Vines in a Cold Climate

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?

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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...