Is chalky soil really the secret to great English wine or just clever marketing? Henry Jeffreys, Author of Vines in a Cold Climate Shares His Stories

Natalie MacLean
Apr23rd

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Introduction

Is chalky soil really the secret to great English wine—or just clever marketing? What makes it so difficult for English wine to break into the North American market? Is it time for a classified system of English wine?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with Henry Jeffreys, author of the award-winning book Vines in a Cold Climate.

You can find the wines we discussed here.

 

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Highlights

  • How did Henry become a wine critic for The Lady, a women’s magazine?
  • What was it light to interview wine pioneer Stuart Moss?
  • How did Henry’s skepticism about biodynamics nearly cause a problem with Gérard Bertrand?
  • What inspired Henry to write Empire of Booze?
  • What was the most surprising thing Henry learned while researching the book?
  • How did Henry’s first experience of English wine go?
  • What unusual vineyard experience totally changed his perception?
  • How much wine does England produce?
  • Where are the main wine regions in England?
  • Are the benefits of the chalky soils in certain parts of England overrated?
  • Is it time for a classified system of English wine?

 

Key Takeaways

  • Is chalky soil really the secret to great English wine—or just clever marketing?
    • We always hear about the chalk or the White Cliffs of Dover. Do you think that has an influence or is it overrated? Henry thinks it is overrated and it was the story that sold. So it was the same soil as Champagne, same grapes, same techniques, but English. There was like a rush for chalk, and people thought chalk was sexy. It was a good marketing angle, and they thought that it was the best place. But in recent years, with the rise of Essex where people thought that you can’t grow good grapes. They have realized that you can. So I think what’s far more important is your aspect, the fact that it’s not too high above sea level because it gets colder, but they’re not too close to the sea. Problems with frost, sunshine, rainfall. I think almost everything else is more important than whether it’s chalk or clay, and once you’ve got everything else right, then you can argue about that.
  • What makes it so difficult for English wine to break into the North American market?
    • Henry observes that selling to Canada and the US is quite complicated. If you sell to Japan, you can get just one person to import it. Whereas in North America you have complicated systems by state and province. You need somebody on the ground selling. Plus, Nova Scotia makes a similar style of sparkling wines. California has some pretty good sparkling wines. And then once the English bubblies land in the market, the price is pretty much the same as Champagne. Why would you unless you wanted something quite unusual, right?
  • Is it time for a classified system of English wine?
    • Henry says that there is now a PDO, or Protected Designation of Origin, a European geographical indication for one county, which is Sussex. But it’s really too early for it, because they’ve only been making quality wine there for 30 years. The appellation contrôlée is, ideally, codifying hundreds of years of tradition. Plus, a lot of producers buy from different counties. So Nyetimber will have vineyards in Kent and Sussex and Hampshire. So that makes a nonsense of it. And also, there’s sort of bits of Sussex that are very much like Kent, so you so there’s no point drawing a line where the old county barrier is. It’s like, it’d be like, sort of cutting the Médoc in half. It doesn’t really make any sense. I think the only place where it makes sense is Essex, because you’ve got the soil.

 

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English wines are like French wines, but fresher. - Henry Jeffreys Henry Jeffreys Click to tweet

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The Champagne model was clearly the way to go, but it took a long time for the English wine industry to come around to that. - Henry Jeffreys Henry Jeffreys Click to tweet

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People thought chalk was sexy, but I think almost everything else is more important than whether the soil is chalk or clay. - Henry Jeffreys Henry Jeffreys Click to tweet

 

About Henry Jeffreys

Henry Jeffreys worked in the wine trade and publishing before becoming a writer. He’s a contributor to Good Food, The Guardian, Harpers Wine & Spirit, and The Spectator, wine columnist for The Critic magazine, and has appeared on radio, TV, and The Rest is History podcast. He won Fortnum & Mason Drink Writer of the Year in 2022 and is the author of four books, including Empire of Booze and Vines in a Cold Climate, which was shortlisted for the James Beard awards and won Fortnum & Mason drink book of the year. Along with Tom Parker Bowles, he hosts the Intoxicating History podcast. He lives in Faversham, Kent, with his wife and two daughters.

 

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Transcript

Natalie MacLean 00:00:00 Is chalky soil really the secret to great English wine? Or just clever marketing? What makes it so difficult for English wine to break into the North American market? And is it time for a classified system of English wine? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in our chat with Henry Jeffreys, the author of the award winning book vines in a Cold Climate. By the end of our conversation, you’ll also discover how Henry became the wine critic for The Lady, a women’s magazine. How Henry’s skepticism about Biodynamics nearly caused a problem with the famous southern French producer Zara Bertrand. What inspired Henry to write Empire of Booze? The most surprising thing Henry learned while researching the book. Henry’s first experience with English wine, the unusual vineyard experience that totally changed Henry’s perception of English wine. A quick overview of the English wine industry today, including the main regions, and why it took so long for English winemakers to embrace the champagne model. Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places, and amusingly awkward social situations? Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast.

