Publication day!
My latest book, Vines in a Cold Climate, is published today. Here’s the story behind it.
Apologies for the lack of posts on my Substack. I’ve been on holiday in my childhood home in leafy Bucks. It was a very English holiday and we did all the things that I used to do as a boy on rainy days. I was delighted to discover that the Tring museum, a collection of stuffed animals started by Lionel Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild had not changed one bit. And Bekonscot model railway was if anything better than I remembered. The moment I clambered aboard the little train, I didn’t stop grinning. I’m not sure the girls enjoyed it quite as much as me.
I have a book out tomorrow called Vines in a Cold Climate: the people behind the English wine revolution. The idea for it came from Derek Wyatt, a former MP, international rugby player and now editor at large for Atlantic books in London. As I have written in The Critic, I was not immediately enthused with the idea:
From the outside it looked as if most producers followed a similar pattern — some chap made a packet in the City and sunk a few spare millions into a vineyard in Hampshire, Kent or Sussex with the aim of making a sparkling wine to beat the French. It was all a bit branded gilet and golf umbrella. I might as well have been writing about accountancy firms, plus there were other books about English wine that did the job admirably.
But meeting an outspoken winemaker made me realise that there was a story there. What I didn’t know how to do was structure the book. Should it be a history of English wine starting with Julius Caesar or perhaps I could do a sort of tour de Angleterre? And how would I make it accessible to the general reader rather than just wine bores like me? I started the research, visiting producers in a bit of a haphazard manner and experts on the subject like Stephen Skelton, without any real idea of how the book was going to work out
I wanted to capture the outspoken personalities in English wine and for this I was inspired by two writers in particular, Robert Camuto and Simon Woolf. The former is the author of two brilliant books on Italian wine: Palmento, and its sequel South of Somewhere: Wine, Food, and the Soul of Italy, a journey through the wines of Southern Italy. This is something I wrote on him in 2021 for Tim Atkin:
Camuto’s modus operandi seems to be to remember indiscrete conversations over long liquid lunches and then reproduce them on the page. Or maybe he smuggles a tape recorder in. Either way the book is a riot. He’s blessed with access to great characters, Giampaolo Tabarrini in Montfalco is described as “exuberant to the point of seeming madness”.
In a similar fashion Woolf, author Foot Trodden: Portugal and the Wines Time Forgot and Amber Revolution, manages to get under the skin of his protagonists and tells the story of a country or countries through personal stories. The problem with both authors as models is that their books are based on long immersions in a country or region’s viticulture and intimate relations with the winemakers featured. I had a year to research and write the book - my editor wanted the book to be published this year. There are now dozens of good producers in England and I knew none of them well.
Rereading Patrick Matthews The Wild Bunch, which I wrote about recently, helped me find the way forward. It’s a book that is structured thematically and around people disagreeing with each other. So I looked for points of conflict and argument in the English wine industry, and while I wouldn’t say the whole thing fell into place, it became a lot easier to decide who to talk to and what to include. My publishers are billing it as the ‘definitive’ book on the subject which it absolutely isn’t. There are some quite major people and producers who I admire that get no more than a brief mention. Instead it’s a look at a dozen or so people who between them tell the story of English wine - though it’s nowhere near the whole story.
Does it work? I think it does, though I wish I’d had another six months to iron out all the kinks. It’s had some nice reviews including a recent one from Simon Heffer in the Literary Review: “Jeffreys takes an amusing jaunt around the personalities of the English wine industry and writes about them in a fashion that brings them to life." I hope there will be more like this.
Anyway, that’s the book. Please buy a copy and let me know what you think. Perhaps in person as I will be doing some events around southern England. I’ll post details about them on Sunday.
Vines in a Cold Climate: the people behind the English wine revolution by Henry Jeffreys is published by Allen & Unwin.
See you next week, Henry!
Congratulations. Will wait to buy a copy in person when you do an event in London.