Camel Valley

On the second leg of my English wine road trip, Tobias Gorn, head sommelier of Michelin-starred Indian restaurant Tamarind in Mayfair, and I stopped off at Camel Valley in Cornwall, where we were shown around by winemaker Sam Lindo, who talked us through the Camel Valley range. In this video, we try the award-winning Pinot Noir Rosé Brut 2010, and finish up with a wine made from what could become England's flagship white grape: Darnibole Bacchus 2011. Chin chin!

English producers need to stop aping Champagne

Sam Lindo, chief winemaker of Camel Valley in Cornwall, has spoken out about English producers’ approach to sparkling wine, claiming too many are trying to ape Champagne. “A lot of English sparkling wine producers are trying to make Champagne by using the same grapes and the same winemaking methods. We should be doing something different,” Lindo told db.com.

“I think we are the only English sparkling wine producer that makes fizz with a flavour profile you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else in the world,” he added. While he uses both Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in his sparklers, Lindo also gives prominence to Seyval Blanc, using around 60% in the estate’s flagship Brut. “We should be using grapes best suited to our cool climate, that’s why I work with Seyval Blanc, Bacchus, Reichensteiner, Rondo and Dornfelder,” Lindo said.

Rather than trying to make rich, full-bodied sparklers, Lindo is deliberately aiming for a subtle flavour profile. “Australian wine pioneer Len Evans once said: ‘taste is best enjoyed at the lowest possible level of perception’, and I’m a big believer in that. Big wines tire very quickly – it’s the subtle wines that hold your interest. I want our wines to display an underripe character that reflects their English roots.

“I’m looking for flavours of fruits commonly grown in England: green apple, gooseberry and elderflower in the whites, and strawberry, raspberry and red apple in the rosé,” he said. Lindo, who sells 40% of his wine at the cellar door, said he doesn’t know from year to year what percentage of still wine Camel Valley will make until harvest time. “If we can’t make sparkling wine from the grapes, then we’ll make still wine,” he said.

As for the 2012 vintage, Lindo said that Cornwall had escaped a lot of the heavy rains that have plagued the rest of the country in recent months. “We’ve been really grateful for this recent sunny spell, but it’s impossible to predict the quality of a vintage until harvest time,” he said. 

Bonds

Last week was epic. After a seven course tasting menu at Trishna in Marylebone on Monday with the inimitable Wine Chap, Tom Harrow, who invited a group of food bloggers to slurp their way through 30 wines in order to find the perfect matches for his soon-to-launch 'Not Your Average Curry Night', on Tuesday I was invited to Bonds in the City, to review head chef Barry Tonks' modern European fare.

The restaurant resides in the Threadneedles Hotel. Built a tuppence's throw away from the Bank of England in 1856, the hotel originally served, unsurprisingly, as a bank. Its former life is still evident, from the vaulted ceilings and Corinthian columns in the restaurant, to the long, varnished bar, where the tills used to dwell. Speaking of bars, as I sit to sup my welcome cocktail – Champagne poured over rose Eaux de Vie, finished with fashionable goji berry liqueur – I'm told that the hotel has an 'honesty bar', from which guests are at liberty to take a drink in the hope that their honesty impels them to make a note of it in the accompanying record book. I rather prefer the idea of a 'dishonesty bar'.

Whilst admiring the impressive glass-domed ceiling in the lobby, which recalls St Paul's, I'm joined by four fellow food bloggers. We take to calling each other by our blogging names: Maison Cupcake, Cherie City, London Cocktail Guide and Fuss Free Flavours, and are soon ushered by a waiter wearing mauve across the American walnut wooden floors, to our round table. The room is populated with unquiet Americans. I can smell truffle oil in the air – which, in such an affluent part of the city, seems apt: the savoury smell of success. The sommelier appears and gives us a detailed run down of the wines we're about to imbibe, many of which, I'm pleased to discover, are English.

The meal begins with peasant bread and pleasantly salted butter, enjoyed with Balfour Brut Rosé 2006, which could confidently hold its own beside the best rosé Champagnes. To start, I opt for smoked eel. Its slick skin gleams like a painted nail, and the smokiness fills my lungs before I even cut into its swan white interior. Its bacon-like flavour is complimented by a scoop of horseradish cream, though I was hoping for more kick from it – the cream rendering it too mild. The eel marries well with the vinegary beetroot and mini mountain of cubed potato, and proves a good match for my buttery Plantagenet Chardonnay.

