Victor Keegan

It is now over three years since Winbirri vineyard in Norfolk stunned the wine world when its 2015 Bacchus was declared the best single varietal wine in the world from 17,200 entries in the Decanter awards, the first time that an English still white wine has received such an accolade. That sort of thing if it ever happens is supposed to occur in the south of the country. But we all know that wine tasting competitions are a bit of a lottery so what has been happening since?

Last week I was in Norwich accompanying my wife at a Delia Smith food event and decided to grab a cab and go the six miles to Winbirri. I was just planning to buy a couple of bottles as it is the close season but was lucky enough to find Lee Dyer, the owner and winemaker ensconced in his office. I congratulated him on his 2019 Bacchus being voted that very week the second best white varietal under £20 in the Vivino ratings. It was beaten only by a 2019 Tabordet Pouilly-Fumé but he pointed out that if you look at the actual ratings – which I did – the Norfolk Bacchus had scored more points than the Pouilly-Fumé so should have been top. The algorithm must have had a headache.

This is but the latest top award Winbirri has won since its 2017 success. Hopefully this will continue. Lee says that this year’s crop will only be about 60% of normal because of bad weather earlier in the year but the quality is expected to be good thanks to an unexpectedly warm September and October not shared in the south. This is not surprising as the dryness of East Anglia has turned out to be ideal for Bacchus, now Britain’s best selling domestic white wine. It was introduced to England by Piers Greenwood of New Hall Vineyards in Essex after he had spent several years in Alscace learning the craft.

Something else really surprised me about my visit. Winbirri is rated #1 out of 136 things to do in Norwich by Tripadvisor with a five star rating. Nearly everyone reported that their visit was excellent. Yet – wait for it – hardly anyone I spoke to from an admittedly small sample in Norwich including high-ups in the Delia Smith organisation had even heard of it. Clearly most of the rave reviews had been coming from visitors from elsewhere. I have had similar experiences in other parts of the country. People often don’t know of vineyards close to them though usually not near main roads. UK vineyards still have a lot to play for.

The search for who “invented” Champagne is beginning to look like a viticultural version of Who Wrote Shakespeare, a saga that could go on and on. It is now generally accepted, even among knowledgeable French people, that the “methode champenoise” (ie allowing still white wine to have a secondary fermentation in the bottle) happened in England decades before the French got around to it. But who was responsible?

A new book by leading wine expert Stephen Skelton is in no doubt. The title of the book “ The Knight Who Invented Champagne” gives the accolade to Sir Kenelm Digby on the grounds that his furnaces – now fuelled by coal which achieved much higher temperatures than wood – were able to make glass bottles strong enough to withstand the enormous pressures of secondary fermentation. At this stage French champagne was a still white wine. France didn’t achieve secondary fermentation in the bottle until much later when they switched to coal. The proposition that the monk Dom Perignon was the inventor was fake news.

Does Kenelm Digby have a better claim? Stephen Skelton’s book is a fascinating tour d’horizon of winemaking, glass manufacture, politics and the astonishing life of the buccaneering Digby himself who killed several people in close combat. Well worth a read. But on the substantive issue there is a problem. Even if his factories did pioneer robust bottles – which is still debatable – that is only a sine qua non (without which, not) of  the invention of “champagne” not a cause. You can’t have secondary fermentation without robust bottles but robust bottles alone don’t make or cause Champagne because you have to have something to put in the bottles.

 Digby, curiously, has no known connection with wine. The word is not even mentioned in his magnum opus :The Closet Opened” which Skelton described as “an amazing treasure trove of domesticity” in which (apart from being the first place to mention eggs and bacon for breakfast) the word “bottle” is mentioned 98 times but never a hint of his involvement with it – and no mention of wine at all or indeed of glass-making. As the author admits, that is somewhat curious. 

The main “proof” of Digby’s involvement is not anything he said but the sworn testimony in 1662 of four men before a court investigating a patent dispute. They claimed that Digby had invented glass bottles 30 years earlier.

For mentions of wine have to turn to champagne guru Tom Stevenson’s discovery in 1998 of a paper presented to the Royal Society In 1662 by Christopher Merret recording how coopers added vast quantities of sugar and molasses to “make them drink brisk & sparkling”. I was so amazed when I read this at the time that I wrote an editorial about it in The Guardian. However, this did not mean that Merret invented the methode champenoise” (except in the old Latin sense of “invenio” – to come across something) he merely recorded what he had seen among the coopers of London. He was a reporter. 

