Discover the transformation of English wine from a laughingstock to a globally respected industry with our special guest, Henry Jeffreys. Henry is a celebrated drinks journalist and author. He has written for the Guardian, the Spectator, and most recently been editor at the Master of Malt blog. He is also the author of several books, including Empire of Booze, and Vines in a Cold Climate.
In this episode, through his lens, you'll meet the quirky personalities who have revolutionized English wine and explore the cultural significance of British and European identity in the wine trade.
We explore how the English wine landscape is evolving with unexpected players such as Californian winemakers joining the scene. Henry sheds light on how international vineyards, such as the Jackson family's initiatives in Essex, are reshaping the industry with innovative marketing strategies and expanding reach. We also delve into the consolidation trends among wineries and the rise of boutique wineries, making an intriguing comparison to the craft beer industry. We also discuss how the pivotal shift from Germanic grapes to Pinot Noir and sparkling wine marks a significant milestone, positioning English wine for future success.
Henry brings us into the world of sparkling wine production, discussing the strategic moves by major champagne houses to expand into England. The impact of climate change, branding challenges, and consumer perceptions all come under scrutiny. We also discuss the broader cultural shifts affecting drinking habits in the UK, especially among the younger generation. Wrapping up, we get a sneak peek into Henry's upcoming book on wine snobbery, promising a captivating exploration of wine status anxiety through the ages.
Don't miss this episode filled with rich stories, expert insights, and an optimistic view of the future of English wine.
Sebastian Lees: 0:34
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the Fat Tony's podcast. Our guest today is respected drinks journalist who has written for the Guardian, the Spectator, the Financial Times and most recently correct me if I'm wrong here has just come off a six-year stint editing the Masters of Malt blog.
Henry Jeffreys: 0:55
There's only one master. This is a common misconception about master of malt.
Sebastian Lees: 1:00
There is a sole master, not many masters someone did a blog web page several years ago about uk brands that people commonly add an s2. They don't like wilkinsons and morrisons and things like that there's there's many of them that in the cultural zeitgeist people append the S to.
Henry Jeffreys: 1:18
The S. Yeah, I think actually Masters of Malt is a better name. There's only one master we are where we are.
Sebastian Lees: 1:26
Well, you're also the author of several books Empire of Booze, a British History Through the Bottom of a Glass, vines in a Cold Climate, the People Behind the English wine revolution, which we will be talking a lot about today, and, most recently, the cocktail dictionary. What I can't convey to listeners via podcast is that if there was a best-dressed man in wine award, I feel like Henry would win it, because if you google any photo of him, he's dressed in this kind of sartorial getup that I would describe as a kind of classic British cross between James Bond and English public school headmaster. So it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show, henry. Welcome to Fat Tony's.
Henry Jeffreys: 2:11
Oh well, thank you for coming, Thank you for having me. I feel very unsartorially elegant today. I'm just wearing a shirt, you know, I'm even wearing trainers. So I think it's just because when people want to take a photo of me which isn't very often there's normally a special occasion, so it's a sort of party or something. Then I'm wearing a suit, but most of the time I'm just as badly dressed as everyone else.
Sebastian Lees: 2:36
Well, I like it. I think it's a good brand it's. You know, we're sorely lacking with Sartorial elegance these days. I can't remember who said it, but someone said we used to be casual in the week and then get dressed up on Sundays, and now it's the reverse. You know, I appreciate it.
Henry Jeffreys: 2:53
Yeah well, the wine trade used to be famously well-dressed, and you still see it in Bordeaux or Jerez or Porto, places where you have these people who are kind of more British than the British. So you'll have these Spanish gentlemen who wear these fantastic suits that they get their tailor in Seville to make or tailor in Bordeaux, dressing like they think of as how a proper English gentleman should dress, even though English gentlemen nowadays just wear gilets, I think there's an Italian word for it.
Sebastian Lees: 3:22
Isn't there, so I'm going to mispronounce this terribly Sprezzatura, which is the art of dressing elegantly, but just with a little bit of a roguishness that stands out, so you know, having a mismatched tie or having your belt hanging out or something like that.
Henry Jeffreys: 3:36
It's kind an effortless elegance yes, well, this is the thing. The french have a term, le style anglais, which is that kind of cording's, you know, hunting and shooting, sort of chic and what's so. What lovely about the europeans and you're also the argentines do it a bit is they always get it slightly wrong because that, because it's always too, the clothes are too well tailored, they're too new, they fit properly, whereas the proper kind of English gent will wear the shirt handed down from his grandfather or the coat that smells like Labradors. So it's sort of, yeah, it's very, it's just. I think it's the most wonderful thing that kind of European take on an English gentleman's style.
Sebastian Lees: 4:17
It's almost like a U-curve, isn't it, where you get into the newly minted middle classes who have, you know, the Louis Vuitton and everything, and then you get to the real aristocracy who you know will have hand-me-downs from several generations ago. There was a British journalist I think it was I think it was the Mirror who last year photographed well, now King Charles and then picked up from the archives that he was wearing the same coat that he had 40 years ago in a mirror photograph from back in the 1980s, which is just fantastic.
Henry Jeffreys: 4:50
Yeah well, they're built to last, those coats.
Sebastian Lees: 4:54
Well enough on Sartura. We're here to talk about wine, and English wine in particular. I just want to give a little bit of a background here. I read your book Vines in a Cold Climate about three months ago now, and I have a confession to make I'm not a wine person. I can probably count on my hands and toes how many glasses of wine I've had in my life. I am very, very well acquainted with every other form of alcohol, though, and I do love champagne. So before the pedants start mailing in saying, well, you know, champagne is a form of wine, I draw a distinction.
Sebastian Lees: 5:27
But that being said, I absolutely loved your book. I really, really totally got lost in it. I think I read it in two sittings, with a minor break, and I think the reason I love this book yes, it's a story about wine, but it's also a story about the great British eccentrics who forged this industry, and I think this notion of the great British eccentric, while sadly becoming an endangered species, really strikes at the heart of the kind of British identity. And before we get into that, before we talk about the book for listeners that haven't read it, I was wondering if you could just give us a very, very high-level timeline of British wine and also, in your opinion, when we reached that inflection point where it stopped being regarded as a joke and started to be taken seriously.
