company said they never drank better foreign wine in their lives’.

Despite the inclement weather of this period (1500–1700, better known today as the Little Ice Age), English viticulture was gathering pace. In 1666, John Rose published a book championing native wines called The English Vineyard Vindicated. He was Charles II’s personal gardener; there’s an amusing-looking picture in the National Trust collection of Rose on his knees presenting a pineapple to a severe-looking king. Growing a pineapple, the most exotic of all the fruits, in England was no mean feat, so imagine what he could do with grapes. Indeed his book contains much advice that is still relevant to this day, such as not to plant vines in very fertile soil as this would lead to an overproduction of foliage rather than grapes.

Rose’s timing, however, was not good. As John Evelyn and other fine West Country cider makers discovered to their cost, these 9 or 10% alcoholic drinks were appearing at a time in the 17th and 18th centuries when the British were getting a taste for spirits like gin and fortified wines such as port, sherry and Madeira, which would have contained double the amount of alcohol. Even the reds from Bordeaux were usually pumped up for British tastes with strong southern French wines or even brandy. Delicate lower-alcohol drinks like cider were out. Eighteenth-century German historian Baron von Archenholz noted, ‘In London they liked everything that is strong and heady.’

Such was the poor reputation of English wine that when Charles Hamilton, the Duke of Abercorn, gave his guests wine from his property at Painhill, which was in Cobham, Surrey, he made sure not to tell them it was English before they tasted it. He planted the vineyard in 1740 and very sensibly employed a French vine grower, David Geneste. The grape varieties used were auvergnat and something called miller – probably pinot meunier. Initially they tried to make a red wine, but the results were a disaster – ‘harsh and austere’ according to Hamilton. But the white and a pale rosé made from red grapes were much more successful. Hamilton wrote: ‘Both of them sparkled and creamed in the glass like Champaign (sic).’ The wine sold for 50 guineas a hogshead (300-litre cask) at a time when a barrel of Château Margaux would have cost around 45 guineas. The Champagne comparison is a tantalising glimpse of what might have been had what Hamilton and Geneste learned at Painshill been continued. The vineyard was just a part of the lavish garden on the property, which was one of the first in England designed to look natural rather than in the Classical, formal style that had till then been fashionable. Hamilton imported plants from America and had follies like a ruined abbey built in the grounds. He spent so lavishly that by 1773 he was severely in debt and had to sell the estate. Wine production continued for a number of years after his death in 1786 but by 1814 the vines had been pulled up.

The erratic weather of the era meant you needed deep pockets to make wine in Britain. And pockets didn’t come much deeper than those of John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, Marquess of Bute. He lived from 1847 to 1900 and at one point was thought to be the richest man in the world, meaning his vineyard wasn’t necessarily run to turn a profit. In 1875, under the supervision of his head gardener Andrew Pettigrew, Bute planted 2,000 vines including gamay, the grape of modern-day Beaujolais, at Castell Coch, a Gothic revival castle near Cardiff.

The satirical magazine Punch joked that it would take four men to drink a Welsh wine – two to hold the victim down, and one to pour it down his neck. Nevertheless, the best vintages, like the 1881, were said to taste like still Champagne. In good years they even attempted to make a red wine – the 1893 sold for 60 shillings a dozen, about the same as Chambertin, a smart red Burgundy. But good vintages were rare, with 1882 and ’83 both disastrous. Large amounts of sugar were needed every year to boost meagre alcohol levels, and the whole operation sounds like a bit of struggle. Pettigrew reckoned that out of 44 vintages, they only ripened the grapes thoroughly in seven. A journal of the time was ‘impressed with the success of the experiment from a climatic point of view, but its costly nature and its questionable pecuniary utility were recognised as being against the adoption of vine-growing in this country’.4 If I were Bute, I’d have just moved to France and made wine there.

In 1897, Hatch Mansfield,5 the noted City of London wine merchant, took on the property aiming to bring it to a wider customer base. Later, managing director Ralph Mansfield commented,6 ‘I do well remember my father telling me of an experiment in selling Welsh wines which was not exactly a success.’ Wine production at Castell Coch died out in the First World War, mainly because of the difficulty of obtaining sugar, and the vines were finally uprooted in 1920. The old vineyards are now a council estate.

Pettigrew surmised that the problem wasn’t just the average temperature in Britain – there are parts of Europe which grow grapes successfully with a lower average temperature throughout the year – but that in southern England and Wales it rarely got hot enough during the summer. English viticultural expert Stephen Skelton thinks that you need summer temperatures to exceed 30˚C on occasion for grapes to achieve full ripeness.7

There’s no record of any wine being made commercially between the wars, but in the 1940s and ’50s the seeds of a wine industry were planted by a few pioneering men and women. The first was Ray Barrington Brock, a former chemist who applied his scientific mind to the problem of which grape varieties would work in the English climate. In photos, with his closely cropped hair and short-sleeved shirts, he looks every inch the modern fifties man. At his home in Surrey he started what he grandly called the Oxted Viticultural Research Station. Here he obtained a variety of vines from across England and the Continent, and planted them to see which would work. His research was invaluable in an industry with no continuous traditions – if, indeed, one could call it an industry; in reality there were just a few eccentrics struggling to grow grapes. England in viticultural terms was like a new-world country, only a cold, rainy new-world country, rather than a warm, optimistic one like Australia.

