Love California? Try Essex

Liam Idzikowski was a Northern Irish amateur jockey who got fed up with the climate there. He has ended up in the warmest, driest corner of the British Isles, making wines that have opened a whole new chapter in the history of English wine, even if their provenance is distinctly unsung. But he took a major swerve along the way.

When I met Idzikowski last year, I was surprised to learn that it was an episode of a BBC TV series I presented back in the 1990s that set him off on his wine journey.

He was so entranced by the warm, sunny climate at Williams Selyem winery in northern California, as seen in our programme on Pinot Noir, that he wrote to the winery offering his services as an intern. “They thought it was hilarious that they could employ someone who would willingly do all the hard work,” he told me. In Sonoma, he was well and truly bitten by the wine bug and went on to work at Tyrrell’s in Australia’s Hunter Valley as well as in South Africa and the Rhône.

By 2011, Idzikowski had graduated with first class honours from Plumpton in Sussex, Britain’s centre of learning about and research into wine production. “I really enjoyed Plumpton,” he said, “and the idea then was to emigrate, maybe to California or Australia.” But before he could be lured to balmier climes, he was offered a job as winemaker at Langham Estate in Dorset, south-west England. “I got lucky because it’s a good site and making good sparkling wine there was easy. It’s one of the few sites in England with genuine Champagne chalk, the only place where the two chalks overlap.”

But Idzikowski wanted to make still wine, not the sparkling wine that has dominated the English wine scene this century, so in 2015 he moved to nearby Lyme Bay, which was starting to get a bit of a reputation for its still Pinot Noir. He knew that Pinot Noir can be difficult to ripen properly and is prone to rot. The 2012 vintage had been notoriously rainy and challenging in England, with vineyards riddled with rot. But many wineries in counties including Sussex, Hampshire and even Cornwall managed to buy clean fruit from the much drier county of Essex in the east. So when Idzikowski was offered Pinot Noir grapes from a new estate in eastern Essex in 2016, he gladly accepted.

Over to Janine Bunker who, with her sister Sophie, now runs that estate, known today as Danbury Ridge. Back then, however, she was as startled as anyone by what Idzikowski achieved. “Our vines had gone into the ground only in 2014. We were still just growers. But then Liam sent us his 2016s made at Lyme Bay from Danbury Ridge grapes. Once we tasted Liam’s wine, we quickly decided to go into grape-to-glass.” Their launch vintage, 2018, was made at Lyme Bay, but by 2019 they were making wine in their own no-expense-spared estate winery, designed by Idzikowski and backed by the Bunker family’s determination to make England’s finest still wines.

The initial lightbulb moment for the Bunkers had come in 2012 when Janine’s father, Mike Bunker, who had retired from GAM Investments in Hong Kong in 2003, was out walking with a friend who mentioned a successful vineyard in Gloucestershire on the Welsh border. Mike and Heather Bunker had grown up in Southend-on-Sea in Essex, and a long time ago had bought land 20 miles north of the seaside town, near the village of Danbury.

It had previously been planted to orchards, and was then contract-farmed. But according to Janine, her father is extremely determined, so once he had the idea to create a vineyard, the necessary soil analyses were quickly undertaken and the first of the Bunkers’ three vineyards planted on the estate just two years later (the other two were planted in 2017).

Being Essex natives, the Bunkers hardly needed to analyse the local climate. They knew this particular corner of the county well. The Dengie peninsula, east of Chelmsford, is bounded by the Blackwater river to the north and Crouch river to the south, and known within the English wine world as Crouch Valley. It escapes the worst of prevailing storms from the south-west and is, crucially, generally frost-free.

My fellow Master of Wine John Atkinson, having fallen for the superiority of Crouch Valley grapes, is now also part of the Danbury Ridge team, so he was charged with showing me around when I visited towards the end of their 2022 grape harvest. Like Idzikowski, Atkinson is frustrated that other English wine producers tend in their publicity to focus on soil types, especially the chalk of which the Champenois boast, rather than climate. For the Danbury Ridge team, it is the warmth and the lack of rain and frost that enables them to get their Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes ripe enough to produce some truly stunning still wines, rather than picking them as early as most other English vignerons do, when acid levels are high enough to make sparkling wine.

But Atkinson is also convinced that it is the clays and gravels below the surface of the local vineyards, rather than chalk, that play an important part in determining the undoubted quality of Danbury Ridge’s still Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. On arrival at the estate, I was given Atkinson’s nine-page presentation and asked to watch his short film on the Danbury Ridge geology. “Here we go,” muttered Idzikowski, as we sat down to watch, confessing that he originally thought he would be able to make a satisfactory still Pinot Noir only two years out of every five, but has actually managed it every year since 2018.

Although the quality of Crouch Valley grapes is an open secret among English wine producers, you rarely see the name on wine labels, and there are remarkably few wineries in the region. New Hall and Chilford Hundred were first planted in 1969 and 1972 respectively, but with very different grape varieties. According to Janine Bunker, “there’s been an explosion of planting in recent years in Essex. Within five miles of Danbury, there are now 25 vineyards but none, except New Hall, have a winery.” The local (substantial) landowning families are reluctant to sell their land, but have been leasing it to incomers who sell the grapes to a variety of wine producers all over England, including the Bunkers.

Many of these vineyards are managed by Duncan McNeill, who knows every square metre of Crouch Valley, having cut his teeth at New Hall between 2006 and 2010. Meeting him in a vineyard overlooking New Hall with a fine estuarine view, I asked whether he’d consider a client a few miles north, near Colchester, for instance. He reacted as though I’d suggested planting vines on the moon. “Totally different soils there.”

So warm and dry was last summer that it left deep fissures in the clay beneath our feet. “I’ve never seen cracks like this,” said McNeill, “and I’ve been talking about drought stress in UK vineyards for years.” The Danbury Ridge team ended up watering some vines by hand, and Idzikowski started to worry about forest fires.

A trip to Crouch Valley was enough to make me wonder whether, eventually, parts of the UK may even become too warm for wine production. But for the moment British wine lovers can feel proud that we’ve shown we can make decent still wine as well as sparkling.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com

Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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