Whilst enjoying another English wine offering: Primrose Hill Tenterdon Estate Bacchus 2009, with its aromatic nose of elderflower, cut grass and gooseberry, we are presented with a crab salad and bruschetta 'inter' course. Generously doused in sesame oil, the dish is crunchy, textured and wonderfully refreshing. Talk soon turns to Fuss Free Flavours' latest hobbyhorse: the Mucky Book Club, which takes place every other Sunday at the Ship pub in Wandsworth. Founded by FFF, books read so far include The Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin and the infamous Story of O. I suggest that Lady Chatterley's Lover might be a good book to tackle, but FFF doesn't deem it mucky enough.

I digress. My main event is a sizeable square of slow cooked pork belly served with apple canon balls and garlic-fueled spinach purée. Sprinkled with sea salt, the skin is satisfyingly savoury, while the pork beneath it is rich, but slightly too fatty – said pig could have done with doing a few more piggy push-ups before he met his meaty end. The accompanying chorizo risotto however, is stunning. Served in a dinky black Le Creuset dish, the al dente rice has bite, while the sauce is meaty and full of flavour, taking me straight to Spain. The wine to match it is an exciting discovery: Denbies Redlands 2006 – a blend of Pinot Noir and Dornfelder made minutes from where I grew up in Surrey. It has a savoury approach and a juicy, red fruited palate with a licorice finish – easily the best English red I've ever had.

After such indulgence I can barely move, but am told excellent things about the cheese trolly, so feel it rude not to sample its delights. The waitress is a cheese fiend, and gives me an exhaustive explanation of each. I opt for Beaufort, Blue, Pont l'Evêque and Epoisse, the last of which, when drizzled with white truffle honey, makes for a sublime, other worldy flavour experience. The sweet-savoury playfulness of the truffle honey matched with the gooey Epoisse has me flinging my head back, St. Teresa-like, in the ecstasy of it all. Perhaps I should pen a short story on it and submit it anonymously to the Mucky Book Club?

Wickham Vineyard harvest

In my three years at Decanter, I've yet to pick a grape. Until last weekend. With English sparkling's star in the ascendancy, I was keen to get out to one of our local vineyards and muck in with the picking.

Wickham Vineyard in Hampshire invited me to take part in their harvest last Saturday, along with members of WineShare - a vine sharing scheme that offers vine rentals in Bordeaux, Burgundy, Provence, Chianti and Hampshire.

Picking starts predictably early, so I have to board the train in London, bleary-eyed, at 7.30am, in order to be there for the 9.30 start. The early start is made bearable by the beautiful weather. It's one of those perfect autumn days - bright, crisp, and full of sunshine. Looking out of the train window, the leaves on the trees burn bright with jewel-like hues - copper, ruby and amber – in their final blaze of glory before death.

A short taxi ride from the station and I'm at the vineyard, being ushered into a garden full of WineShare members huddled together in their wellies, clutching cups of coffee for warmth. Gulping down a coffee (it's too early for bubbles, even for me) winemaker William Biddulph hands round a bucket of pruning sheers and explains our mission for the morning - to pick as many grapes as humanly possible.

Biddulph, who looks like a foppish Jason Donovan, started life at Berry Bros, then spent the mid '90s in Gisbourne, New Zealand, taking the helm at Wickham five years ago as winemaker on the seven hectare estate planted with six white and four red varieties, including the epically named Triomphe d'Alsace; the grape we're about to pick, which will go into their Row Ash Red 2010 and Row Ash Rosé NV.

We're split into three groups and given a row each to work on. Basket and sheers in hand, I stand at my alloted spot and get picking. There aren't many rules, we just have to avoid unripe and over-ripe bunches. Apprehensive of the sheers at first, I soon find my rhythm and pick up picking speed. Seeing everyone else frantically picking around you helps spur you on. It feels a bit like a competition, but the more you pick, the quicker your basket gets emptied.

Mid pick, I pop a couple of the grapes in my mouth. They're small, round and inky blue-black like blueberries. They're lovely and sweet but incredibly tannic. I decide not to eat any more, and take to peeling one open instead. Behind the blueberry skin, the flesh is red and pigmented like Dornfelder. I squidge it between my fingers and ruby red juice squirts everywhere.

After a couple of hours, the sun is high in the sky and warming our backs. It's hard work, and I find myself looking at my watch and wondering when we might be rewarded with lunch. Every now and then a quad bike roars up my row and zooms away with the contents of my basket. Flagging a little, I wish were picking to music. I run through a picking soundtrack in my head of high octane tracks to keep my momentum up.

