A Celebration of English Wine by Liz Sagues

Author:Liz Sagues
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719826153
Publisher: Crowood

Hambledon vines, not a cricket bat in sight. CHRIS DIXON PHOTOGRAPHY/AMBLEDON VINEYARD

There is a further link with that particular French wine region at Hambledon. Looking out from the top of the winery, vines can be seen high on the skyline on Old Winchester Hill to the north. This is the Meonhill vineyard, planted in 2004 by champenois Didier Pierson. After a decade, Pierson returned home and, although he retained a consulting interest in the winemaking, the vineyard became part of the main Hambledon estate.

Chardonnay is the main focus of the modern plantings, flourishing as it never did in the days of Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones, and a variety of clones and rootstocks in all three noble varieties provide a broad blending choice for Jestin. Contract winemaking helps make best use of serious investment in equipment – crowd-funding and EU grants have contributed to the cost of that. But if the label says ‘Hambledon’, the wine will have come only from Hambledon-grown grapes. That reminds me of an issue Salisbury-Jones had over whether he should make sparkling wine. If he did, he told a questioner in the 1970s, he would need to bring in grapes from other vineyards and so couldn’t put his vineyard’s name on the bottles. No, he said, if it couldn’t be called Hambledon, he didn’t want to make it.

Like the unpressed grapes, I journeyed up three levels in the winery lift to where the two Coquard presses sit, with space for a third alongside. From pressing onwards, all transfer through the winery is by gravity, to ensure the gentlest handling of the wine-to-be. The scale is big – there is capacity to make 1.1 million bottles a year. Sales supremo Steve Lowrie anticipates there will be a ready market for them all. ‘We’re two-and-a-half to three years ahead of where we expected demand would be,’ he told me as construction began on the new cellar in spring 2017. ‘We can sell all we produce. Five years ago we were begging sommeliers and trade buyers to come and taste. Now they are asking us.’

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