Natalie MacLean 00:01:34 I’m your host, Natalie MacLean, and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle, please, and let’s get started. Welcome to episode 334. If you’re listening to this episode on the day it’s published, April 23rd, it is World Book Day. Yay! So why not celebrate by trying to win one of three copies of the award winning book, vines in a Cold Climate by today’s guest, Henry Jeffreys. I also still have three copies of Sally Evans inspiring, witty new memoir, Make the Midlife Move A Practical Guide to Flourishing After 50, and one copy of Fiona morrison’s book to give Away the Ten Great Wine Families of Europe. It has gorgeous full color photos of landscapes, vineyards and the amazing architecture of these wineries across Europe. It’s a beautiful coffee table book. All you have to do is email me and let me know you’d like to win.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:47 It doesn’t matter where you live. I’ll choose seven winners randomly from those who contact me at Nathalie at Natalie MacLean. Com. In other bookish news, if you’re reading the paperback or e-book or listening to the audiobook of my memoir wine, which on fire, rising from the Ashes of divorce, defamation and Drinking Too Much. A national bestseller and one of Amazon’s best books of the year. I’d love to hear from you at Natalie at Natalie MacLean dot com. I’d be happy to send you beautifully designed, personally signed book plates for the copies you buy or give as gifts. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all retailers worldwide at Natalie MacLean 334. The paperback usually arrives within a day or two of ordering. The book and audiobook are instantly available. Okay, on with the show. Henry Jeffreys has written for Good Food, The Guardian, Harper’s, Wine and Spirit, Spectator, The Critic magazine, and has appeared on radio, TV and the Rest Is History podcast. He is the author of four books, including Empire of Booze and Vines in a Cold Climate, which is what we’re going to talk about today.

Natalie MacLean 00:03:57 And that book was shortlisted for the James Beard Awards and one the Fortnum and Mason Drink Book of the year. Along with Tom Parker-Bowles, he hosts the Intoxicating History Podcast. He lives in Faversham, Kent, with his wife and two daughters, and he joins us now from his home in Kent. Welcome to the podcast, Henry. So great to have you here with us.

Henry Jeffreys 00:04:20 Great to be here.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:22 Okay, so before we dive into your book, tell us how you became a wine critic for a women’s magazine and which magazine was that?

Henry Jeffreys 00:04:28 It was a magazine called The Lady, which has kind of visions of sort of PG Wodehouse or something like that.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:35 It does?

Henry Jeffreys 00:04:36 Yeah. At the time, the editor was a lady called Rachel Johnson, who is the sister of a former tousle haired prime minister of Britain. And I have a friend who is a journalist, and I used to do this blog called Henry’s World of Booze. This was sort of quite long. This was about 15 or 16 years ago, in the early days of blogging, where people would just start a WordPress site and just kind of get going, and I kind of thought, I’m going to try and write about wine and try and but, you know, I didn’t really actually know anything about wine, but I thought I’d try and, you know, be sort of funny about it.

Henry Jeffreys 00:05:08 And this journalist sent it to Rachel Johnson and she goes, oh, I really like this because it’s wine, but it’s not really about wine. So she invited me into her office, and this was when the lady had these wonderful offices in Covent Garden, in London, and they were very upstairs, downstairs. So the top floor was all the ladies who were who were the editors and writers, and they were all very grand and had big offices. And they went to sort of Cheltenham Ladies College and stuff. And then downstairs was all the sort of secretaries and postmen and stuff, and they were all like, you know, Cockney geezers and stuff and sort of like, you know, it was very much like being in a stately home with the sort of, you know, if you can imagine Downton Abbey or something. And then Rachel invited me into her office and she said, Henry, I’m glad you’ve come in. Would you like to be our new features editor? And I said, I don’t know anything about features.

Henry Jeffreys 00:05:54 And she goes, I don’t want to think about running a magazine yet. I’m doing it. I don’t you guys, will you write for us about wine? So I did that for about five years and it was fun. It was just I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t really what I was talking about, but I tried to approach it in a very sort of accessible, slightly kind of offbeat way.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:14 What were some of your offbeat topics that you did for the magazine?

Henry Jeffreys 00:06:17 I did something on how to appeal to wine. Stop. If I talk about grapes you hate. So like things like Pinotage Sauvignon blanc. You know, a lot of wineries, especially like Jancis Robinson, are always like, oh, Sauvignon blanc, it’s awful and stuff.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:32 Fiona. Gooseberry bush. Yes.

Henry Jeffreys 00:06:33 Yeah. Ways to impress wine writers, that kind of stuff.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:36 So that’s great.

Henry Jeffreys 00:06:37 It was a very odd gig, but fun to do.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:40 Very good.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:42 Now you have another story where you’re talking to American wine pioneer Stuart Moss.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:47 The week before he died. What was that conversation about?