Henry Jeffreys: 6:23
Yeah, I think you can go back a long way. There's sort of evidence of Romans growing vines. You could go to the Middle Ages. But I think that the roots of the English wine industry are very, very shallow.
Henry Jeffreys: 6:36
The modern industry really got off its feet after the Second World War. You had some sort of double-barreled kernels planting some grapes, but it was all very sort of amateurish and obviously I've never tried the wines, but probably not very good. It was people with a spare paddock thinking oh, I quite like wine, I'll plant some grapes here. How hard could it be if the French could do it, though you know that's probably not entirely fair. I'd say that people started getting serious in the late 60s and early 70s and you had a kind of new generation, sort of young Turks like Stephen Skelton and Peter Hall, who's still making wine at Brakey Bottom and, funny enough, king Charles and Camilla are big, big fans of his and they were people who they weren't colonels, they didn't have a pension. They were young people, young farmers who thought, who wanted to make money out of it. So that's when the industry sort of became so. There are certain wineries, like Biddenden, balney, brakey Bottom, that have their roots in this period, but still it was very much a curiosity. You sold locally, sometimes good. If you had a warm vintage they might make something quite nice, but very much a local curiosity.
Henry Jeffreys: 7:55
Until Nightimber, which was founded by two Americans, sandy and Stuart Moss, and they planted grapes. In the late 80s and they got a champagne consultant, they planted French grapes, they made sure the soil was like champagne, they imported champagne equipment, champagne bottles, champagne labels and basically made Sussex champagne and did it incredibly successfully. So the first vintage, a 92 Blanc de Blanc, was released in 1996. And then in 1997, started winning awards, beating the French, being put in blind tastings where it would beat the French. So I would say sort of 97 was the point where people woke up and went oh, there's something going on here.
Henry Jeffreys: 8:41
And about the same time that Nightingale started, ridgeview started. I think their first vintage was probably 96, 97, something like that, and they were very important because they made a lot of wine for supermarkets, for lathe weights, for other people. So if you tried an English wine you probably read about Nightimber, you probably drank Ridgeview. And then, following the success of Nightimber and Ridgeview and incidentally I tried the first vintage of Nightimber a couple of years ago, so tried it 30 years after the vintage and it was absolutely phenomenal. So they got it right from the word go.
Henry Jeffreys: 9:19
And then after then you had all these sort of city boys who had made a lot of money doing stuff I don't really understand planting grapes in, and that was in the noughties and that was, and then it all sort of went from there and it's had kind of fits and starts, you know, sort of sped ahead, slowed down, but really it was. It was the 90s where it started to be done properly, because people realised that the climate was quite similar to champagne. The soil was similar. The great thing about champagne is you can make it with slightly underripe grapes. You actually don't want fully ripe grapes, you want to have that acidity. And then when you do the champagne process it tastes invigorating. And people had never done that in England before, mainly because you need a lot of money to do it, because you need to make the wine and then sit on it for three years, four years, five years and wait for the bubbles and that wonderful flavour to develop. So yeah, I think that's the brief history.
Sebastian Lees: 10:20
I think there's a lot there about the English champagne market. I know you're technically not allowed to use that term, but before we get onto that, in the first section of your book you talk about these pioneers of the English wine industry, and when I was reading it I broadly lumped them into three categories, which was aristocrats, eccentrics and pioneers. Um, is there anyone from that early period that you feel deserves more credit than they've been given or stands out of it as particularly enjoyable?
Henry Jeffreys: 10:54
I first mentioned him already. But peter hall is is absolutely wonderful. He's still making his wine. He looks like a kindyard in 1974, so 50 years ago this year, in this little valley not far from Hove. But it feels like you're in the middle of nowhere, it really doesn't feel like you're anywhere near Brighton. And he suffered all these kind of floods. There was one year there was a plague of pheasants that came down and ate all his grapes. There was one year there was a plague of pheasants that came down and ate all his grapes. He's had all these kind of trials and tribulations and he's never given up and gradually his wines have become very sought after.
Henry Jeffreys: 11:49
So, as I mentioned, the king likes them, corny and Barrow, the wine merchant stock them, all these like smart restaurants, like Sketch. But to begin with he was just some kind of just sort of madman in this little valley, like King Lear, like raging against the elements, and he told me he referred to the 70s and 80s as the bloody, awful weather years. And you've just got to be mad to think not only can you make wine, but you're going to make something as good as the wines that peter makes. So yeah, peter, peter's a real inspiration, especially as I'll be honest here the industry from the outside can seem very corporate.
Henry Jeffreys: 12:30
It's, you know, it's lots of very clever branding and sort of. You know, everyone's trying to be like paul ro Moet or something, and so it can seem a little impersonal. And then when you find characters like Peter, the whole story comes to life. So this is what I aim to do in the book it's not write a book about grape varieties or soil or global warming, but write it about these crazy people who defied the odds and thought they could make a really good wine in our sort of ridiculous climate.
Sebastian Lees: 13:02
I do think it resonates. I know I've already said this, but this story of the English eccentricity, you know, overcoming odds, fighting the good fight it really does resonate and I think that's what really sucked me in. And then being able to layer on top of that as a kind of skeleton you know, the stories about climate change, the stories about grape varieties, the stories about bigger industry, was just absolutely engrossing. I mean, we talked about this kind of explosion of English sparkling wine, we hinted at it and we hear a lot, you know about the geographical similarities in the South East, the chalkiness being similar to the Champagne region and we are seeing huge growth. I think I was reading a study researching this podcast and I think it said we're projected to sell 22 million bottles of sparkling wine a year English sparkling wine by 2030.
Sebastian Lees: 13:55
Yet, at the same time, what I noticed in your book we were talking about this may sound too antagonistic, but the encroachment of the French champagne houses into buying tracts of land within the UK. I think you mentioned Tassinger, pomeroy, I think as well. Also Germany, frejane. Do you think that British wineries should be worried about this? Do you think that British wineries should be worried about this? Do you think the industry might be swallowed up before it's had a chance to fully spread its wings, or do you think it's complementary?