Snipping off the final few bunches on my vine, I scan the row and realise it's naked of grapes. Lunch beckons. I bound back to the garden and am treated to a banquet of a buffet. Famished from my morning's work, I ask for a bit of everything and the food seems to taste especially good having laboured for it. In three hours our small group stripped the vineyard of two tonnes of grapes. We toast our success with a glass of Wickham Special Release Fumé - a blend of Bacchus and Reichensteiner aged in French oak. I'm looking forward to the Row Ash Red being bottled, and to drinking a wine I helped make.

English wine tasting

We all know about the merits of English sparkling wine – Ridgeview Estate's Grosvenor Blanc de Blancs 2006 recently won the UK Sparkling Over £10 Regional Trophy at the Decanter World Wine Awards, making it a contender for the Sparkling Over £10 International Trophy at the Decanter World Wine Awards ceremony dinner on 1 September, where it will be competing on a level playing field with heavyweight vintage Champagnes.

Sparkling wines aside, when my flatmate Jimmy Smith, who runs the West London Wine School in Fulham, mentioned he was hosting a Best of British wine tasting, I was the first to sign up, excited about trying the still wines on offer.

A modest and manageable eight wines were on show – four whites, one red and three sparklers. We seem to be experiencing something of a wine boom in England – planting is at an all time high. The 2009 figures show 1,215 hectares under vine, with Champagne grapes Pinot Noir and Chardonnay being the most widely planted, followed by trendy grape Bacchus, named, of course, after the Roman god of wine.

A whopping 75% of England's vineyards are in the south, clustered around Sussex, Surrey and Kent. Although winemaking in England dates back to AD43, when the Romans brought vines to Britain, it's only over the past 20 years that we've started to be taken seriously as a quality wine producing country. And things are on the up, with both foreign and local investment, a surge of skilled winemakers coming up through the ranks, and the effects of Global Warming, England is emerging as a serious player in the wine world.

There are currently 381 vineyards in England, stretching as far north as Yorkshire, and 116 wineries producing around 2.2m bottles a year, and a record 3.2m in 2009. Jimmy's tasting began with Stanlake Park Regatta White 2007, a blend of Ortega (named after the Spanish liberal philosopher José Ortega), Madeleine Angevine and Schonburger. The stunning, sprawling Stanlake Park manor house wouldn't look out of place on the Left Bank. The wine however, failed to impress. It had some attractive green fruit and crisp acidity, but was too light bodied to get me excited.

On to wine 2; Denbies Flint Valley NV from the Surrey-based winery boasting the biggest single vineyard in the UK. I have to admit to being both proud and nostalgic about tasting this wine. I was born ten minutes from the vineyard in Godstone a year before it was founded in 1984. There is something wonderful about trying a wine from where you were born. I felt the same pride (albeit disproportional) as natives of Bordeaux and Champagne do about their wines. A blend of Reichensteiner, Seyval Blanc and Chardonnay, it had a slightly oily texture, with a flinty, mineral core and sharp green apple and citrus notes.

Two Chapel Down wines were on show – Bacchus 2009 and Brut Sparkling NV. With 19 vineyards scattered across Kent, Chapel Down has won a slew of awards over the past few years. Along with Ortega, Bacchus is making a name for itself as an exciting variety to watch. The pronounced nose showed passionfruit, nettle and lime, while the sharp palate was filled with puckering lime and gooseberry - we just might have found England's answer to Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.

The only red of the night, Bolney Estate Dark Harvest 2008, came from Bookers in Sussex. Made from the early ripening Rondo grape, with a small amount of inky Dornfelder thrown in, it was liquid proof of how far we've got to go with our reds. It tasted like a church – dusty and musty, but there were faint, pleasurable hints of Pinot Noir through its smoke, spice and soft red fruit.

We ended with a trio of sparklers – Chapel Down (as previously mentioned), Somborne Valley Rosé 2006 and, for the grand finale, Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 2005. Sharing Champagne's clement climate and limestone and chalk soils, England has the perfect terroir for sparkling wine – production is set to double in 2010, from 3m to 7m bottles a year. The Somborne had an odd, almost cheesy nose, but a wonderfully elegant palate of apples, strawberries and raspberries, with a creamy, lemony mousse. But the Nyetimber 2005 stood out like a diamond in the dirt. A rich golden hue, if I were to get this in a blind tasting, it would be almost impossible not to place it in Champagne. The nose sang of rich autolytic notes - biscuit, toasted almonds and brioche. The palate was rich and creamy, like a plate of hot buttered croissants.

The tasting has given me a lot to think about. Not only are we now making sparkling wines that can hold their own against the best vintage Champagnes, we seem to have found our own homegrown version of super seller Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc in Bacchus, and a rising star in Ortega. There is so much to celebrate in English wine right now - the future's bright.