Henry Jeffreys 00:06:50 Yeah, I was very, very lucky because for those who don’t know, Sandy and Stewart Moss were the pioneers of English wine. They were from Chicago, and he made a lot of money in dental equipment, and she was an antiques dealer, and they sort of decided they were going to have a kind of retirement project in England. And they thought we were going they were going to plant a vineyard in Sussex. And before that, people had made wine in England and people had made quite good wine in England, but no one had thought to take champagne head on and say, you know, the climate’s quite similar, the soils quite similar. We’re going to plant the big three varieties. We’re going to get French consultants and French equipment and all this kind of stuff. So they were there was a vineyard called Nightingale, which is still going, and it’s now owned by this Dutch billionaire, and it’s very, very successful. But they were the first people to be really ambitious.

Henry Jeffreys 00:07:35 They were the sort of people I wanted to speak to most for the book. And I was chatting with this very strange Frenchman I know called Jerome, and he’s the strangest Frenchman because he collects English wine and he lives very near me. And I met him through the local book festival, And I was sort of chatting with him, just saying, I need to get hold of the mosses. And he goes, oh, I’ve been corresponding with them for years. I collect old timber and he had like a whole folder of clippings about nightmare. He had bottles of the very first vintage of nightmare, and he had their details. So he put me in touch. And the mosses, they’ve properly retired and they moved to Santa Barbara 2002, I think 2001. Now they’ve been kind of forgotten about, and they were so pleased to be talking about the old days, and they were just, you know, he just full of stories. And Stuart told this wonderful story about how someone from the Ministry of Agriculture came to visit them and said, you’re insane.

Henry Jeffreys 00:08:32 Just this is a good place to grow apples. And Stewart said, you know, we didn’t move 5000 miles to plant apples. So I interviewed them both and had a. And then the week after, I had a message from Sandy saying that he’d died.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:46 Oh.

Henry Jeffreys 00:08:47 So it.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:47 Was sad.

Henry Jeffreys 00:08:48 Incredibly sad. And he was he was in his mid 80s but it was quite sudden. So I feel so fortunate enough to have been the last person to interview him and have him tell his side of the story for the book. So that was a real bit of luck and a bit of a sad story as well.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:04 Yeah. When did they plant the vines? When did they start? Night. Timber.

Henry Jeffreys 00:09:08 I think they planted in 1988. They did a very small trial vintage in 91, but the first commercial release was 1992. And I’ve tried that wine a few times. Blank to blank, kind of more recently disgorged, I think, disgorged in the last 5 or 10 years and bought directly from timber.

Henry Jeffreys 00:09:28 And it’s honestly one of the best sparkling wines I’ve ever had. They got it right. Absolutely. First time, which is extraordinary when you consider that what most people in England were making at the time.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:38 And is timber still today considered one of the best English wines?

Henry Jeffreys 00:09:43 No, definitely. They’re huge now. I mean, they’ve got hundreds of acres of vines. Yeah, something like that. So they produce a very nice non-vintage, which is sort of 3540, which is always very good.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:55 You’re talking about euros, right?

Natalie MacLean 00:09:56 35, £40 or pounds.

Henry Jeffreys 00:09:59 You know, some sort of rough. Yeah, roughly. Roughly the same in euros. Probably a bit more if you’re buying it on the continent. Not that you probably ever find it on the continent.

Natalie MacLean 00:10:08 We don’t get much in Canada of English wines like a few here and there, but not a lot.

Henry Jeffreys 00:10:13 The problem with Canada is Canadian wines are quite similar to especially like Nova Scotia. It’s true the style and the sort of sparkling wines are very, very similar.

Henry Jeffreys 00:10:22 So there’s absolutely no reason why Canadians need English wine. So actually you do some stuff that’s quite different from us as well, but our stuff is quite similar. And then they also do some single vineyard wines and then some sort of prestige ones. And the single vineyard ones I think are always some of the best in England. So yeah, and they age incredibly well. So they’re still right in front.

Natalie MacLean 00:10:43 Right. Okay. We will get more into sparkling wine and those wines in a moment, but I still wanted to hear a few more of your stories before we dive in. You. You almost got into trouble talking with Gerard Bertrand, the winemaker in southern France Languedoc, because you were skeptical about Biodynamics during a press trip?

Henry Jeffreys 00:11:02 Yeah, well, I just read Biodynamics, which is obviously ridiculous.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:05 What do you find ridiculous about it?

Henry Jeffreys 00:11:07 Well, all this stuff about, you know, like, you get a mouse, you know, when Saturn is in the third movement of Venus or something, and then you skin it and burn it when Venus is in the second movement of Saturn, and then you dilute that to homeopathic quantities and then use that to treat mildew or something.

Henry Jeffreys 00:11:24 It’s just it seems like such obvious rubbish. Obviously Darryl Burton takes it very, very seriously and he takes it a lot further. So it’s not just the kind of burning of the mouse and the cow horns and all this.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:35 I never heard.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:35 About burning mice. They burn a live mouse.

Henry Jeffreys 00:11:38 No, no, they kill the mouse.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:39 They kill. Okay, just just ask.