While Digby may have been a sine qua non he was not the only one. There were others, not least Sir Robert Mansell who in 1615  – when Digby was only 12 years old –  persuaded James l to ban wood in furnaces because forests were needed to reconstruct England’s navy. It could take thousands of trees to make a single ship. That certainly accelerated the trend to make strong  bottles from coal-fired furnaces

Until documents are found linking individual coopers with a purposeful desire to exploit the new “discovery” it is tempting to say that although strong bottles were a sine qua non the whole movement towards sparkling wine wasn’t caused by anyone. It just happened. But without question it happened in England not France even though our geographic neighbours have yet to fully admit it. 

The Knight Who Invented Champagne (Published by the Author £25)

Britain’s wine producing industry is in surprisingly good heart after the tremors of lockdown judging by today’s WINEGB tasting at the Royal Horticultural Halls in London. It is not obvious why this should be so as production has dropped from 13m bottles in 2018 to only 8.7m bottles in 2020 mainly due to bad weather Some say 2021 could be the worst since 2012. However sales in 2020 were 30% up on the previous year and new plantings of vines are predicted to be 1.4m this year. This is clearly a very bold investment for the future

in an industry that is like no other not least because of the often very large timelag between planting and sales.

Lockdown hit trade sales badly but triggered a boom in online sales and, as vineyards re-opened, helped vineyard tourism and cellar door sales. Exports are also on the rise.

Our sparkling wine vineyards are festooned with gold medals and the quality is good enough to charge premium prices. The big new thing is that our red wines – mainly Pinot Noir, the Bergundy grape – are now winning top prizes, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago

The worry is price. You are pushed to find any English or Welsh wines under £10 a bottle though there are some – like Brightwell in Oxfordshire, New Hall in Essex, Halfpenny Green, Shropshire and the Wine Society that just about manage it.

So far this doesn’t seem to have mattered as most vineyards say that can sell all they can produce though there are rumblings about overstocking. They are clearly helped by the encouraging way customers are keen to buy local food and wines, a trend that lockdown and Brexit have encouraged.

It is also due to the fact that there is a huge amount of spending power in the economy thanks to freewheeling increases in the money supply which at some stage will have to stop. Put this together with the millions of new of vines being planted and there is clearly a risk that oversupply in the future might lead to a price cutting war. None of this pessimism was evident among people I spoke to today and let’s face it we still produce only a small fraction of the wines we consume so there is all to play for. Let’s hope the bandwagon keeps rolling.

What a shame. Chapel Down the U.K.’s biggest and fastest expanding wine operation, is closing down its Gin Works at King’s Cross in London, This is a few months after it closed the restaurant there. They are to be commended for taking swift action to close a lossmaker that has been open barely a year rather than let it bleed on but this doesn’t alter the fact that this is one of the few big setbacks in the seemingly unstoppable revival of UK wine and spirit industry. The rest of Chapel Down’s vineyard expansion continues apace but this should come as a timely reminder of the danger of expanding too fast on too many fronts. Why did it happen? We don’t know the full story yet but I have to ask myself why as a long-term advocate of UK wines, a regular diner in King’s Cross and – disclosure – owner of a few shares in Chapel Down (because of a generous 33% discount on wine purchases which still obtains and which I explained here https://bit.ly/398dvp8 ) I never actually drank or dined at the Gin WorksIt looked lovely and I was impressed when I had a brief look around but despite meaning to go on a number of occasions when we finally decided to the restaurant it had closed. One of the key problems was that it was definitely off piste being several hundred yards away from a huge variety of restaurants that are springing up in the new King’s Cross development and more recently into Coal Drops Yard. Also it had a bit of an identity problem. It was a brazen expansion into the fast growing gin industry but it was also selling English wine with a restaurant. the lure of gin does not seem to have been enough.

Hush Heath’s vineyard

I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a red Pinot Meunier as it is hardly ever made into a red wine. At this year‘s WineGB trade tasting there were two red meuniers available at two stalls side-by-side – Hush Heath and Simpsons – and I wasn’t sure that the both knew the other had it on offer. 

With all the economic uncertainty around us it is comforting to be hit by an industry on the roll. At today’s annual tasting of English and Welsh wines organised by WineGB at the RHS Lindley Hall in London there was a palpable buzz in the air on the back of a record 13.2m bottles produced from last year’s bumper harvest. This was more than double the previous year’s output with almost 70% accounted for by sparkling wine which continues to win top gold medals in international competitions. This year’s crop could turn out to be the second best after last year’s. Three million new vines were planted this year, nearly twice 2018. Happy days . . .

But what struck me most were innovations among the still wines. There were two Pinot Meuniers – one white by Simpsons and one red by Hush Heath – which I have never come across before. Pinot Meunier is one of the two red grapes from which classic champagne is made along with white Chardonnay. The other red is Pinot Noir which is being successfully grown in the UK but Meunier is hardly ever turned into a still wine anywhere so it is great to see two English vineyards taking the plunge to produce two very agreeable wines.

