Highlighting our Sussex vineyards as we mark English Wine Week Raise a glass
The national campaign runs from June 20-28, its aim is to raise awareness of English wine across the country.
One event that coronavirus is not going to stop is English Wine Week, the annual celebration of what is increasingly appreciated as a world-class product.
But this year what happens in Sussex and elsewhere in the UK from June 20 to 28 will be rather different from the usual guided tours of vineyards, face-to-face tastings and special menus in restaurants.
Activity, explains Peter Gladwin, acting managing director of trade body WineGB, has to be mainly virtual rather than actual. “We have a comprehensive social media campaign underway, channelling celebrity and expert tastings, discussion groups, video tours and special offers from vineyards and producers,” he said.
Like other vineyard owners throughout the county, Gladwin has been forced to put the usual programme of visits, tours and special events such as wedding parties on hold until restrictions on the hospitality trade are relaxed. But he and his wife Bridget, who have run Nutbourne Vineyard near Pulborough for almost 30 years, are eagerly awaiting that moment.
The pandemic is a huge blow for the 70-plus commercial vineyards in Sussex.
For most of them, welcoming visitors is crucial to business success – a third of wine sales are at the cellar door, for example.
The county is the heartland of UK wine production. It has the largest area of vineyards in WineGB’s south east region, which is home to three-quarters of England’s 8,600 acres of vines. Of the grape juice produced, 70 per cent goes into the acclaimed sparkling wine, that time and again has beaten champagne in blind-tasting contests, while the remainder becomes ever-improving still wine.
Sussex is also where the fine fizz emerged, in the 1990s.
Wine grapes have been grown in the UK since Roman times: the thirsty invading army needed supplies, and the soldiers were followed by monks, the gentry, even royalty (Henry II planted a vineyard at Windsor Castle). In 1667 Samuel Pepys enthused about an English wine; a century later the 10th Duke of Norfolk had a generously yielding vineyard at Arundel Castle.
The ground-breaking 20th century initiative happened close to West Chiltington. There, at the Domesdaymentioned Nyetimber estate, Chicago emigrés Sandy and Stuart Moss went against all then-conventional advice and planted the three champagne grape varieties, chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier, not the Germanic hybrids happier in England’s cool climate. The Mosses made their wine in exactly the same way as champagne, bubbles created by second fermentation in bottle.
The first wine they released, 1992 blanc de blancs, astonished the world by coming top in an international blind tasting of sparkling wines in Paris. The rest is history...
Nyetimber, owned since 2006 by Dutch-born former shipping magnate Eric Heerema, is still the bestknown name in English sparkling wine.
But it now has many rivals. Soon to follow it was Ridgeview, where great credit is due to the late Mike Roberts for making fine Sussex fizz widely available – its own well-distributed wines apart, Ridgeview is responsible for many top own-brand bottles.
There are, though, longerestablished producers that are important in the modern Sussex wine story.
Peter Hall, whose tiny Breaky Bottom vineyard is tucked beneath the South DownsinlandfromNewhaven, has risen above a truly unfair series of tribulations over 46 years, the latest serious frost damage this spring.
Bolney Wine Estate, near Haywards Heath, will celebrate 50 years in 2022, and has, unusually for the UK, long focused on award-winning still red wines alongside its whites and sparklers.
Carr Taylor Vineyard, inland from Hastings, made the first commercial quantities of champagnemethod sparkling wine in the UK in 1983, but from reichensteiner grapes.
Then there are the newcomers. Set to become England’s largest single vineyard at 400 acres, Rathfinny, high on the South Downs above Alfriston, is a brand-new business life (and massive £10-million-plus investment) for former hedge fund manager Mark Driver and his wife Sarah.
Career changes, too, have led to some of the UK’s finest still wines, made by former marketing executive Alison
Nightingale at Albourne Estate, near Hurstpierpoint, and ex-Formula One engineer Simon Woodhead at Stopham Estate, close to Pulborough. Both have planted international varieties such as pinot blanc and pinot gris as well as the UK’s signature still wine grape, bacchus,.
Sussex is also the scene of much innovation
Entrepreneur Penny Streeter has brought her South African “golf and wine estate” concept to Mannings Heath, near Horsham, where the first grapes will be harvested this year. She also owns nearby Grade I-listed Leonardslee Gardens, site in 2018 of an experimental planting of pinotage vines.
Bluebell Vineyard Estates, beside Ashdown Forest, is about to release a pioneering barrel-aged merlot; Albourne and Bolney have both introduced vermouths.
Alongside all this is one hugely significant Sussex influence on the burgeoning English wine scene: Plumpton Agricultural College. Driver, Nightingale and Woodhead – and many, many more top English winemakers – are graduates of the college’s internationally renowned wine department.
Expertise is part of the reason why Sussex produces superb wines now, plus good choice of vineyard sites on the county’s chalk-rich soils. Climate change matters, too, bringing riper grapes. But its downsides include late frosts affecting earlier-opening buds and damaging storms and strong winds during the growing season.
Vintages vary a lot – wicked frost in April 2017 limited total UK production to 5.9 million bottles against 2018’s bumper 13 million.
What will the 2020 vintage hold for Sussex?
This is a crucial moment, as the vine flowers open, but prospects are encouraging, despite sporadic damage from April frost.
Cameron Roucher, Rathfinny vineyard manager, commented: “We’re a week to ten days ahead of normal. Here’s hoping for a settled flowering.”
At Bolney, flowering started even sooner, with an unusually early harvest predicted.
By then, Sussex vineyards should be in full welcoming mode. And, as several suggested to me, there could be a silver lining to the Covid-19 cloud: increased
The county is the heartland of UK wine production.
LIZ SAGUES
enthusiasm for buying local.
Liz Sagues is an awardwinning wine writer and author of A Celebration of English Wine (Robert Hale), which tells a 2,000-year story from the Romans to 21st century world-beating bubbles.