Henry Jeffreys 00:11:42 There’s a kind of ritual slaughter of the mouse where you chant. I don’t know. I think the mouse is dead. It has to be the right mouse. It has to be like an organic mouse.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:53 A mouse who deserved it.

Henry Jeffreys 00:11:55 You can’t be a factory mouse, because that would be.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:57 That wouldn’t be very.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:58 Of the Earth or.

Henry Jeffreys 00:11:59 Anything with Steiner’s teaching. But if you go to Bertrand’s Cloud, to which he makes this incredibly expensive rosé, and it has all these, like, pyramid shaped fermenters with gold tops, and it looks like something from Star Trek. And I was chatting with the winemaker and he was going, oh, these fermenters, they channel the forces of the cosmos into the wine.

Henry Jeffreys 00:12:21 And I was like, oh, really? You know, so, so have you done tests where you compare non pyramid wines to pyramid wines? So empirically you can show that there’s a difference. And he goes no, no you don’t understand. They channel the forces of the cosmos into the wine like that. Like moving his hands to show how the forces of the cosmos got into the wine. And then you look quite cross. And then the PR lady pulled me aside and was like, you know, Monsieur Bertrand takes all this stuff very seriously and that’s like, oh, everyone kind of looked at me and sort of wrote like that. And the readers will have to imagine French people looking really kind of skeptical.

Natalie MacLean 00:12:59 Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Henry Jeffreys 00:13:00 And so that’s why I just kind of kept my trap shut for the rest of the trip.

Natalie MacLean 00:13:05 I agree that there’s a lot of woo woo about Biodynamics. The only point I do see, though, with it, a bit of a counterbalance, is that anything that makes you pay attention to the vines and the health of the vines, or the health of the land is, I think, worth it.

Natalie MacLean 00:13:19 But.

Natalie MacLean 00:13:20 Perhaps just a little bit overdone in that case. All right. So what drew you to this story in particular? Vines in a cold climate. I mean, you live there, so perhaps it’s just obvious you want to write about what was all around you, but what was the inspiration to actually write the book?

Henry Jeffreys 00:13:38 I do live in English wine country, but actually I wasn’t very interested in English wine. I’m much more of a kind of, you know, I like wines from the Rhone, you know. I like port, you know, things like that. I like big, big, sort of robust wines. And I was approached by the publisher. They’d read a big article in the in the Sunday Times and they said, oh, you know, there’s something happening in the vineyards of England. We should do a book on it. And there was somebody at the publishers who I kind of knew very vaguely. In fact, I’d actually been for a job interview with her about 20 years before.

Henry Jeffreys 00:14:12 And she’d turn me down. But she knew that I was now writing about wine. And she said, oh, why don’t you try this? I was a young man, but not particularly young. So they approached me and I just I was a bit like, I don’t know, because English wine seemed, from the outside, quite corporate. There’s a lot of people, you know, sort of bankers and stuff, you know, made a packet in the city, planted some vines. They all have branded jellies and kind of golf umbrellas and stuff. And I thought, there’s not much of a story here. But then I kind of started digging down and I realized that actually I kind of got the industry wrong. There’s a lot of very big personalities, some real mavericks, and it was a lot richer than I thought it was. So I agreed to do the book, and I started right at the end of 2021. And they wanted it in just over a year.

Natalie MacLean 00:15:02 Wow.

Henry Jeffreys 00:15:03 So this was still sort of Covid time.

Henry Jeffreys 00:15:05 So I spent six months traveling around vineyards in my old car, meeting people and stuff and sort of, you know, trying to get around all the kind of bizarre regulations that were about meeting people. And then I spent about three months sitting in my office trying to write the bloody thing, which was really hard because I just had hundreds of hours of interviews, notes and sort of things like that. And trying to shape all that into a 300 page book was an absolute nightmare. And if you find mistakes in the book, there are mistakes in the book because it just I didn’t have enough time to get it Quite as good as it could have been. But, you know, I think I did all right.

Natalie MacLean 00:15:46 I think you did all right, too. With the number of awards and recognition you’ve received for it. So what was the most surprising thing you learned while you were researching and writing the book?

Henry Jeffreys 00:15:57 It’s a hard question. I mean, I suppose the thing about just sort of how interesting these people are did surprise me.

Henry Jeffreys 00:16:03 Just the sort of personalities. There’s a kind of a few stories that stand out, like sort of surprising stories, but the kind of overall thing was just how unguarded everybody was. So if you kind of did the same book about champagne, you know, you’d have all the PR people sitting there, all their comments would have been sort of weighted against what their kind of vision 2028 was. But this was just a load of people just who wanted to tell their stories. And some of them were just so unguarded, and some of them were incredibly rude about each other. And a lot of it just didn’t go in the book because I just thought, I can’t face this. I can’t face like problems with libel and stuff. There’s one chap from a vineyard called Chapel Down who are one of the biggest producers in the country, and he was just telling me about how all the investors were sort of, he said, like charlatans and liars. This was in the early days, not the current investors, who were lovely, of course.