Henry Jeffreys: 14:27
I think it's a great thing. I mean, who could have predicted that 30 years ago that the French would be coming to make wine in England? And I think there's plenty of room for it, and I think they bring a sort of marketing nous that perhaps the British don't have and a kind of marketing reach as well. So now I think it's an entirely positive step that the French and the Californians, the Jackson family vineyards, have just bought a load of land in Essex. Really, yeah, to make a still wine, to make Chardonnay. I mean, californians in Essex making wine, that's something just. I mean, even five years ago people would say you were mad if you said that. So no, I think it's all very positive because I think inevitably you're going to get big companies moving in, and if those big companies are people like Tattinger, then I think that's brilliant.
Sebastian Lees: 15:19
And do you think, with these big companies moving in, do you think we're still going to continue to see these kind of startup boutique wineries emerge, or do you think we're in a kind of consolidation phase now within the British wine industry?
Henry Jeffreys: 15:32
I think we're in a consolidation phase of medium to large wineries and I think a lot of medium people will go under or not go under, but they'll be bought up. They'll amalgamate that kind of stuff Because there's so many English sparkling wine brands and most of them are very, very good indeed. But it can be quite hard. I mean, there's so many I didn't even put in the book people that I love just because I thought there's so many. There's just so many of them. So I think there will be that kind of consolidation. But at the other end I think that there'll still be lots of small producers because, well, I think there's so many more grapes going in the ground and I think at some point, probably quite soon, there's going to be more than people can actually deal with in the short term. So I think you'll have the price of grapes will go down. So people who are buying on the open market, people like the sort of London urban wineries like Black Book or London Crew, who buy grapes from Essex or Sussex or whatever, I think things will become easier for them because the grapes won't be so in demand. So I think people will plant vineyards and they realise that it's quite hard to do or hard to sell the wine. So I think the new blood will move in. So I think there will be a lot of movement.
Henry Jeffreys: 16:56
But I don't think it's going to become homogenous. I think there's always going to be lots of space for the little people especially. I mean there's a chap in Cambridge who I'm quite friendly with called Chris Wilson and he has a winery called Gutter and Stars and he makes sort of 10,000 bottles a year. His startup costs are something like £10,000. He rents like this little cellar under a windmill and he makes his wines. He sells almost all of them direct, a little bit to wine merchants, a little bit to restaurants. Very good at PR, very good at marketing and I think he makes quite a good living. So I think if you approach it right and you think about your routes to market and stuff, you know you can actually make money out of it.
Sebastian Lees: 17:40
Yeah.
Henry Jeffreys: 17:41
So I think there's still going to be plenty of room for the little people.
Sebastian Lees: 17:44
I think it's interesting. Before I read your book, I'm approaching middle age and I have begun to wonder in what way my midlife crisis would manifest itself, whether it be a motorcycle or a passively attractive sales rep from Milton Keynes. But after reading your book, all I could think is I should start a boutique vineyard, despite having zero experience, and there is something seductive about it, in a similar way to, I think, what we saw, that the craft beer explosion you know for previous sort of 10 years, and you're right, I think we are. We have this dual state now in the craft beer industry where a lot of the earlier, earlier brands have been swallowed up by the large breweries and kept the brand, but also we're still seeing continuous innovation, continuous new blood entering the market. So we are, we can see these two states exist at once.
Sebastian Lees: 18:38
I suppose is what I'm trying to say. There's nothing mutually exclusive about it. You know, it's fascinating really. One thing you talk about and I may misremember here, but you also talk about the shift in grape varieties in the early days of English wine, and I think there was a moment am I right in thinking it was originally the assumption that we start off with almost a Germanic kind of approach to this because we're culturally and geographically aligned. And then it was slightly later on that someone had the aha moment for the Pinot Noir and kind of going down the sparkling wine route.
Henry Jeffreys: 19:15
So originally the English wine industry was totally orientated towards Germany and you had these great varieties that were bred at the Wine Institute in Geisenheim and they were designed. They're called things like Muller-Turgau and Reichensteiner, and most people who knew anything about wine in England were either educated in Germany or they might actually be German themselves. There was a consultant called Karl Heinz Yoner who was quite influential. So people were like you know, it's a cold climate, it's a bit like Germany, we'll plant these grape varieties. And then they decided they were going to make a sort of German style wine, sort of Liebfraunmilch style wines, and you know, I mean they tended not to be very good. The grapes weren't ripe enough, they were often planted in not very good places and they would cover up the lack of ripeness with like sweetener, with the stuff called Suss Reserve, which is basically grape trees. Not that there weren't good wines being made I'm sure Peter Hall made some good wines and Stephen Skelton, but on the whole the ambition was very low. We would make English versions of cheap German wines and people had tried to plant French grapes, sort of Chardonnay, pinot Noir and stuff, but generally the sugar levels had never got high enough and the acidity had just been off the scale like basically undrinkable. But in the 80s the mosses from Nightingale realised that these French varieties, if you're making sparkling wine, they don't need to be quite so ripe because you can have very high acidity. If you taste the base wine in champagne before it goes through the fizz making process, it's not a lot of fun. It's very high acidity, not a lot of fruit, and over time, over the secondary fermentation, the yeast, the bubbles, it develops all these beautiful flavors. The yeast, the bubbles, it develops all these beautiful flavors. And you leave it long enough and the acidity comes down, or the perception of acidity comes down. And so that was a huge shift away from France towards Germany no, sorry, other way around, away from Germany and towards France. So the whole industry sort of switched to making sparkling wines.
Henry Jeffreys: 21:32
But one of the kind of interesting things I find about these german varieties is that they were designed to ripen in germany's much warmer climate. Germany has a continental climate, has much longer summers. You think of germany as cold, but if you're in germany in the summer it's probably pretty hot, especially in the wine producing regions, and so they would ripen very early. They wouldn't develop a lot of flavour, they'd make pretty piss poor wine. But in England, with a cooler growing season, some of these varieties are actually quite nice if you can ripen them properly. If you think about the difference between an English apple and a Golden Delicious or something. It's that cool climate. You get that wonderful acidity, that wonderful freshness. And so it's the same with Muller-Turgau and Reichensteiner and that kind of stuff. You can actually coke some really interesting flavours out of them, as long as you get them properly ripe.