Meanwhile, the long established Three Choirs on the Gloucester/Herefordshire border has branched out into producing fizz and dry white in small tins – a great way to sample UK wines – and they are also selling Bacchus in a box.

Bacchus (made from Riesling-Silvaner and Müller-Thurgau) is now Britain’s flagship white wine. It reached new heights at the 2017 Decanter World Wine Awards where it was voted best in the world.

What is a bit puzzling is the huge price differentials among the Bacchus wines on show bearing in mind that to most palates there is not a great deal of difference. They range from Brightwell of Oxford charging only £9.99 to a recent arrival, Montgomery in Wales which charges £20 a bottle (they apparently sell it all without difficulty) and Hattingley Valley which clocks in at £22.50. New Hall vineyards in Essex, which introduced Bacchus into the UK and has been a big supplier to other vineyards, charges £11.50 for its Bacchus (though not at the WineGB show as it is not a member). Bacchus is likely to continue to lead the revival of UK white wines – at whatever price – not least because academic studies have revealed large regions of Essex and elsewhere as being ripe for development.

Vineyard tourism is expanding fast while exports of UK wines grew from 4% to 8% of total sales in 2018 and are likely to continue to expand thanks to concerted efforts by the industry and government. If there is one place that needs more effort it is Europe. WineGB statistics show that 43% of all exports went to Scandanavia but none – yes, none- to France, Italy, Spain or the rest of the continent of Europe. I leave you to figure that one out.

@BritishWino

Then and now . . Albury’s 17th cent vineyard and Winbirri 2015

AS THIS year’s buds burst and the bottles from last year’s bumper harvest are prepared for sale It is time to ponder whether the next big surge in UK winemaking is about to happen.

Our sparkling wines are now world-class and can look after themselves. The question is whether our whites and maybe even our reds are about to follow, and whether they will benefit from a ‘halo’ effect.

The root of all this is psychological. For decades we have been conditioned to believe we cannot make top-class wines in Britain even while wine-making techniques were improving dramatically. Enjoying a glass of wine is a deeply psychological experience conditioned by numerous factors including sunshine, who we are drinking it with, what we have just eaten or drank before, the price and what others say about it. Experts regularly get it wrong, often giving a gold medal to a wine which others rate as bronze or even less.

I was thinking of this last night when I opened an eagerly awaited bottle of Winbirri Bacchus 2015 with some friends. This is the still white wine which has achieved something that no other UK vineyard has come near to. At the 2017 Decanter international wine competition it was awarded not just a gold medal but a platinum – chosen from those that have already scored gold – and then voted the best wine of its kind in the world.

Yes, in the world – and all this from a vineyard in Norfolk that is further north than Birmingham. Eat your hearts out Kent and Sussex!

I am a very seasoned wine drinker though – like over 95% of the population – I don’t have the sophisticated taste buds that experts appear to have. When I checked what the experts had found in this Winbirri I could just about smell “grapefruit“ but not the other conflicting flavours which reviewers claimed to notice including lemon, “aromas of hedgerow, elderflower and pear” or “grassy notes” or goosberry and passion fruit or blackcurrant leaves (yes, leaves) or – wait for it – “fresh tennis balls”. Even if I had picked up these “notes” I don’t know what the connection is with enjoyment of the wine.

In this context it remains to be seen whether Winbirri’s wine is a one off, – but still an extraordinary achievement – or whether it is a harbinger of things to come. I would bet on the latter.

The dry east coast of England is proving a wonderful stomping ground for Bacchus, named after the God of wine, a grape whose parentage is two German grapes that were popular when the UK wine revival was in its infancy 40 years ago – Silvaner- Riesling and Muller Thurgau. It was introduced to Britain by New Hall Vineyards further south in Essex which is far and away the biggest producer of Bacchus and has supplied grapes to other well-known vineyards for years.

Three years ago in this column I suggested that white ones might be about to emerge from the cold. It hasn’t yet happened in a big way, but these things take time and there are enough good English whites – such as Solaris, Ortega and Chardonnay (when it isn’t being used for sparkling) – to give hope for the future as long as they don’t price themselves out of the market.

And then there are the red wines. These are the least suitable for English soils but we have started to produce Pinot Noir that has been winning silver medals. With the benefit of last years bountiful harvest this year will be a crucial test for our Pinot Noir and other reds. It is a hugely competitive market world-wide. But now that English and Welsh fizz is gaining us a worldwide reputation for fine wines, anything could happen. As long as the psychology is on our side.