Henry Jeffreys 00:16:57 I just said that his job was basically dealing with basically crooks. People who were not straight forward, not 100% honest, just told me all about it. And then I went through it with lawyers and they go, well, we can’t actually name names. So that was it. It was basically what surprised me was just how unguarded.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:16 Unguarded. And you said some had some really particularly memorable stories. What’s an example of one of the people that you meant.

Henry Jeffreys 00:17:24 The same man.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:25 The chapel Down guy.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:26 Yeah.

Henry Jeffreys 00:17:27 Yeah. So he’s called Owen Elias, and he’s done everything he’s worked for sort of. Every producer made so many different wines, made some wonderful wines, probably made some terrible wines as well, just seeing the kind of highs and the lows. And he told me that one of the growers that they worked with, who was one of the crooks, basically turned up with all these sable blanc, which sable blanc is this hybrid grape that.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:51 They make it in Nova Scotia.

Henry Jeffreys 00:17:53 And it can be wonderful if you get it right.

Henry Jeffreys 00:17:55 It actually makes some incredibly good wines, but if you don’t get it right, it tastes like, in Owen’s words, like cabbage and potatoes. And he had this 7%, you know, fermented it and it got to 7%. And he was like, what the hell? And we can imagine how acidic that would be. And he goes, you know, what do I do with it? He was sitting there in a tanker and then they had a fire and he goes, then we had a fire. And that took care of that part. So was it a deliberate fire? He goes, no, no, no, no, no, nothing like that. But he goes, but we did have the most wonderful insurance. So that paid for a new winery.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:30 How convenient. How convenient. Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:32 Some things just work out, you know.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:34 So.

Henry Jeffreys 00:18:35 Yeah, exactly.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:37 That’s great. What was the most surprising or one of the most surprising things someone has said about your book since it’s been published?

Henry Jeffreys 00:18:44 It was just lots of people have said some really nice things.

Henry Jeffreys 00:18:48 Stephen Skelton was very, very funny. He is Mr. English Wine, so I get emails from him the whole time. He sent me an email today telling me I got something wrong and something I’ve written, but he’s been making English wine. He’s a consultant. He advises people on where to plant, and he said something like, I can’t remember the exact words, but it was, you know, it’s a good book in a kind of warts and all sort of way. But I hope he’s got a good libel lawyer on speed dial, you know, because he doesn’t hold back. But that’s Stephen being that’s him being very, very complimentary. Yeah. That was one of the, one of the more surprising things someone said.

Natalie MacLean 00:19:22 That’s great.

Natalie MacLean 00:19:24 All right. So now your book provides a really fascinating journey of the English wine industry. Let’s start with your first experience or one of the first experiences you had tasting drinking English wine. You described it as tasting like boarding school stone floors. That’s really specific.

Natalie MacLean 00:19:43 What did you mean by that?

Henry Jeffreys 00:19:44 I’m revealing too much about my past. It was at a wedding in Suffolk, and the wedding venue made its own wines. And just I tasted it. I’d never had a wine like it. It was quite sweet, you know, like a sort of cabinet or something. But then they had this acidity that just closes your whole mouth down. So it’s not like that lovely Mosel, refreshing, mouthwatering green apple kind of thing. It was like acid. It was like sort of like drinking citric acid, and it just shuts your whole palate down. And it was just so unpleasant. And I thought, this is not a good place to make wine.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:21 Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:21 But later you discovered, you know, that might be helpful for making English wines, assuming perhaps sparkling wines, that level of acidity.

Henry Jeffreys 00:20:30 Yeah, maybe not that level of. I mean, that.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:32 Is.

Henry Jeffreys 00:20:33 Crazy. And in fact, I was talking to this man who set up the sort of, I can say, England’s answer to UC Davis, but that’s kind of overselling it.

Henry Jeffreys 00:20:41 But there’s a college where you can learn how to make wine called Plumpton, and he set up the course for that, and he was talking about the grams per liter of Chardonnay that he harvested when he tried to grow it. And it was something like 300g/l of tartaric acid. And that’s about three times what you get in champagne at the moment. So that’s a lot of acidity. But you’re right, the sparkling wine, you do want a lot of acidity because it softens and provides that kind of backbone for aging.

Natalie MacLean 00:21:09 Just not that much.

Henry Jeffreys 00:21:11 But not that much. But it took I think it took a long time for people to move away from the German model. So there were lots of people trying to make German style wines in England, and then make up for the lack of ripeness with such reserve, you know, with grape juice, sweetening it. Yeah, sweetening it, but it took a long time. It was funny. You really kind of read it. I’ve got a lot of old books on English wine, and people kind of talk about the similarities to champagne, The sort of acidity, the kind of foaming and stuff, even like right back to the 18th century, people were commenting about because people had tried to make like before.

Henry Jeffreys 00:21:45 And so all the time the champagne model was clearly the way to go. But it took a long time for the industry to come round to that.