Henry Jeffreys: 22:27
And then there's a couple of other German varieties. Bacchus, which is, despite its name, actually a German variety, can actually make, makes very nice wines, and it ripens three weeks earlier than chardonnay, pinot noir and stuff. So it's a real banker. You know if it's going to rain a harvest if you've got some backers, that's a good thing. And there's another one called ortega, which, despite its name, is also german, which people used to make sweet wines out of because it accumulated sugar very quickly. But there's people in Kent making sort of Wiener Verde, albarino type wines out of it which are just delicious.
Henry Jeffreys: 23:03
And because they ripen earlier you can get a bigger crop. You don't have to worry about if you leave your Chardonnay out, you're going to get some rot. You're going to get a smaller crop, but these are ripened earlier, so you can get a bigger crop, so you can have cheaper wines. So it's very interesting because everything like shifted to France and now people are thinking, oh, hang on, you know, some of these old grapes are actually pretty useful. So it's now. There's now kind of a quite a complicated picture, but still I think the French ones are dominant in planting. I think it's like the big three champagne grapes, followed by Bacchus. Those are the top four.
Sebastian Lees: 23:45
I mean, how geographically constrained are we in the UK? Then the book talks obviously a lot about the southeast, a little bit of southwest. Towards the end of the book you talk about, I think, essex being the future. But how far north can we go? Are there any renegades? You know pushing the boundaries at the moment that you know of.
Henry Jeffreys: 24:07
I will be completely honest with you. My publishers gave me a really tight deadline for the book and I live in Faversham in Kent, in the heart of English wine country, and very quickly became apparent that I could either write a quite good book about the whole country or a really good book about Southern England, and I thought 95% of wine comes from Southern England and basically anything you come across is probably going to be from Southeast England, maybe a bit from the Southwest. So basically with my book you get to norfolk and then it's kind of like here be dragons and you know monsters and stuff. Um, so it is hard to. You can't really ripen the great french grapes above a certain latitude. So sort of east anglia is pretty good.
Henry Jeffreys: 24:49
Perhaps going into south lincolnshire there's some nice wines being made. It just gets harder and harder. But who knows with with climate change. So a lot of people plant what are known as hybrids, which have which are slightly different from crosses. It means they have some normally american wine, american grape dna in and they some of of them can be quite nice like Solaris. Some of them are a bit weird, like they taste a bit like Vimto. They've got a sort of slightly unnatural kind of taste. That's Rondo I'm talking about, which is just horrible.
Henry Jeffreys: 25:27
So it's not something I know a huge amount about, because I just decided to completely ignore the north of England. But the wines are quite different. You're not going to get a really good French-style wine or a really good German-style wine. They're going to be a bit more offbeat and, to be honest, I haven't had anything from the north that I've absolutely loved. But at the same time, the way things are going, who knows? And also the east of England, because it's drier. Like I mentioned, essex, so now Suffolk, norfolk, south Lincolnshire. So I think you know, getting up into Lincolnshire, I think you could potentially get some really good wines. The problem with the west is it's wet, all of England's very wet, but the west is particularly wet so you get fungus. So it's so even places that are, you know, like somerset, has a great, some great wineries, camel valley and cornwall, you know, brilliant producer, but it's always going to be a bit more of a struggle because of all the damp so our american you mentioned california american varieties.
Sebastian Lees: 26:30
Do they tend to be more robust then to climate?
Henry Jeffreys: 26:34
Yeah, it's not really. California tends to have European grapes, it's like planted almost entirely with European grapes, but you have like these wild vines from America, like Avitis labrusca, and they have DNA and that means that they can ripen, they can deal with cold more and disease resistance and stuff. So scientists are always trying to kind of breed to create the perfect grape which has the flavor of a European grape but the hardiness of a Native American grape, and they haven't really done it yet, though some people think they have. So there's quite a lot of them planted in England. And then there's a certain kind called Peewees, which stands for disease fungal resistant in German. So it's one of those very long German words which I can't quite remember.
Sebastian Lees: 27:23
One of those amazing German compound words.
Henry Jeffreys: 27:25
Yeah, one of those. It's like Peewee for folks, ganesan, the hearth and the hooves, something like that, and people are always talking about this. One is going to revolutionise English wine and I have never tried one which I've been convinced by. Most of them are working progress, but if they do work they'll be brilliant because you don't have to spray them for fungus, and that's the big difficulty of growing grapes in England, it's the fungal pressure.
Sebastian Lees: 27:52
It's interesting you mentioned. You did briefly mention climate change there, and I do wonder it is talked about again towards the end of your book. To what extent do you think that you know there's a lot of lip service given to this factoid that the southeast today is similar in climate to the Champagne region of perhaps 30 or 40 years ago? How seriously do you think the big Champagne houses and other French wine producers are taking this aspect of climate change? Do you think they view it as a potential existential threat to business in the future?
Henry Jeffreys: 28:28
I think they definitely do, but they obviously don't know if it's going to be.
Henry Jeffreys: 28:33
So I think they're all seriously thinking about it, because if it does get too hot and the acidity drops at the moment, they're doing really well and it's actually they're making some fantastic wines and they don't need to add as much sugar to take the edge off the acidity as they used to. But I think, yeah, I think a lot of them are thinking about what might happen in the future. But I think they're also in england, not just england for the climate change, they're just in england because they're interested in making sparkling wine in different places. So moet makes sparkling wine in australia and california tattinger makes wine in california. You know, I Roderer.
Henry Jeffreys: 29:13
I don't know if they still do, but I think they used to make sparkling wine in Tasmania. Was it New Zealand? I can't remember One of the two. So I think it's sort of something that big companies do. They're always looking for new opportunities and the price of land in Kent or Sussex it's like £25,000 a hectare for prime vineyard land. It's a million in Champagne. So I think they're just thinking about a new venture, but obviously with one eye on the climate, because no one really knows where it's going to go.
Sebastian Lees: 29:47
That's the challenge, not just in wine and sparkling wine, in everything there's a broad body of evidence saying we're going this way.
