English Wine by Oz Clarke;

Author:Oz Clarke;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

Plumpton College

Ditchling Road, Lewes, West Sussex BN7 3AE

www.plumpton.ac.uk Telephone 01273 890454

First planted 1988; vineyard area 9 hectares (20 acres); total average annual production: approx. 18,000 bottles

At the winery: visits by appt

Sales: online, local and national stockists

Oz recommends Brut Classic, Bacchus and Rosé

I’m surrounded by a gaggle of inquisitive 13-year-olds on my first visit to the wine department of Plumpton College, England’s increasingly famous wine school. They’re all here for the ‘Big Bang’ – an afternoon of donning white coats and lab spectacles, pressing grapes, messing around with refractometers and the like and probably ending up exhilarated and mucky – just what kids love. But did they know anything about wine? Only one said ‘yes; put it in front of my parents and it’s gone.’ Well, that’s a start.

But who knows how many of these schoolchildren might catch the wine bug from visits like this? Plumpton College is Britain’s only vineyard and winemaking school, and it’s the only establishment in Europe that teaches the wine business and the production of wine in English. Chris Foss, the boss from its foundation in 1988 until 2019, reckons there are now few wineries in Britain that haven’t benefitted from Plumpton graduates, and I’ve met them on my travels in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand as well as in France and Spain.

The wine course didn’t start very auspiciously. Chris Foss had been making wine in Bordeaux in France – in some years up to 500,000 bottles – but had come back to England in 1984 to look for a vineyard manager’s job. These weren’t thick on the ground in 1984, and the Plumpton Agricultural College was just wondering whether to dip its toe into the wine and vineyard business. The college wasn’t exactly going to shower gold on the idea but they had two rows of vines, and Chris seemed content to make do with a desk and an old chicken shed and some leftover glass demijohns.

But Chris was undeterred – or just desperate to get away from the smell of poultry. The two rows of vines became 0.4 hectares (1 acre) and is the now the heart of the experimental college vineyard, which aims to include every trellising and pruning system known to man, as well as every grape variety and rootstock that might reasonably be expected to have a future in Britain. There are also 10 hectares (25 acres) nearby which Plumpton operates as a commercial vineyard, bringing in a very useful £150,000 a year to fund the College programmes.

And the wine department has had a purpose-built Wine Centre since 2006, which is improved on every time a new sponsor is prepared to put up the cash. The winery itself is small but smart, with tanks as tiny as 200 litres and as big as 5000 litres, so that the students can make as many experimental cuvées as possible – which they will then sell, unless they are filthy, in which case they get thrown away or, knowing students, another use for them is ‘discovered’.

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