Meet the wild man reviving Britain’s lost vineyards

Names are important, as Master of Wine Tim Wildman knows well. That the sparkling wine he makes is called Astro Bunny has done sales no harm at all. He’s had such success that his Australian wine business is now big enough to be run from a distance and he recently moved back to the UK.

Congenitally enthusiastic, Wildman decided it was time to make a pet-nat (hipster for pétillant naturel, or a frivolous, lightly sparkling wine) in Britain. He branded this project Lost in a Field and went in search of suitable grapes. For him the English wine scene has become boring. Too many similar copies of champagne made from the Champagne grapes Chardonnay and Pinot by too few winemakers (contract winemaking is a common destination for the produce of many of the new English vineyards). So Wildman decided to concentrate on other grape varieties such as he could find.

Largely, this meant the grapes planted by the previous generation of English and Welsh vintners in the 1970s and 1980s, when summers were cooler than they are now. These were typically early-ripening crosses and hybrids sent to England from Germany — where short, cool summers were also common — and many were bred deliberately to ripen fast. Among Wildman’s favourites are Reichensteiner, Schönburger and Madeleine Angevine.

Those of us familiar with the English wine scene in that period came to rather despise these grapes because they dominated plantings and we associated them with the results of the uninspiring combination of cool summers and inexperienced winemakers. But Wildman has rebranded them “heritage varieties”. “It’s an easier term to get across to the public than saying ‘German crosses and hybrids’ and a useful catch-all that saves having to list the varieties themselves,” he says. “It also adds status, value and a certain prestige to varieties that have, until pretty recently, been sidelined or seen as underdogs yet form the true story of the old-vine legacy in this country.”

Wildman is stressing old vines because they are increasingly valued in the wine world. While the quantity of grapes they produce may not be maximal, the quality is usually superior, perhaps because the vines’ roots are deep and the plants have had so long to adapt to their environment and come into balance.

But it wasn’t that easy to find these heritage varieties. Wildman started off last year with “some old databases” from what was the Wine Standards Board (now subsumed into the Food Standards Agency), as well as some internet research. He identified 200 vineyards that had at some point been planted with Madeleine Angevine, Reichensteiner or Schönburger, then spent two months last summer, district by district, trying to find them and their owners. His aim was to see whether his blessed heritage varieties were still planted there and whether he could buy the grapes from the 2021 harvest for his first English pet-nat, which he has named Frolic.

“There was quite a bit of time spent driving down country lanes, getting out every few hundred yards to look over a hedge to see if I could spot a vineyard,” Wildman recalls. “From the initial list of 200 I found just two that would sell me commercial quantities of grapes, three that would sell smaller quantities, mainly of red, and about a dozen abandoned vineyards.”

Wildman has almost certainly chosen the best varieties that dominated English vineyards in the 1970s and 1980s

It’s these abandoned vineyards that have inspired Wildman to embark on another seemingly hare-brained scheme. Following on from his Instagram account, in which he recorded his search for the lost vineyards, in May he set up his Lost Vineyard Preservation Society, which has recruited volunteers to help him restore three of the abandoned vineyards by working during the day and camping out next to them at night.

His argument is that he is restoring Britain’s viticultural heritage. It would be picky to point out that this heritage is pretty recent, or at least seems so to this heritage wine writer. But, whatever one’s views, Wildman has almost certainly chosen the best varieties that dominated English vineyards in the 1970s and 1980s.

He has made agreements, initially for three years, with the owners of the three vineyards — in Hampshire, Devon and Powys in Wales — whereby he and his associate, vineyard consultant Darcy Gander, helped by the volunteers, will do their best to bring the vineyards back to life in exchange for whatever crop they produce. The main ingredients in his Lost in a Field pet-nats are still likely to be the much bigger quantities of heritage varieties that he buys from commercial vineyards.

The society’s first adventure took place on June 15 in the Welsh vineyard, about which Wildman is especially enthusiastic, particularly the bit on slate terraces. Volunteers included a voiceover artist who grew up in the area and brought her parents along for the day to help, and Jen Scott, an NHS dietitian who is developing her wine career.

She came across Wildman at the Real Wine Fair in London in May, attracted by the crowd around his table, and realised he was the producer of the Australian pet-nats she had enjoyed. She told me about her Welsh experience: “It was a hard day’s work but I really enjoyed the sense of doing something to help, while learning so much about the vineyard management. The vineyard was so overgrown that you couldn’t actually see the vines when we arrived.”

The Hampshire vineyard, called Court Lane, is in the village of Ropley and was started as a retirement project — as so many early English vineyards were — by Sarah Flook’s father. Up to 2014 his wines had done well locally but as his health failed, the vines became a liability. When Wildman contacted her last August all that remained were 0.75 acres of eight different varieties, including Reichensteiner and Madeleine Angevine. She and her mother were about to pull them out but “Tim’s enthusiasm and energy for his Lost Vineyards project was infectious, and I soon started to realise the direction in which the vines were heading could take a complete U-turn”, she wrote to me in an email.

On June 22, together with volunteers and some neighbours who had once helped her father with the harvest, she spent what she described as “a joyous day of bud-rubbing and strimming, followed by a barbecue”, adding: “I felt we were celebrating the rebirth of Court Lane Vineyard, with the baton being passed from the old watch to the new.”

If only for moments like that, Wildman’s Lost Vineyard Preservation Society project surely deserves to succeed, however odd it may seem to choose early-ripening grapes in a warming climate.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. More stockists from Wine-searcher.com

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