One of the grapes that Brock picked up from Germany was müller-thurgau, which became a staple of English wine. There were countless other varieties he planted that failed to thrive. In the early years the wine wasn’t much good either. A vintage was made by Edward Hyams which he described with commendable honesty as ‘very poor and yeasty’.

Yet even if the results were underwhelming, Brock’s and his peers’ work was a great help to those who would come later. Every English vineyard planted since owes something to Brock’s trial-and-error approach to ripening grapes. Hyams was perhaps even more important because through his books and media work he disseminated information about viticulture and wine-making. Part of the problem in the past was that important facts would be learned but then forgotten. Hyams made sure that this did not happen and helped ensure that winemakers could learn from each other’s mistakes.

Despite their importance in the development of English wine, neither Brock nor Hyams made wine commercially. The pioneer here was – deep breath – Major-General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones, who in 1952 planted a vineyard at Hambledon in Hampshire, the village famed as the ‘cradle of cricket’. Born in 1896, Sir Guy had served on the Western Front in the First World War and picked up a love of France including French wine. Later, after the Second World War, he served as military attaché in Paris from 1946 until 1949. Returning home, he was determined to make good-quality dry wine in England.

The chalky soil at Hambledon is very similar to parts of Champagne and is today planted with chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier. But inspired by Brock’s work, Sir Guy planted müller-thurgau and seyval blanc, a French hybrid.8 If you want to see what the early days were like, there’s a wonderful Pathé film on the Hambledon website of a harvest, probably in the early 1960s, where all the men are wearing ties, a sartorial standard to which I wish modern winemakers would return. But don’t let the ‘jolly day out’ feel of the film fool you. Hambledon was a thoroughly professional affair. Winemaking was in the hands of Bill Calchary, who lived until 2021 and continued to help out until just before his death, in conjunction with Austrian consultant Anton Massel, who introduced more consistent winemaking techniques from Germany. Massel would later go on to found the IWSC (International Wine and Spirits Competition).

Sir Guy’s example inspired others to plant vineyards and attempt to make wine. In 1958, Margaret Gore-Brown planted vines at Beaulieu House in Hampshire (she later gave her name to the trophy for English wine of the year at the UKVA, now Wine GB, annual awards). It was a revival of winemaking on the property that had previously been carried out by Cistercian monks in the 13th century. Indeed there’s a great story of how Beaulieu Vineyard in California tried to stop Gore-Brown selling wine under the name of her house before she informed them that they had been making wine at Beaulieu since before America existed. The matter was quietly dropped.

By 1967, there were enough growers to form an English Vineyards Association. The first chairman was Jack Ward of the Merrydown Wine Company based in Horan in East Sussex. Despite its name, Merrydown was a specialist in cider and country wine (wine made from fruit other than grapes) but in 1954 Ward had been inspired by Brock to plant some grapevines. English wine was finally building up a bit of momentum. There were even competitions, including at Christie’s, where homegrown products were tried blind against German and French ones and not found wanting. Yet some people still had trouble with the very idea of English wine. Sir Guy told a story of trying to bring some of his wares into France for export and being stopped at Orly Airport: ‘The wine seems to have aroused the suspicions of the French douane [customs officials] who could not believe that England produced wine.’ Steven Spurrier had a similar problem when he tried to organise the delivery of an English wine to be served to President Georges Pompidou and Queen Elizabeth II at a dinner at the British Embassy in Paris. He was curtly informed by French customs that ‘English wine does not exist.’

The weather still wasn’t cooperating either. In A Tradition of English Wine, Hugh Barty-King describes 1954 to 1958 as a ‘succession of bad years’. Only the very best sites could ripen grapes sufficiently to make a drinkable wine. By the sixties, Brock had realised that his vineyard in Surrey was perhaps not so well sited at 450 feet (137 metres) above sea level. The extra altitude meant that the grapes ripened late. He wrote ‘It used to be said that every hundred feet of height represented three days’ lateness of ripening of ordinary fruit.’ Like Brock, other English growers were beginning to work out what was needed from a vineyard site. Situation was absolutely critical, in a way that it wouldn’t be in warmer climates like Burgundy or the Loire. In France it might be the difference between good and great wine; in England it was the difference between something drinkable and something that would be better off turned into vinegar. Ideally the vineyard should be close to sea level, on a south-facing slope to catch the evening rays of sunshine. Shelter from high winds was important, so not too close to the sea, but proximity to large bodies of water was helpful in preventing the temperature dropping too low. Good drainage was important – vines don’t like wet feet – and frost traps such as ditches or wet, low-lying fields were to be avoided.