Sebastian Lees: 29:54
But then you have so many modeling scenarios that are predicting slightly different things and if you put your business hat on, it's this awful kind of differential weighing mechanism of to what extent do we bet the farm on these models and to what extent do we diversify. So I can understand that it's it must be an extraordinarily tricky situation to be in. So, henry, we talk about climate change and we also talk about for want of a better word new market opportunities driving the big houses to, you know, england, australia. If you look at the kind of the global GDP of the last 30 years, it's absolutely exploded and I think we're seeing a lot more affluent customers competing for the same luxury goods, and I think this is why we see L viano family being competing for the top spot with elon, musk and bezos to be the richest person in the world. And to what extent do you think the champagne industry buying sort of land in the uk, buying land in australia? Yes, there's this kind of climate change equation, but also maybe it's just market demand.
Henry Jeffreys: 31:11
You know, there's a newly minted demographic that's emerging globally and they need to expand to meet demand yeah, I mean, I'm glad you're so optimistic about it, because I think if you talk to people in the industry that they're not thinking that much about that. The demand is too high. I think champagne sales have been falling recently. There is a worry that there isn't the demand. It's a similar story with Scotch whiskey.
Henry Jeffreys: 31:38
Basically, all these industries that, as you put it, bet the farm on this kind of rising tide of prosperity, I think are beginning to think oh, what if that rising tide of starts receding? And I think the problem with a lot of luxury goods is they're not actually that rare or that luxury. So I think there's always going to be demand for, you know, domaine de la Romani Conti in Burgundy, because the numbers are quite small, but then something like, let's say, macallan, where they make an awful lot of it, is demand still going to be there? You know, it's just sort of. I think it's a huge worry for all those luxury goods people.
Henry Jeffreys: 32:22
So I'm not yeah, I'm not convinced that the luxury way is the way to go. You know, obviously some people do it very, very well, but I think all that market is now in decline. So I'm not quite sure where England fits into all that, because basically the English policy with the big sparkly wine producers has been if we can get a slice of the champagne cake, even if it's just a tiny slice, that's big enough for us. And if our slice keeps getting bigger and bigger, but with the champagne cake getting smaller, smaller, it's a bit like is that, is that the best option? Is that? Is that the only string we've got to our bow? Is that the only way we can market ourselves? So it's yeah, I mean it's not. It's not my area of expertise, but I just I do worry about people thinking that the luxury market is the way to go because it's always going to keep expanding I think you're right about a bigger slice of the pie Again.
Sebastian Lees: 33:15
Something else I was reading in preparation for this was Circe, the hospitality company, were talking about how English sparkling wine has gone from as a percentage of total sparkling wines and champagnes that they sell to industry each year or sell to events has gone from pretty much zero 15 years ago it's now at it was either 22% or 23%, but sort of low 20s, and they're projecting it to be 50% within the next five years.
Sebastian Lees: 33:45
So again, those are percentages, so you don't know how big the overall cake is. And it may be that as the peak luxury goes into decline, consumers are getting a little bit more, especially corporate consumers, who Cersei's are going to cater for, are getting a little bit more penny wise and just starting to look at slightly cheaper alternatives that are of similar quality. And do we see the price of a price point of kind of the top? Do we see the price point of kind of the top, the very, very top end of English sparkling wine now? Are we seeing it competing or kind of equaling kind of champagne price points, or are we still sort of angling slightly below? I don't know. It's a genuine question to you. I'm not sure.
Henry Jeffreys: 34:27
There are a few what the French call luxury cuvées. So Nye Timber produces a sort of 180-pound wine, gutsborne does a 200-pound wine. There was, I think, a 300-pound wine release which I never tried a few months ago. So, yeah, people are definitely going for that and I think that's very much a planting a flag, sort of saying we can charge as much as Cristal and get away with it. And admittedly, the wines are the ones I've tried the gusball and the night timber super fancy ones are very, very good indeed. Uh, though, as with champagne, the the best one, the, you know, the ones that are a third of the price are almost as good. So, you know, your kind of Paul Roger vintage is pretty much almost as good as the Paul Roger Winston Churchill, you know. And there's really no reason to buy Winston Churchill unless you want to show off, which obviously lots and lots of people do. So, yeah, I think, yes, people are going for the prices and yes, yes, I'd say the quality's there easily you know you talk about pushing to compete at that price point.
Sebastian Lees: 35:35
There's almost this Rory Sutherland-esque behavioral science thing at work where, if we can get to that tipping point where perceptually people equate the price point of the top end with the champagne region, there'll be almost this cascade shift. And I suppose that brings me on a little bit to my next topic. Another thing you talk about is this idea of protected designation of origin PDO, and you know it's very, very clear cut. You know Carver in Spain, prosecco Italian. But at the moment when I read your book and again please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but when I read your book it seemed like there's a lot of confusion or a little battle going on with UK sparkling wine.
Sebastian Lees: 36:17
At the moment we have this Sussex PDO that was awarded and I think you also talk about how there are separate ones for English wine and English sparkling wine. Where do you see this heading? Do you think we're gonna continue to see people kind of fighting out? Do you see this heading? Do you think we're going to continue to see people kind of fighting out? Do you think we will end up in more of a French style model where we have different regions? Or do you think we'll end up with an almost blanket name, like the Italians and the Spanish, where there's one specific region but it is synonymous with sparkling for that country?
Henry Jeffreys: 36:49
I'm not really sure where it's going to go for that country. I'm not really sure where it's going to go, but I think the lesson of new world producers trying to ape the Appalachian Controle system is not a happy one. So if you look at California and stuff, they have all these American viticultural areas which basically absolutely nothing to anybody. Napa Valley that sells, sonoma that sells but you know what is Sonoma Coast or Paso Robles or that kind of stuff. And I think the French system is. I wouldn't say it's a relic because it still works to some extent, but it's a sort of relic of pre-branding kind of times. It's, you know, sort of people in certain areas coming together and saying we've got to protect our area, we've got to protect our our thing, but you didn't have a big brand in, say the. That could just be like well, our brand is so strong that we don't need this kind of um kind of protection, whereas I think basically english wise is going the branding route to protect quality. So I think most people will. So certainly I don't think the geographical thing really works. I don't think the Sussex thing really means anything to anybody.