Natalie MacLean 00:21:55 Was it the 2007 Teal Thiele Vineyard wine that changed your perception of English wine and what it could be?

Henry Jeffreys 00:22:02 Yes. Yeah. It was. It was a huge mail order wine company over here called Lewthwaite. The chap who runs it has been selling English wines since the 70s. He’s called Tony Slaithwaite. He’s a very interesting man and he had this crazy idea. They just built a new warehouse just to the west of London, a town called Thiel, which is near Redding, and there was a load of old rubble and he goes, this would make a good vineyard. And so whatever Tony won, Tony got. So they put some soil on it. They spoke to Ridgeview, who were one of the pioneering English producers. They planted some Chardonnay. It was probably about an acre. It was harvested by the people who worked in the offices that were there and then taken to Ridgeview.

Henry Jeffreys 00:22:46 And it was so good. It was so sort of ripe and kind of bruised apple and, you know, a bit like a sort of Bollinger or something like that.

Natalie MacLean 00:22:54 What’s a bruised apple taste like? I’ve heard that before, but I never understood what people were like.

Henry Jeffreys 00:23:00 When your apple oxidizes, you know, when it’s brown rather than when you first cut it, you get the fresh apple and then you get that kind of when it’s oxidized slightly, it’s the it tastes, you know, it tastes like kind of darker caramel toffee that that’s okay.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:14 Yeah. Gotcha.

Henry Jeffreys 00:23:15 Almost like a cooktop. It’s almost like you’re halfway to making a pie with it. That’s the sort of flavor. Later, I spoke to a woman who was involved with the vineyard. And sadly, when they moved offices, it’s now like an Amazon distribution center there. So the whole vineyard was destroyed. But she told me that they thought that part of the reason why the grapes got so warm was because there was a special microclimate caused by lorries with their engines idling on the nearby motorway.

Henry Jeffreys 00:23:40 So there was a kind. Yeah, kind of good to carry on or something like that. And so, so you say, you know, terroir comes in very odd guises sometimes.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:49 Yeah. Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:50 Fascinating. So why don’t you think the wine world and maybe it’s just us here in North America, why haven’t we recognized. It seems the transformation that’s happened in English wine, the jump in quality and so on. Is it just because we don’t get enough of the product here, or is there another issue?

Henry Jeffreys 00:24:09 I think it’s definitely, definitely that. I think it’s for lots of reasons, like the quantities are very small. Selling to America is very hard. Selling to Canada is quite complicated as well, I believe. You know, it’s not like selling to one country. If you sell to Japan, you can just get some person to import it. Whereas in North America you have all your kind of complicated systems by state. So you need somebody on the ground selling it. So there has been times when it has been imported, but I just think it’s incredibly hard.

Henry Jeffreys 00:24:40 And especially as you know, as you mentioned before, Canada makes from Nova Scotia makes pretty similar style of sparkling wines. California has some pretty good sparkling wines. And then once they come over to you, the price is pretty much the same as champagne. And so why would you? Unless you were, you know, you wanted something quite unusual. So there’s all kinds of things that you come up against which stops it taking off. And I wonder, I wonder if it ever will. I think it’ll probably outside sort of northern Europe and maybe some other markets. I think it’ll probably always be a bit of a curiosity.

Natalie MacLean 00:25:16 So if you could define what English wine is in a sentence, maybe that’s impossible, but how would you position it if you were coming up with a marketing campaign or a slogan? How would you describe English?

Henry Jeffreys 00:25:29 Wine marketing is not my, not my strong, strong suit like France, but fresher, you know.

Natalie MacLean 00:25:36 Okay. That’s good.

Natalie MacLean 00:25:38 Hey, there might be a career for you in marketing yet.

Henry Jeffreys 00:25:41 Yeah, maybe the best sparkling wines are, I think, are as good as sort of equivalent champagnes. But they have this zing, this kind of sort of electricity that’s sort of different to champagne. And then you get some kind of still Chardonnays, Pinot noir and stuff, which especially distilled Chardonnays can be absolutely superb, but they’re very lively and fresh. So yeah, like France, but fresher.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:05 Okay.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:06 Good. So you mentioned that England produces a very small amount of wine that’ll change each year, but on average, roughly how much is it producing like volume or bottles or however you want to frame it.

Henry Jeffreys 00:26:18 In a very big vintage like 2018? 15 million bottles, a lot more planting. So I think probably in a big vintage like 2023, it might be double that now, maybe 30 million bottles. So if you think so, that’s sort of ten times smaller than champagne.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:34 Okay.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:35 All right. Yeah. That’s good for perspective. And with that, maybe you can draw us a bit of a mental map where the wine regions are in the country and how they compare in size to champagne.

Henry Jeffreys 00:26:47 My knowledge of how big champagne is is not good. So I’m not sure if I can do that.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:53 That’s okay.