What were these early wines like? English wine writer Oz Clarke says, ‘I have not found the slightest evidence that anything Brock made was drinkable.’ He describes the early Alfriston English Wine Festivals he attended in the 1970s as ‘sodden affairs with sodden people giving you sodden wine’. He opened an old English wine recently, 1976 Chilsdown from West Sussex, and deemed it ‘unbearable to put it in my mouth’. He added, though, that there were rays of sunshine like Biddenden and Spots Farm in Kent, and Breaky Bottom in East Sussex.

In the late seventies and eighties, a second wave of producers was to arrive, who were more commercially minded, and better trained and equipped. Using techniques imported from Germany by men like Anton Massel, they were able to temper the high acidity of England’s grapes with a little sugar, making them a lot more palatable. It was in the eighties that English wine would experience its first boom.

________________

1  Though later DNA testing would show that Wrotham pinot is an early-ripening clone of pinot noir

2  Dionysus by Edward Hyams

3  From Dionysus. And what a vigorous mother she was. During the 14th century, it’s estimated that something like the equivalent of 50 million bottles of wine would be shipped from Bordeaux to England every year at a time when the population was around 5 million

4  The Wine and Spirit Gazette (Harper’s Weekly), 16 April 1892

5  Yes, the same firm that planted a vineyard in Kent in 2017 in partnership with Champagne Taittinger

6  A Tradition of English Wine, Hugh Barty King

7  Wine of Great Britain, Stephen Skelton

8  See ‘Grape Expectations’, chapter 12

CHAPTER 2

The bloody awful weather years

‘The industry was the preserve of crusty old major-generals, wealthy farmers and a scattering of military retirees’

Stephen Skelton

Visiting Peter Hall at Breaky Bottom in Sussex is a pilgrimage for any devotee of English wine. Though only ten miles from Brighton, it feels like you could be in a remote Welsh valley. It’s perhaps apt, then, that Hall started out as a shepherd before marrying the local farmer’s daughter and becoming, with his new wife, tenants on a six-acre small holding.

Born in 1943 and brought up in Notting Hill, ‘when it was still rough’, Hall studied agriculture in Newcastle. He had no experience of viticulture or winemaking but he grew up in a wine-drinking household – unusual for the time. His mother was French and her father used to own a famous restaurant in Soho called Au Petit Savoyard which was popular with showbiz types, lords and gangsters. In 1974, Hall was inspired by a vine grower on the Isle of Wight called Nick Poulter (the author of two books – Growing Grapes and Wine from Your Vines) and planted müller-thurgau and seyval blanc vines on the slopes surrounding his Sussex cottage.

He’s been there ever since, making wines that have become legendary in the English wine canon. It helps that Hall looks somewhat mythological himself, like the ancient mariner with his striped sweater, sailor’s cap and the constant smoking of roll-up cigarettes. I’d heard that he was a whisky fan so brought him a bottle when I visited, though he told me that at his age he doesn’t drink very much these days, and we stuck to tea. Probably wise as I was driving and there’s a two-mile unmade track in and out of Breaky Bottom – which is named after bracken rather than what the drive did to the underside of my old Mercedes.

Breaky Bottom has established a reputation that resonates beyond the small world of English wine. Hall himself seems torn between an urge to cut himself off in his little valley and his delight that the outside world seems so interested in what he is up to. Just before I visited, he’d been to a reception at Clarence House hosted by Camilla Parker-Bowles (now, of course, the Queen Consort, though this was before the death of Queen Elizabeth II) and was fresh from being interviewed by the German wine press. He proudly told me how the wine buyer from Sketch, a fashionable London restaurant, was demanding: ‘I want Breaky Bottom,’ while Christina, his second wife, was reminding him that he needed to label some bottles for the wine merchant Corney & Barrow as the buyer was coming to collect them in person the next day. And it’s not just the wines that are in demand; Hall has had to fend off potential buyers for his farm. Shaking his head, he told me9 about one suitor from the Low Countries who had offered him ten times what he paid for the property when he bought it outright in 1994 for £100,000.

It’s a far cry from scratching a living in the seventies, which Hall recalls was how English winemaking was back in those days. In 1976, his first harvest, he had some beautifully ripe grapes but no winery, so he took the crop to one of the largest commercial operators at the time, Lamberhurst in Kent which was owned by Kenneth McAlpine,10 a former racing driver and scion of the construction family. The winemaker was a German called Karl-Heinz Johner who had trained at the country’s elite wine school at Geisenheim. Hall wanted a dry, French-style wine rather than the sweet Germanic wines that most English producers made. Eventually the time came to try what Johner had made and immediately Hall could tell that the winemaker had ‘completely goofed it up’. Johner then admitted that, despite his education, this was his first vintage. ‘Just my luck to make wine for someone who knows about wine,’ he said, as Hall recalled in a spot-on German accent. A morning with Hall is like spending time with Rory Bremner.