Henry Jeffreys: 38:07
And then there's various sort of things about what should we call English sparkling wine. So English sparkling wine is a designated thing. It basically means a champagne style wine, so certain grapes has to be champagne method. How do you communicate that to customers? That's the big challenge, because there are people making Prosecco style wines, which means the fizz comes from a tank rather than being from into the bottle. You get slightly different flavors. You get it's more prosecco's, more fresh fruits and sweeter and stuff. Champagne's more sort of biscuity and sophisticated and grown up, if you will. How do you communicate that to customers? Because the charmat, which is the term for making prosecco star wines, doesn't really mean anything to customers people.
Henry Jeffreys: 38:51
What the people love, the english champagne, but you're not allowed to call it english champagne, obviously. Oh, this would this would be the answer to all our problems is if you could just call it english champagne. Um, so the way to do it to communicate it is basically to make a bottle that looks a lot like champagne, so sort of the gold, the foil, the, you know that kind of stuff, and I think people get that, even if they don't actually understand why it tastes like champagne. They get the, they get the signaling, uh. But I just can't see of a of a simple way to communicate it and also it's all very, very technical because obviously most people don't really care. They just want something that looks nice and tastes nice.
Henry Jeffreys: 39:33
At the end of the day, I was going to say that isn't too expensive, but sometimes they actually want something expensive. You know, that's kind of why people buy champagne because it's expensive and it's a way of saying we are celebrating. You know, this is important. I'm spending 40 pounds on a bottle. I don't want to spend 20 pounds, I want to spend 40. So that's what the english people want. Yeah, that's what english producers want. They want to some of that market. Yeah, sorry, that was a bit kind of bit rambling, but yeah, it's a. It's a very hard, hard one, because it's something that the english producers talk about the whole time, these designations, and I just don't think customers really care I think you're absolutely right about the labelling.
Sebastian Lees: 40:11
I think you mentioned it in your book briefly about I think it was Nye Timber in particular who the early labelling efforts are very, very different from the modern ones. And I remember after I read your book I actually googled it and looked at some of the old labels compared to the new ones. And the new ones do look much, much more for want of a better word champagneesque. You know, they've got the foil trim, they've got the foil borders, they've got the communication of being a little bit a cut above and what's fascinating is you've seen that evolution very rapidly. In under under 10 years they've kind of learned what maybe the champagne learn region learned in 100 years and rapidly adapted.
Henry Jeffreys: 40:53
Yeah, the old Naitimber labels were printed in France and actually they look a lot like 80s Champagne labels, right? So 80s Champagne labels were all like black and gold and 80s Naitimber labels are black and gold and then the sort of wine kind of went all sort of white and sophisticated and Naitimber have done that and I think the new labels look, or newer labels look, great. But I think the old ones, at the time when most English wine looked like kind of jam jars or something, then Nightimber was like wow, they've got gold foil, you know they look.
Sebastian Lees: 41:32
in the 80s or 90s they looked fancy. We're coming up to the last third of this and the time always goes too quickly with great guests, but I want to shift a little bit to talk about the future of English wine production, and then very, very quickly as well. I want to have a very quick chat with you about English drinking culture in general. But in your book you talk about how certain wines are described as good or good for England In a slightly pejorative way. This is the kind of phrase that's used. Where do you think we are today with that split with the current generation of English producers?
Henry Jeffreys: 42:08
I'd say that even since I wrote the last. So for listeners, good for England is like something that my wife would always say to me when I was enthusing about an English wine. I'd be like, oh, this is great. And my wife would go is it really my wife's Californian, as I mentioned? Is it really good? Or is it good for England? And I would say, even since I wrote that last chapter whatever it was two years ago the quality has gone up considerably. The 2022 vintage was remarkable.
Henry Jeffreys: 42:41
I've had some like Chardonnays still Chardonnays from Kent. There's a little producer near me called Nine Oaks and they do a Chardonnay. I think it's about 80, I think Majestic have it in for about 18 pounds at the moment if you buy more than one bottle and it's as good as any sort of Macon or something Sanveron or something for about the same price. It's just a wonderful wine. So I'd say the still wines, the whites, the Chardonnays have just gone up so well and if we can get the prices down a bit, I'd say England or Essex and parts of Kent are just some of the most exciting places in the world for Chardonnay. And then there's still sparkling wines I think have been really really good for years and are just getting better and better. Like some of the 2020 vintages I've tried just the kind of ripeness, the sort of beautiful. They don't even need a lot of Lees agent, which is the yeast, the dead yeast cells. They're just so beautiful, beautiful wines. And then the German ones are coming on so well, like the Bacchus, which I used to find tasted like cut grass or underripe asparagus. I didn't like it at all, and they've got really good now.
Henry Jeffreys: 43:54
The ones that are the big good for England are the red wines, and red wines are very, very hard to make because you don't just need the sugar and the acidity level to drop. You actually need the skin to be fully ripe because you're fermenting the wine on the skin. So if the skin is slightly underripe, you get these green flavours like biting into an unripe apple, and that's very unpleasant. And then the problem with that to get a slightly technical is that in order to get them to that ripeness level, you need fewer per vine, so you have to cut some bits that aren't ripening properly off, so the vine puts all its energy into ripening these special grapes. And then the problem with that is that if you hadn't cut off all those grapes you could have made a wonderful sparkling wine to sell for 60 pounds a bottle. So the accountant is going to come around and go what are you doing? You know these grapes on the ground. We could have made, you know, our 60 quid a bottle wine out of these.
Henry Jeffreys: 44:52
So red wines just don't really make any sense, apart from if you're just going to be like fuck it, let's just do this. So there's certain producers in Essex there's one called Danbury Ridge, who are just saying you know, no expense spared, we're going to get these as ripe as possible and in Essex it's very dry. You can let them in 2021. Terrible year. Danbury were harvesting their Pinot Noir on Guy Fawkes night, you know, incredibly late, and they made a beautiful wine out of it, lovely wine. It's very expensive. It's £35 a bottle. So the reds very much work in progress and I think they'll be work in progress for a long time. But if you get a good one they're worth trying. But they can't compete with just pound per pound with new zealand or france or germany. But I'd say everything else is just coming on. So fast it's.
