I spent much of last week in a tiny darkened room reading my forthcoming book aloud for the audiobook version. As well as being one of the most mentally taxing things I have ever done, up there with learning to drive, it’s a great test of what works and what doesn’t. It certainly made me wish I’d used less complicated sentences and that my pronunciation of French words, of which there are many in wine, leaves a lot to be desired. I was really tempted to do comedy Rest is History accents for everyone especially the French winemakers in the book but was advised against it by the producer.
What with juggling my day job with publicity for the book and, hopefully, other projects (to be revealed), this Substack is going to become more sporadic. There will be at least one post a week, either an article or Sunday Drinking recommendations, but probably not both. Today, I give you 30 years of English wine history in five minutes.
Will Davenport who makes organic wines in Sussex recalls the fierce debate in English wine circles in the late 1990s about crossing the £20 threshold. Would anyone pay that much for an English Sparkling Wine at a time when you could buy a nice champagne for £14? Just over two decades later and Gusbourne in Kent has just released a wine called Fifty One Degrees North that costs nearly 10 times that. In recent years there’s been something of an arms race in English sparkling wine with Chapel Down, Nyetimber and others releasing increasingly expensive wines.
Charlie Holland, the winemaker at Gusbourne (who is about to move off to a new venture in Essex), looked a little sheepish when I asked him about the price. Apparently they did extensive testing against their French rivals like Krug and Cristal before coming up with the £195 price tag. It’s certainly a phenomenal wine and evidence of a swagger in English wine that wasn’t there even five years ago. It makes the late ‘90s look like ancient history. How did the industry come so far so quickly?
As any taxi driver will tell, ‘it’s global warming, innit?’ The 1970s and early ‘80s were what English wine pioneer Peter Hall at Breaky Bottom calls the BAW - bloody awful weather - years. Even the heatwave vintage of 1976 was ruined by a rainy autumn. But something began to change in 1989 and 1990 which were both very warm. 1994 was the year things really took off right with regular summer temperatures over 30 degrees centigrade up to the scorching 2003 vintage. There were still disastrous years like 2012 but you could now make a palatable wine in England more often than not.
Could being the operative word. England hadn’t suddenly become California, those warmer summer days would not matter without experienced professionals to make use of them. After the second world war, English wine had been the preserve of retired colonels and The Good Life brigade but by the late ‘80s there were homegrown winemakers like Peter Hall with a number of vintages under their belts who were discovering what worked and what didn’t.
But it was still a shoestring industry compared with other wine producing countries. This changed in 1988 with the arrival of two ambitious Americans, Sandy and Stuart Hall, who bought a farm complete with Tudor manor house, Nyetimber in West Sussex. Rather than the usual German varieties favoured by English winemakers, they planted chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier with the ambition to make a rival to champagne. Most people at the time thought they were mad. Stuart Moss, who died earlier this year, told me a story about an official from the Ministry of Agriculture who said that they would be better off planting apples. Moss snapped back: “we didn’t move 4,000 miles to grow apples!”
With a fortune made selling dental equipment, he had the means. They hired probably the most experienced winemaker in England, Kit Lindlar, and a French vineyard consultant called Jean-Manual Jacquinot, one of the very few who spoke English. Jacquinot was not impressed with the standard of English wine when he arrived: “At that time it was very bad. The still wine was awful; sparkling wine was worse.”
Their commitment was vindicated when the first vintage, a 1992, was shown blind by Jancis Robinson, wine writer for the Financial Times, to a group of French industry professionals who all pronounced it a fine vintage champagne. It would go on to win award after award. The Queen was a fan; it replaced champagne in the royal household for the first time in history. The ambitions of two Americans transformed English wine. The baton was taken up next by Mike Roberts at Ridgeview who planted in 1995. One of his wines beat the might of Piper Heidsieck and Charles Heidseick to win best sparkling wine in the world at the Decanter awards in 2010. In 2017, the French paid English wine the ultimate tribute when Taittinger planted vines near Faversham in Kent. Its first wine is due to come out in 2024.
In the ‘90s and ‘00s, English wine looked to Champagne for inspiration, and it proved a good model especially as you can make palatable sparkling wine from not entirely ripe grapes. But now the still wines are having their moment thanks to warmer temperatures and, with lots of trial and error, growers are learning how to ripen fruit more fully.
In 2016 Chapel Down startled everyone with the ripeness of its Kit’s Coty Chardonnay 2014, grown on a special patch of chalk near Maidstone. Other producers realised that with the right site and sufficient work in the vineyard, that England’s answer to Chablis could be achieved. Red wines have proved harder because you have to have a perfectly ripe skin or the wine will taste green. One estate, Danbury Ridge, in Essex, the driest part of country, has cracked it producing ripe pinot noirs with an almost New Zealand intensity of fruit even in difficult years like 2021. They are expensive at the moment but show what is possible with the necessary money and ambition.
Danbury Ridge is owned by a man with deep pockets as is Nyetimber but it’s not all about millionaires. The industry is so varied now with innovative young people taking over industrial urban spaces, buying in grapes and making weird and wonderful wines.
English wine is never going to be cheap, the cost of labour is too high and yields are too low, but you can find exceptional quality now in the £15-20 bracket if you know where to look. There are producers who are discovering that those much-maligned German varieties that built the English wine industry can, in the right hands, produce superb dry wines for fans of Muscadet, Sancerre or albariño. Hell, there’s even some actual albariño planted in Kent that in a warm year can take on the best of Spain. We’ve come a long way from the BAW years.
Even Homer nods
Spelling mistake in the penultimate sentence.