The problem was that Johner had applied formulaic, cold-climate winemaking practice to Hall’s grapes. This involved adding water to bring down the acidity and then adding sugar before fermentation to make up for the dilution. But because Hall’s grapes were not the searingly acidic grapes that were normal in England, the subsequent wine was lacking in acidity. To make up for this Johner added citric acid and some unfermented grape juice at the end of the process to sweeten it – a process routinely done to cover up for unripe grapes, which Hall’s weren’t. He then topped it off with a dose of sulphur to stop the wine refermenting in the bottle. It tasted awful. Hall submitted a claim for the value of the wine that had been ruined and, after more than a year of letters and phone calls, eventually got the money out of McAlpine. The irony is that Lamberhurst was probably the best equipped winery in England at the time. If it was turning out bad wine, then there’s every chance that everybody else’s was worse.

By the time of the next vintage, Hall had established his own winery. He showed me some photos: it looked incredibly primitive, making wine in what looked like large buckets. ‘There was no money for proper tanks or pumps,’ Hall outlined. Thirty years later, Johner, now a successful winemaker, came to visit Hall, who says there were no hard feelings.

Incompetent German winemakers weren’t the only problem that Hall had to deal with. For five straight years, water built up on a neighbour’s field before pouring down the hill and flooding Hall’s cottage to the extent that he and his wife were forced to move into a caravan. Fortunately, the vines planted on the steep hillsides were largely untouched by the deluge. Then there was the plague of pheasants that ate all his grapes one year. There was something biblical about the trials that Hall faced and eventually overcame, but I get the impression that he relished a fight.

The hardest thing of all was what Hall describes as the BAW years – bloody awful weather. In the seventies and eighties, winemakers would be lucky to get two good vintages a decade, with six passable and two that would be a complete write-off. Most of the time Hall was making what he describes as ‘tolerably acceptable still wines’ – though they were considered by Oz Clarke and other wine writers to be England’s finest.

One of Hall’s great friends is the former winemaker Stephen Skelton. These days Skelton is Mr English Wine, a Master of Wine who has written many books on the subject and now works as a consultant for those looking to plant vines. Skelton established a vineyard at Tenterden in Kent that would eventually morph into the present-day behemoth Chapel Down. Unlike almost every other English winemaker, Skelton had had proper training at Geisenheim. He first planted vines in England in Easter 1977 and wasn’t impressed with the competition. In fact, he said at the time that he had never had an English wine that he liked. Skelton, like Hall, makes marvellous company because he has strong views on everything, which he has no hesitation in expressing. There’s something of the Professor Yaffle, the learned irascible woodpecker from Bagpuss,11 about Skelton, tutting and laughing at the incompetence and foolishness of other English winemakers – and, no doubt, other wine writers.

Skelton’s first vintage was in 1979, of which he produced 8,000 bottles. But it was the next year that put him on the map. He made a seyval blanc with a little bit of sweetness in it and some carbon dioxide left over from fermentation still bubbling through the wine – a ‘spritz’ rather like you get in some young riesling kabinetts or a vinho verde from Portugal. Much to Skelton’s surprise, he got a call out of the blue from Tony Laithwaite, who ran the UK’s largest mail order wine merchant, asking to buy a few cases. This wasn’t Laithwaite’s first foray into English wine – the company had listed a 1974 Adgestone from the Isle of Wight,12 a vineyard that is still in business. But this time Laithwaite had been tipped off by Hugh Johnson, chairman of the Sunday Times Wine Club, a partnership between the newspaper and Laithwaites, who had tried the wine at a competition.

A few weeks later, Skelton had another call, this time from Colin Gillespie from UKVA (United Kingdom Viticultural Association) informing him that he had won the Gore-Browne trophy for English wine of the year. This was the competition that Johnson had been involved with, and he’d tipped off Laithwaite who’d cannily managed to buy a few cases before the results were known and Skelton put the price up. Gillespsie added, however, that some on the judging panel thought that Skelton had cheated ‘by having trained in viticulture and oenology [winemaking]’. There was something not quite cricket about knowing what you were doing, which went against the amateur ethos of English wine at the time. As wine journalist Jancis Robinson, who then wrote a profile on Skelton for the Sunday Times, said on her website: ‘For several decades, vine-growing was typically a retirement occupation for the well-heeled with a paddock to spare . . .’ Or as Skelton himself put it:13 ‘The industry . . . was the preserve of crusty old major-generals, wealthy farmers and a scattering of military retirees.’