Rushing to press a depleted grape harvest in fading light at his vineyard in Stopham, West Sussex, left Simon Woodhead ruing the impact of Brexit. Without his 20-strong team of seasonal eastern European workers gathering nine tonnes of fruit a day, he’s reliant on “late and slow” friends and family, which means 4am finishes and slim pickings of the pinot gris, pinot blanc and bacchus varieties used to produce his still wines.
“The problem is you can’t just press half and do the rest later and it was getting harder to see in here,” he said, gesturing to the giant stainless tanks that filter out the dirt and debris from the juice in his barn-converted winery. “Last year, we did get some help from a team furloughed from an events company, who were a bit better, but with France and Germany being a bit more inviting to workers, the situation is going to remain problematic.”
Not that the former McLaren engineer is panicking. Climate change and the ever-present threat of pest attacks demand resilience and a ready solution, while as part of a hub of vineyards in the South Downs thriving in the low-altitude, dry conditions and sandy soil, much is going his way. The lockdown-fuelled resurgence for local products has driven domestic sales, while vineyard tours are fully booked — evidence of a growing market for wine tourism.
“A lot of wine enthusiasts visiting us are looking for an experience, but ultimately we’re hoping to create a product that stands up on its own and is no longer the ‘poor cousin of traditional French wine markets’,” Woodhead said of his wines that are stocked in Waitrose and in hotels that include Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons and Claridge’s.
Stopham Vineyard has a continental feel of its own, with rows of 21,000 grapevines bearing clusters of tiny green beads that will ripen to full size by the end of August. Woodhead considered importing wine from Spain after travelling and working there, but changed his plans after spotting the site — a former dairy farm — when attending a friend’s party near by. Taking advantage of EU-funded viticulture training, as well as Britain’s exemption from an EU-wide vine planting ban, he decided to set up his own wine business in 2007.
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Since then, his business has enjoyed a following wind. Climate change means slower ripening and stronger flavours, while the free-draining green sand enables the vines’ roots to penetrate up to two metres deep for strong growth. However, only three of the eleven years of operation have been “good”, weather-wise, with late spring frosts and the wet summers demanding creative interventions, including the use of an aircraft propeller fan attached to a tractor to blow frost off the vines. Other methods, including carbon dioxide sensors to measure and control the gas levels created during the fermentation process, borrow more from his engineering background.
“You don’t go to university at 18 thinking you want to be a winemaker. It tends to happen after you’ve worked in an office and want to do something else and you bring that experience with you. Ultimately, it’s a very scientific and precise process.”
Indeed, achieving the optimal balance of sugar and acidity is all-consuming, with levels continually being adjusted before and after fermentation — efforts appreciated by the growing number of customers buying directly from the vineyard.
Andy Rogers, based five miles away at Upperton Vineyard, believes that attention to detail has helped to elevate English wine production from its low standing of the 1980s and 1990s — a legacy of a reliance on fast-ripening but poor-quality grapes that left a sour taste with the consumer. His scaled-down operation in semi-retirement produces 6,000 bottles of sparkling wine, yet still generates a six-figure turnover with a sold-out lockdown and a “phenomenal year so far”.
“People would say, ‘We haven’t tried English wine in 20 years because it’s awful.’ You’d only get one chance to get it right,” he said, recalling the hard sell involved in offloading only one case of wine to local pubs. “The sparkling wine market didn’t exist. Pubs treated it a bit like champagne, keeping a couple of bottles in the fridge for a special occasion, whereas now the market is massive and UK commercial vineyards have exploded from about 100 to 900. The problem now is that people often plant where they shouldn’t, such as areas with frost pockets.”
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His 42-acre site on a south-facing slope gave him a head start. Intended as a yard for the trucks and diggers of his business building show gardens for housing developers in London, the setting inspired him to change tack. “I spent ten minutes looking at this view and thought, ‘I don’t want to go to Clapham any more, so what else can I do?’ ”
After hearing of the soil’s qualities from another local early market entrant, the novice “without a clue about wine” initially planted a thousand vines — a move soon validated when Nyetimber, one of the world’s largest sparkling wine producers, offered to buy some of his land for its own operation. He chose not to sell and planted more vines. From the outset, he outsourced the production of his chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier to the nearby Ridgeview Winery, freeing his time to focus on planting.
A loyal customer base retained from the early days has been consolidated by industry awards, in turn boosting hotel trade sales and winning over traditional champagne drinkers. “People are starting to realise our wine is as good as the French and probably better value. We’re taken a lot more seriously and when you knock on their door, it’s a very different reception now.”
Uncorking international markets
While smaller vineyards in West Sussex focus on the domestic market, larger operators are casting their nets wider, with inroads in Sweden, Bermuda, New York and Singapore (Caroline Bullock writes).
Producing 50,000 bottles of sparkling wine a year, Wiston Estate in the village of Washington has doubled its export trade in 2020, building on the momentum of domestic sales and rising international interest in new, high-quality regions.
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For Dermot Sugrue, its winemaker, the day job of pressing traditional champagne grape varieties increasingly combines with international travel to drive distribution.
“I recently met with the British ambassador to Sweden in Stockholm, because Scandinavia is such a big market for us. They’re naturally anglophile, don’t produce their own wine and are fascinated by the English market,” said Sugrue, who credited consistent industry award wins for the brand’s rising profile. “We are being approached all the time by distributors. Singapore is our latest acquisition.”
Wine GB, the national organisation for grape growers and winemakers, said that the UK’s overseas market had doubled from 2018 to 2019, accounting for 10 per cent of the 5.5 million bottles of English wine sold in 2019.
While the United States remains the primary export market, Norway, Canada, Australia and Japan have become key targets for industry market leaders.
For Sugrue — who has made inroads in Taiwan with Sugrue South Downs, his own sparkling wine label, after a Taiwanese importer declared his product superior to Dom Perignon in a blind tasting test — the interest is validation of the quality of English winemaking.
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“We were told, ‘You can’t make wine here, it’s too wet.’ But climate change, plus expertise and better understanding of the varieties grown in the UK has meant we’re delivering and it’s sparked a huge appetite for New World Wine.”
