The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A pie, a pint… or a pinot noir?
Beer is not the only tipple in theYorkshire Wolds, as Damien Gabet discovers on a tour of local vineyards
‘My wife walked into a bar in York once. ‘What sort of wines do you have?’ she said. ‘Both,’ said the bartender.” My brilliant Blue Badge tourist guide, Tim Barber, told me that anecdote as we wended our way through the Yorkshire Wolds on the newly launched Yorkshire Wine Trail (YWT).
Yorkshire and wine. Two very different things. One, the embodiment of an honest, straight-talking look at life; the other, something that strikes an altogether more rarefied tone. Say the words together and you can expect incredulous glances.
Indeed, for hundreds of years the nearest thing to Yorkshire wine was brown, frothy and came in a pint glass. It has been said that (good) wine can’t be made above the 50th parallel – too cold, too wet. While it’s true that Yorkshire
skies bruise easily, the soil is good. In particular, the Wolds’ chalky uplands: a similar geology to that which props up Kent, England’s most viniferous county.
Combine that with a roll call of ultrahardy German varieties – and the ominous augury of a warmer world – and you have the makings of a promising terroir. Of the handful of vineyards that exist in Yorkshire, six (soon to be nine) have now united under the banner of the aforementioned trail, an oenophilic jaunt that aims to change hearts and mouths by inviting you to visit the county’s best producers.
Rather than lodging at different locations along the way, I started each of my three days at the optimally positioned Grand hotel in York. The nearest vineyard to the city (20 minutes by car) is Yorkshire Heart, where you will be greeted first by two chocolate labradors, followed soon afterwards by owners Gillian and Chris Spakouskas.
Gillian’s love for producing that most English of things, fruit wine, matured into planting hobby vines and they have been growing steadily since. They now shift 30,000 bottles a year. The fruits of their labour include the Latimer White, an easy drinker with a bit of sauvignon spirit. But it is their summer-in-a-glass rosé that is turning heads, having recently won an IWC bronze medal.
I tried it with a plate of local cured meats and cheeses in their bar, which looks out on to the vines. The no-nonsense Yorkshireness of the place is pervasive, creating an unadorned cellar-door experience that doesn’t hide the truth: a vineyard still feeling its way.
For full pastoral prettiness, you will swoon at Ryedale Vineyard. Owner Jon Fletcher lives with his wife in a 16thcentury farmhouse garlanded in fullbloom roses. Indoors, two tasteful bedrooms channel the new-old Englishness of Soho Houses, all heavy fabrics and muted tones.
Both have views of the south-facing vines whose varieties include the red Rondo, a hybrid with huge leaves that harness the ephemeral shine of a Yorkshire summer.
Jon popped on his tweed jacket and flat cap for a tour and tasting. His softly spoken education among the vines felt unembellished. “Stupidly, we make as well as grow,” he said, as we walked into his stables-turned-winery. “A lot can go wrong.”
“Fruity enough to make a Yorkshireman blush!” exclaims the tasting note for his sparkling rosé. I tried it from a thimble-sized cup and left with a bottle.
The next day, we made for Laurel Winery, just above the pretty market-and-minster town of Beverley. Tourist guide Tim stopped off in the chocky-box hamlet of Warter for us to visit the Yorkshire Wolds Heritage Museum Centre. The Wolds – soon to be awarded AONB status, I’m told – are often overshadowed by the more flirtatious Dales and Moors. As such, tourism is almost invisible across its pudding hillocks and rolling arable. We settled in the mini museum’s cowslip-carpeted garden to try one of Tim’s favourite Yorkshire delicacies: a fat wedge of Wensleydale cheese on a slice of barm brack (a dense fruit cake), accompanied – of course – by a flask of Yorkshire tea. It works.
Ian Sargent, the owner of Laurel and the man behind YWT, admits it is all about getting people to look beyond the wine heartlands of the South. As I walked with him and his daughter between the vines, he told me that more and more cereal farmers in Yorkshire are getting interested in grapes.
That is how family-run Little Wolds started out. Granddaughter and marketeer Alice Maltby is open about the farm’s barley-based roots and the impostor syndrome she felt when they started producing wines. A tasting at their view-laden plot confirmed their calibre and marked the pinnacle of my affinity for Yorkshire and its wine.
The trail’s high-born exception to the cereal farming rule is Carlton Towers Estate, whose walled garden has been replanted with immaculate rows of auxerrois colmar and pinot noir. The grapes, which will unite in a sparkling white, aren’t ready yet, so a visit is limited to a tour with the head gardener and a cream tea.
“It’s getting more popular, but our focus has to be on quality,” says Sargent. You can judge that at The Pipe and Glass, whose Michelin star attracts the great and greedy for gilt-edged grub and the local drop. They have rooms too, if you’re all on the bottle. Malton, “Yorkshire’s food capital”, is another gourmand magnet, a host of pubs and delis leaning into its old-world square.
In York, Andrew Pearn’s riverside Star Inn deftly pairs posh Yorkshire with worldly wines, but the best of the comestibles was at The Bow Room Restaurant at Grays Court Hotel.
Newly appointed head chef Adam Richards flaunts his Michelin pedigree in a spectacular tasting-menu supper that calls on the hotel’s kitchen garden and Yorkshire’s “vast larder”, from heritage-breed pigs to the “best rhubarb in the world”. There is no Yorkshire in the wine pairing as yet, but F&B manager Alex Stainsby does serve a Woldsbased sparkling at the bar, which, “Goes down a treat with guests.”
“Rosé or white?” I asked. “Both.”