Sebastian Lees: 45:45
It's actually incredibly exciting you uh mentioned a couple there, but, being slightly more specific, are there any other up-and-coming English wineries or established English wineries which are now starting to come into their own that our listeners should be on the lookout for in 2024 and beyond?
Henry Jeffreys: 46:04
I mean there's a couple who I buy from quite regularly. There's Westwell, which is down the road from me in Kent, and they're very interesting because they do some sparkling wines and they also do some quite experimental stuff, you know, not quite sort of natural wines but getting on for that. And they do an Ortega, which is this, one of these German grapes, and they produce it in this sort of Muscadet Albarino type style and it just seems to get better and better, like their 2023, which again, wasn't a brilliant vintage. They sell for like 16 pounds at the winery. It's lovely, it's like a real seafood wine and I think it's a great introduction to English wine, if you're, because it's so sort of gastronomic. One of these places where I live is near Whitstable, so you think oysters, a lot of the restaurants sell Westwell Ortega and it's just, it just works.
Henry Jeffreys: 46:54
And then there's a winery in Dorset called Langham and they are fully organic, they only use fruit from their own estate, they don't buy in any quite small producer and their sparkling wines are some of the most exciting in the country, really kind of rich. Oh, actually there's. There's one other who I'm going to name check, because I didn't put them in the book and I feel really bad about it because I think their wines have come on so strongly recently. They're called black chalk and they make sparkling wine in Hampshire and they've just released two special wines from 2020. A Blanc de Blanc, so all Chardonnay, and a Blanc de Noir, so all black grapes, which are some of the best English sparkling wines I've ever had. So Westwell, langham, black Chalk my big three, but there's hundreds of others, but I'll let people explore.
Sebastian Lees: 47:49
What we will do. All of those that Henry has just mentioned. We will include links to their websites, obviously on the Fact Only's website and on the podcast pages. If you think of any others after the Fact, henry, please just ping them to me and I'll make sure they get included as well. The last question, I suppose, on the kind of future of this. There was I think the chapter was called Storms Ahead or Cloudy Storms, something like that, and you mentioned, you know, slightly downturn, but you talk about the pandemic decimating production lines in the winery industry, and I think you said that was then compounded by the war in Ukraine, and you talk about paper shortages. But most importantly, most crucially, you talk about glass. Production was one of those industries that was most affected by the loss of cheap gas from Russia. Essentially, now, that was 2022. We're two years on now and I was just wondering have those problems now abated? Do you know? Or are we still seeing, uh, production line problems there?
Henry Jeffreys: 48:52
I think I think the actual global supply chains for those kind of things are better. I think people have just given up on just in time as well, so people realize that they have to stockpile all this kind of stuff. I think one of the biggest problems is labour. So it's very labour intensive picking grapes, and they used to all come from Romania and Bulgaria, and after Brexit they didn't. And then some people were doing kind of mad things like flying in workers from Indonesia or Nepal or just this sort of and this isn't strictly a Brexit thing, because there's a shortage of labor in germany, all over europe, in california. Uh, it's, it's a huge, it's a huge. So I think that's probably the biggest problem. So a lot of people. There's mechanical harvesting that some people are doing, or just getting all the local people in and paying them, but accepting that they're going to do it a lot slower than a team of well-trained Romanians. So it's yeah, I think that's the big problem for the future, rather than a lack of supplies.
Sebastian Lees: 49:59
It's a lack of labour. I think it goes back to the spreadsheet people as well, the accountants, this notion of JIT, just in time, huge, huge concept throughout the last 20, 30 years in all industries. But all you're doing is pushing your risk into the tail. You're fragilizing In the short term. Yes, it's more stable, yes, it's more economical, yes, it's more competitive, yes, it produces more profit. But when you have those long tail events that happen, like the pandemic, it just totally destroys your supply chain. It has a long tail effect.
Sebastian Lees: 50:40
And I want to switch. We're coming up to the last five or 10 minutes now and I just fairly recently about the decline of English drinking culture. Now, I'm of a certain age where I came of drinking age in the early noughties, which I think was actually the peak drinking culture in terms of volume of alcohol consumed per person per year in the UK UK. But it was also, you know, the era of Alcopops and all of that thing, not particularly sophisticated. Definitely, quantity over quality. Since then, you know, we've seen half the night clubs in the UK close. I think the statistic I read was 31% of night clubs in the UK have closed between 2020 and 2023. And we're seeing similar statistics for bars and pubs. Why do you think that young people just don't drink anymore, and what do you think the industry is going to do in response to that?
Henry Jeffreys: 51:37
I think they're going to panic. I think there's so many reasons it's quite hard to know where to begin. I think smartphones have a huge thing to do with it. I think the fact that you could well two things. First of all, that you've got this box of tricks that can amuse you all day in your pocket. You know we didn't have I came of age in the 90s. There wasn't really that much else to do apart from sitting in parks and drink cider and smoke Benson and Hedene hedges and you know, kind of go and sort of shout outside people's houses and try and kind of get off with girls. It was that's, that's all there was to do, really. And now you, you can just be amused doing fiddling with your phone or playing video games or all that kind of stuff. You know you don't even need to leave your own house. And then combine that with social media, with the A, the kind of pressure of looking good, but also the fact that if you're making a dick of yourself while you've had like a bottle of cider, someone is going to film that and put it on the internet, you know. So I think people are a lot more careful or certainly younger people, about what they say, what they do, how they behave, and then you combine that with worries about health.
Henry Jeffreys: 52:47
I think there's a lot of scare stories about alcohol, people saying the World Health Organization saying there's no safe limit, that sort of stuff. There's also a fashion element. I was reading this book I think it was, was it JB Priestley's journey? Oh, I can't remember what, it's called English journey or something, and he's talking about the 1930s and he was saying that people just weren't drinking very much. People were going to see jazz concerts, they're going to the movies, you had all this exciting new stuff going on and they didn't want to be like their parents, who spent all their time in the pub. You know, they wanted to play, they wanted to go to dance and, you know, do American stuff. So I think there's an element of fashion as well that people you know, you and me found was going to the pub or going to nightclubs and drinking too much and stuff.
