Twelve months, 36 acres, and 60,000 bottles of award-winning sparkling wine.
Andrew Jefford visits a Sussex winery that is giving Champagne a run for its money.
Photographs by Bill Philip
Winter
January 28th, 2005… and it's snowing in Majorca and Algiers. Here in West Sussex, where the hills fold together like softened origami and the green lanes claw deeply into the sandy, root-knotted earth, it's merely cold and damp. The north wind's blowing, though; out in the vineyards, the
father-and-daughter team of Bill and Lisa Davey cut back the dead wood of winter. The vine, remember, spent the first few million years of its evolutionary history climbing trees; skip the pruning for a year, and it will sprawl as aimlessly as any adolescent during the school holidays. As the day draws on, the scudding clouds darken to pewter. Perhaps the snow will float down onto Chiltington and Gay Street soon, rendering Bill (whose hair and Old Testament beard are already on the snowy side) invisible.
This is Nyetimber, one of Britain's most successful vineyards. It was the creation of Stuart and Sandy Moss, a zillionaire couple from Chicago who collected fine English antique furniture, then one day decided to buy the perfect home to house it all. They chose Nyetimber, mentioned in the Domesday Book and a former residence of Anne of Cleves. It had land; Stuart heard that vineyards were the coming thing. He and Sandy hired advice from Champagne in the form of the confident Jean-Manuel Jacquinot; they then planted Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay. Result, eventually: success. Family reasons, though, rolled the Mosses back to the USA in 2001, and the house and vineyard were then bought by songwriter Andy Hill, who was looking for a sanctuary from aeroplane noise in which to write his songs. (He wrote the 1981 Eurovision winner 'Making Your Mind Up' for Bucks Fizz, a quartet that, for a while, included his wife Nichola.) Wine, though, soon claimed Andy's attention.
"Songwriting is easy," he tells me over a mug of coffee, "but most days you end up with nothing. The one day you get it right you make a lot of money, but mostly: zilch. With this, there's always something to be done, and when you've done it you feel a great sense of satisfaction. Wine's more grown-up, too. Writing songs is just not becoming for a corpulent old git like me. It's hard to write songs about being in love when you can't remember what it feels like."
Spring
St George's Day: what better date to visit an English vineyard? It's been a bright and boisterous week, but our national day dawns damply. The chestnut and sycamore leaves unfold in the drizzle-laden air like magician's handkerchiefs. As I drive into the vineyard, two greater spotted woodpeckers slope off in different directions from a moist vineyard tryst.
It's a Saturday, and a party of customers from the Old Forge Wine Cellar in nearby Storrington has come to tour. Dermot Sugrue is showing them round. He's Nyetimber's winemaker; pale blue eyes, a ready smile and a Limerick lilt, all of which goes down as well as the 1999 Nyetimber Classic Cuvée the guests are offered. This wine, a blend of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier, is one of the two major wines Dermot makes for Nyetimber; the other, a Blanc de Blancs, features Chardonnay alone. The lure of a degree in environmental sciences took this vet's son from the west of Ireland to Norwich. Now the wine bug has sunk its fangs into him, and Nyetimber's a great opportunity. Not that it's an easy life: Dermot was in the cellar by nine in the morning on Good Friday and didn't leave until 4am on Easter Saturday: he was cold-stabilising the wines, and the tanks took their time…
Once the visitors have gone, we take a walk around the vineyards. The hedgerows are surging; but the vine is a cautious plant, and its own
starting pistol has barely detonated. The buds have burst, but the leaves remain tiny and tightly folded. The vineyard still looks bare, spare, gaunt. Bill
and Lisa, says Dermot, have only just finished pruning – exceptionally late this year, since they are changing the system to that used in Chablis, so the plants needed a lot of reshaping.
We retreat to the winery to escape the cold rain; my hands are now numb. (Brewers and distillers rejoice in steam and warmth, but winemakers spend most of the year working in a rheumatic chill.)
We taste the 2004s: an appley Pinot Meunier; some deep, structured Pinot Noir, and three or four different samples of the Chardonnay, which have turned out exceptionally well this year: scythingly intense and lemony, but with a flowery, graceful finish. No bubbles yet, of course: they come later.
I'd been vaguely expecting to see Andy, but he isn't around. Dermot isn't sure where he is; he rings the house, but there is no answer. How do they get on? "Andy likes the fact that I'm very hard-working," replies Dermot. And Andy? "He's a bit flaky every now and then," smiles Dermot. "But what do you expect? He's a musician."