Henry Jeffreys 00:26:54 So you have London, which is in the southeast corner of the island, and then above it you have Essex and Essex. I always think of as the kind of new Jersey of England. It’s the sort of it’s kind of like very influenced by the city. It’s quite rough and ready and stuff. So that’s a bar that’s very good for still wines because it’s dry, it’s warm. You can leave the grapes out longer. So some very good Chardonnays coming out of there. So that’s sort of to the north east of the city. South east of the city is Kent, Sussex, and then sort of going round to the west, Hampshire below the city, that sort of prime sparkling wine country. Basically, the further east you go, the drier it is. So you can leave the grapes out longer, you have less disease pressure, you can get better yields. So basically the kind of south east, which is where like 90% of the wines come from, increasingly good still wines, but still sparkling wine is is the main thing.

Henry Jeffreys 00:27:52 There’s quite a lot of chalk, but there’s also green sand, which is like sort of gravel. There’s clay and then Essex is all clay. So it’s like there’s one consultant who compares it, perhaps a bit optimistically to Pomeroy, but it’s a similar sort of the soil is quite similar clay.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:10 So for the drainage it does it just retain as opposed to limestone lets the water go away. Right. Drain off.

Henry Jeffreys 00:28:17 It can get quite boggy. But if you have good drainage and a good slope, then it does. And then then it holds the heat and then it sort of dries out, but keeps the kind of moisture down below so the roots can get to the moisture, so it’s apparently really good for Pinot noir. I’m not an expert in geology. And then the further west you go, the damper and colder it gets. Oh, not necessarily colder. You still get plenty of sunshine, but it gets dampened down because of the disease pressure. It’s harder and harder. So you have vines in Hampshire, Wiltshire and then going down to Cornwall, which is in the far south west, and then further north you have in the Midlands, you have their sort of vines, but in fact Wales has some quite nice wines in the southern parts of that sort of over to the west.

Henry Jeffreys 00:29:02 And then you go further north and there are vineyards, but they tend to be non, you know, they would use hybrids and things like that. So if you’re after kind of classical wine you need to go to South Wales. There are some as well.

Natalie MacLean 00:29:13 And we always hear about the comparison again to champagne soils, the chalk or the white cliffs of Dover, the chalky ness, which again I think is limestone. But just correct me, I’m not a geologist either, but do you think that has an influence or is it overrated? The chalky soils in England?

Henry Jeffreys 00:29:29 I think it is. It is. I think you’re right. I think it is overrated. I think it was the story that sold. So it was same soil as champagne, same grapes, same techniques, but English. So I think people there was like a rush for chalk and it’s kind of people thought chalk was sexy and it was sort of it was a good marketing angle and they thought that it was the best place. But in recent years, people, especially with the rise of Essex, people thought that Essex was just clay.

Henry Jeffreys 00:29:56 You know, you can’t grow good grapes there. It’s too sticky. And actually people have realised that you can. So I think what’s far more important is aspect, the fact that it’s not too high above sea level, because then it gets colder, but then not too close to the sea. Problems with frost, sunshine, rainfall. I think almost everything else is more important than whether it’s chalk or clay. Then once you’ve got everything else right, then you can argue about that. But there just aren’t that many places where you get everything right that actually some people have planted in lots of chalk and it hasn’t been quite right because they they were just seduced by all that chalk. And actually there’s been other problems.

Natalie MacLean 00:30:35 Okay.

Natalie MacLean 00:30:36 Do you ever think there’ll be someday a classified system of English wine, the way we see in France, like the Premier Cru? The Grand Cru? Or is it just too small, or do you hope it doesn’t happen? Because it might get too complicated? I mean, what is your thought on that?

Henry Jeffreys 00:30:52 There is now a PDO, a kind of European geographical indication for one county, which is Sussex, but it’s really too early for it because they’ve only been making quality wine there for 30 years or something.

Henry Jeffreys 00:31:05 So it’s sort of, you know, if you think what the Appalachian control is, ideally it’s codifying hundreds of years of tradition, but we don’t have any tradition. So it’s kind of silly. And especially as, first of all, a lot of producers buy from different counties. So timber have vineyards in Kent and Sussex and Hampshire and stuff. So that kind of makes a nonsense of it. And also there’s sort of bits of Sussex that are very much like Kent, so there’s no point drawing a line where the old county barrier is. It’s like, you know, it’d be like sort of cutting the Medoc in half. It doesn’t really make any sense. I think the only place where it makes sense is Essex, because you’ve got this soil, it’s all the same. It’s this kind of I’ve mentioned it before and it produces some really, really good and quite distinctive chardonnay. And I think that if there was anywhere there’s this place called the Crouch Valley, which is this peninsula with water on all sides, and it has an amazing microclimate.

Henry Jeffreys 00:32:03 It doesn’t get frost, it stays very, very dry. It’s almost sort of semi-arid. And that’s probably the only place where you think that’s kind of Grand Cru. That’s where it’s distinctive. But nowhere else quite like that has been found yet.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:18 And would you compare those Chardonnays to like Chablis and northern Burgundy but fresher.