Henry Jeffreys: 53:35
And young people I don't want to be like my parents. So I think you've got this kind of storm of, you know, all these factors coming together and meaning that young people don't have the same drinking patterns, though people do say that they do drink. They just drink on certain occasions and not the whole time. And then what's the industry doing about it? Well, they're sort of flailing around like, if you look at scotch whiskey, just the.
Henry Jeffreys: 54:00
Some of the attempts to appeal to young people are so embarrassing I mean, I won't name names, but there's a certain brand who are telling us about the press releases and their tie-ups with pop stars and stuff, and it's just, it's like your dad at a disco. They're awful. But I think a lot of brands are getting it really, really wrong. Trying to get down with the kids Though I did read somewhere that you know, guinness is very popular with young people and I think that shows that a kind of a really, really strong image and not trying to be down with the kids, just being kind of effortless, does work. And I think something like guinness is custom made for instagram because you just think of that. You know that pint settling, you know that moment. You know whenever you see a pint of gu Guinness, you're like, oh, I really fancy, I really fancy a Guinness now. So I think some brands are responding to it.
Henry Jeffreys: 54:53
Well, I think wine is struggling, because the trouble with wine is it's so. It's not like scotch whiskey where you have like super brands Johnny Walker, that kind of stuff. With wine, apart from champagne, you don't really have super brands. So it's just so disparate, all these different people, so there's no united front trying to appeal to young people. But then, but also I was about to say, you know, there's there's a fashion element as well. Like wine was very, very popular amongst my parents generation, you know it was like elizabeth david and holidays in tuscany and things like that. And now wine is just normal. It's kind of boring. So is it fashion? Will they come back to drink? I hope so, but I think there are certain structural things based around technology and health that mean that I think the heavy drinking days are gone for the foreseeable future.
Sebastian Lees: 55:46
I think you're right on all fronts. I saw someone mention and I hadn't thought of this that fruit machines used to be a substantial component of pub revenue and smartphones now have basically taken that online gambling share away. You don't really ever see fruit machines in pubs anymore. And then also, I was at a university reunion last year and we were talking to the bar manager of a bar we used to go in that was always always packed with students and it was absolutely dead. And the manager was saying well, these days it's about the brand name. They will drink less, but they are prepared to pay more for brand name things, whereas when I was a student, I never thought about the brand name.
Sebastian Lees: 56:27
It was just how drunk can I get as cheap as possible? Essentially, it sounds bad now looking back, but that was the attitude when I was younger. And so there's that, and there's also the young people I speak to. You'd be like oh, what are you doing on Friday? Well, I'm going to the gym and they will spend their Fridays and Saturday nights in the gym. And again, that was very niche when I was was young, which wasn't that long ago it's talking 20 years ago but there's been this sea change in. I think you're absolutely right. There's no one particular driving factor. There's all these components that have added up to this. Just just change in in in the cultural perception of it going to the gym on a friday, saturday, that's sad, yeah.
Sebastian Lees: 57:06
It is. It makes me feel maybe I'm just getting old, but it does make me feel a bit sad and nostalgic and you know I don't want to turn into that person when I was young blah, blah, blah. But I certainly feel that way sometimes.
Henry Jeffreys: 57:17
I didn't even mention online dating. You know that's got to be like a huge component as well. Because, as well, because you could tell someone you know you could meet people online, chat them up without ever having to like have a few pints to get your courage levels up.
Sebastian Lees: 57:33
You know, yeah, there is a dark side to that, because I I was what I unnamed unnamed investment bank I was at a few years ago and I found myself suddenly going from being one of the youngest members of a team to one of the oldest, which seemed to happen. There's no intermedium period. It just suddenly switched and we were all out for drinks and one of the younger people was talking about this girl that they liked at the bar. I said, well, go and talk to her. And they looked at me like I was an alien.
Sebastian Lees: 57:59
This concept that you will go and talk to a random stranger at a bar and kind of try and chat them up and it's just completely online now and that skill set for want of a better word seems to have been totally lost and terrifies people, which I again. I find it a real shame, to be honest, because I do think there's certain life skills that are learned through kind of going through these torments and trials. Anyway, I've come full circle, I am get off off my lawn territory now. So in the last few minutes I want to ask you you know you recently finished at master no s of mold what's next for you? Have you got any up-and-coming projects you want to plug or talk about anything we haven't talked about you'd like to mention, or just anything at all you want to, you want to talk about in the last few minutes yeah, I've got a couple of projects that I hope will reach fruition I'm not really meant to talk about, but one of them is a podcast.
Henry Jeffreys: 58:55
But I can't. I can't talk about it just because if it doesn't happen, there's no point talk about it. If it does, you know, hopefully it'll be, it'll be interesting. Um, and then I'm hoping to write a book which I think I can talk about. It's going to be called something like big noses and long finishes a brief history of wine snobbery, starting in like ancient times and going up to kind of alan partridge and blue nun. It's about. It's about wine anxiety, wine status anxiety through the ages I love.
Sebastian Lees: 59:29
I love the sound of. I look forward to reading it and if those undisclosed projects do come through down the line, please let me know and we'll be sure to retweet them out. After the fact, wine status anxiety sounds fascinating. Status anxiety by alan de botton is one of my favorite books of all time. So if there's a wine, take on that oh, is it?
Henry Jeffreys: 59:47
I haven't read it. I should read this. Yeah, no, I've been reading what's his name? Will Storr's book about status, which is really interesting, well worth a read. But I'll read the Alain de Botton.
Sebastian Lees: 59:59
Well read the book, and there is. He did make a documentary on it, which kind of, if I'm honest, wasn't particularly uh well known, but it is on youtube now you can watch it for free and it's.
Henry Jeffreys: 1:00:10
It's wonderful, okay. Well, I'll read the book I've got. I've got plenty of time now to read books now.
Sebastian Lees: 1:00:14
I don't have a job there you go wow, okay, I think, sadly, we've come to the end. The time always goes far, far too quickly. I say this every time. It's been absolutely wonderful talking to you, v Vines, in a Cold Climate. Buy the book, read the book. It's absolutely phenomenal. I'm not a wine drinker and I absolutely loved it. It's just one of those great, great stories that is character driven at its heart. Absolutely phenomenal book. Thank you so so much, henry Jeffries. Absolute pleasure talking to you. Well, thank you for having me on.