Later, as I drive off down the dark and ferny Gay Street, a slender vixen trots ahead of me. She turns, languidly enough, takes a long slow look, then skips off up into the high banks.
Summer
July 2005 is fine and warm after a grudging June, but on the morning I choose to visit, the rain is sluicing down. Nyetimber almost looks autumnal already: rain-laden cobwebs hang off the hawthorn. The vine tendrils lurch and dangle damply.
The winery, by contrast, is clattering. A little articulated lorry from the Aube is parked in the courtyard. The bumper 2004 harvest is being bottled – with its sweet bottling liquor, of course, which it will gently consume over the next year or two, impregnating itself with carbon dioxide. Then comes the messy job of 'disgorging': removing the yeasty deposit that the second fermentation has left. Patrick Fays, the jolly French bottler, is bouncing around the cellar, tweaking his deafening machine. What does he think of Nyetimber, I yell.
"It's not bad at all. Given ..." – he waves his plump arm out through the cellar door – "the amount of sun you get here, it's not bad at all."
Jean-Manuel is back again, too. He is, as the French would say, la mémoire du vignoble: he created the vineyard, wrote the winemaking rules, and comes back to Nyetimber every couple of months to check progress. His mobile number is taped to the fuse box.
"I had faith," he says, "as soon as I saw the grapes growing. Before that, I wasn't so sure. But it has been a big challenge. The wine was horrible in the early tastings. The acidity is very high in England, so it must have lots of cellar time." He gives me a little yeast culture to drink: milky, frothy, half-made wine, its sweetness offsetting the naturally sharp acidity.
Dermot tells me that flowering this year has resulted in a good though not large crop; the main problem has been hail, which has damaged some of the leaves. I mention my surprise at not seeing Andy today. "He's been holidaying a lot," says Dermot. "He was in Greece for a while; now he's in Spain. He forgot we were bottling." He had, though, been up to the House of Lords with Dermot the previous week to collect the five trophies Nyetimber scooped in the English & Welsh Wine of the Year Competition.
Autumn
At last: Nyetimber in spilling sunshine. It's 20 October 2005, after the third-driest September for 100 years, and 68 pickers of all ages (paid £5.05 an hour) are bending and shuffling their way through the vines to bring home the harvest. The quality
of the grapes, though, is not my first question.
Leafing through a trade journal in August, I'd spotted a picture of Dermot beneath a headline that read, "Nyetimber production will go on." What? Andy and Nichola, I learn, have separated, though "they remain the best of friends after the split and are now on holiday together with their new lovers and children".
Indeed Dermot tells me that the split happened shortly after Hello! had come to photograph the couple together at their beautiful home. The story had to be hastily redrafted. "Swapping their marriage for a sparkling relationship," cooed the new headline. I wonder how all the uncertainty has affected the workers. "Harvest has been the best distraction for the last few weeks," says Dermot. "The main thing is that the vineyard's not for sale."
Wandering through the vineyards, I find Bill and Lisa next to a trailer loaded with boxes of Pinot Noir grapes. Like forces of nature, both have carried on regardless of the human drama: Bill worked a 13-hour day yesterday, from 6am to 7pm. He predicts (with total accuracy, it later turns out) that the weather will break tomorrow. "I can see the rain coming
up the river. That's always bad, whereas if it comes over the hill, it'll be fine." The trailer is weighed down with the grapes, and the juice is dripping slightly, making a muddy puddle under the trailer's edge.
"If Stuart Moss had still been here," remembers Bill, "he'd have been holding a sponge under that."
Back in the winery, Dermot looks tired but content. There will be plenty of Nyetimber with the 2005 date on it: around 60,000 bottles, which is fewer than the record of 100,000 achieved in 2004, but still satisfying (the worst year, 1997, netted just 5,000). At least he's back home by 9pm this harvest, whereas it took till three in the morning to press each day's grapes last year. The ripeness is excellent, with the Chardonnay coming in at almost ten per cent ABV, well up to Champagne standards. The great challenge – making English sparkling wine to compete with the best from anywhere – looks as if it will be met for another year. After a small celebratory glass of the incisive 1999 Classic Cuvée, I drive off down the green shade of Gay Street for the last time.
In spring 2006, the Hills sold Nyetimber after all, to a Dutch lawyer and businessman called Eric Heerema for an estimated £7.5million. Bill, Lisa, Jean-Manuel, Dermot and all the team, of course, continue their work. The sun also rises; the showers fall; and the vine roots push on, with growing familiarity, into the soft, cool greensand soil of Sussex.