Henry Jeffreys 00:32:23 Actually, no, I mean, they’re not actually that I fell in love with other counties produced quite shabbily esque ones. They’re more sort of quite hard to explain. I think they’re more kind of almost like sort of really good Margaret River or something like that.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:37 Oh. From Australia.

Henry Jeffreys 00:32:38 Yeah, they’ve got that sort of the best ones have a sort of weight to them that you just really wouldn’t expect. And actually there’s a Jackson family vineyards have just invested quite heavily in Essex. So actually if anyone is going to take English wine global it would be them.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:55 Okay. Interesting. Well there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Henry. Here are my takeaways. Number one is chalky soil really the secret to great English wine or is it just clever marketing? We always hear about the chalk or the white cliffs of Dover in England.

Natalie MacLean 00:33:18 Do you think that has an influence or is it overrated? Well, Henry does think it’s overrated. And it was the story that sold. So it was the same soil as champagne, same grapes, same techniques. But it was English. There was a rush for the chalk, and people thought chalk was sexy. It was also a good marketing angle, and they thought that it was the best place. But in recent years, with the rise of the region of Essex where people thought that you can’t grow good grapes because it didn’t have the chalk, they realised that you can. So he thinks what’s far more important is the aspect of the vineyard, the fact that it’s not too high above sea level because it gets really cold and it’s not too close to the sea. Problems with frost, sunshine and rainfall. If you don’t have the right aspect or orientation, height, etc. of the vineyard. He thinks that almost everything else is more important than whether it’s chalk or clay soil. And once you’ve got everything else right, then we can all argue about that.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:19 Number two, what makes it so difficult for English wine to break into the North American market. Henry observes that selling to Canada and the US is quite complicated. If you sell to Japan, you can get one person to import it, whereas in North America you have complicated systems by state and province. You really need someone on the ground selling it. Plus, Nova Scotia makes a similar style of sparkling wine. California makes good sparkling wines. And so then once you get English bubbles landed in the market, the price is pretty much the same as champagne. So why would you pay that much unless you were looking for something quite unusual? Number three is it time for a classified system of English wine? Henry says that there now is a PDO or a protected designation of origin, which is a European Geographical Indication for one county, which is Sussex. But he says it’s really far too early for it, because they’ve only been making quality wine for about 30 years. The Appalachian control. A is ideally, in his opinion, codifying hundreds of years of tradition.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:25 Plus, a lot of producers buy from different counties, so Nye Timber will have vineyards in Kent and Essex and Hampshire, so that makes a complete nonsense of a designated origin. Also, there are bits of Sussex that are very much like Kent, so there’s no real line between where the county barriers are. It’s sort of like cutting Medoc in half, he says. That really doesn’t make any sense. The only place where it does make sense is Essex because of its unique soil. In the show notes, you’ll find the full transcript to my conversation with Henry, links to his website and books the video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now, no matter where you live. If you missed episode 170, go back and take a listen. I chat about English sparkling wine, magical blends, and harvest secrets with Janina Doyle. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.

Janina Doyle 00:36:24 If you’ve never tried English wine, the best to try would be sparkling.

Janina Doyle 00:36:29 Our sparkling wine is actually the closest thing you’re going to find to champagne, and not like it’s a mimic when there has been blind tasting competitions. English wine has very often won about 70%. The wine is sparkling wine, and the varieties grown in England are the three champagne varieties. Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:50 What is it that your wine regions share with champagne?

Janina Doyle 00:36:53 It’s the soils. The Paris basin. It’s free draining. It’s typically chalk, limestone and clay. It gives you that minerality and beautiful acidity. That same soil type is what we have in England, certainly in the southern part of England.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:10 The white cliffs of Dover. Is that chalk or limestone? Okay.

Janina Doyle 00:37:14 Dover is in Kent and actually the most wineries or certainly the top wineries.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:24 You won’t want to miss next week when we continue our chilly chat with Henry. If you liked this episode or learned even one thing from it, please email or tell a friend about the podcast this week, especially someone you know who would be interested in learning more about English wines.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:40 It’s easy to find the podcast, just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, their favorite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on my website at Natalie MacLean. Com slash podcast. Email me if you have a SIP tip question, or if you’d like to win one of seven copies of the books by Henry, Sally or Fiona. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this episode, or if you’ve read my book or are listening to it. Email me at Nathalie at Natalie MacLean. Com in the show notes, you’ll find a link to take a free online food and wine pairing class with me called the five Wine and Food pairing mistakes that can ruin your dinner and how to fix them forever. At Natalie MacLean. And that’s all in the show notes at Natalie MacLean. 334. Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass this week. Perhaps a zesty English sparkling wine perfect for toasting to World Book Day.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:46 You don’t want to miss one juicy episode of this podcast, especially the secret full bodied bonus episodes that I don’t announce on social media. So subscribe for free now at Natalie MacLean. Meet me here next week.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:04 Cheers!

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