Our vineyard was planted in 2019 on 2 hectares with ortega, chardonnay, bacchus, and pinot noir. The vineyard benefits from being south-facing with a clay loam soil. The bedrock geology changes across the vineyard, from Tunbridge Wells Sand into the Wadhurst Clay Formation which has left our soils with just enough sand to drain well. There are Roman iron ore workings in the woods and the iron rich soil gives us red clay. Our vines are certified organic with the Soil Association.
The vineyard is 'no till', meaning we don't cultivate or plough. We don't use any herbicides so there is a lot of strimming, hand weeding and sheep grazing. We are close to the sea, a little over 4 miles to Covehurst Bay giving us greater light exposure, a lower frost risk but more wind. The vineyard shelters from this behind thick old hedges of oak, willow, and hawthorn plus we've planted a windbreak of apples, pears, poplar, quinces, and maple. We are committed to increasing biodiversity and we've found 60+ plants growing in and around the vineyard. We benefit from extraordinarily high levels of earthworms and use large amounts of compost produced by our farm and nearby horses plus woodchip. We do all of the work ourselves with some valuable help from our kids, their mates, and our excellent neighbours.
We make our wine at Davenport Vineyards under the supervision of Will Davenport, Britain's leading organic winemaker. His skills and experience are invaluable to us.
We allow natural/wild yeasts to ferment the wines, keeping them on gross lees until bottling and never filter or fine them. We use a mixture of concrete eggs and stainless steel tanks for fermentation and ageing. Our focus is in the vineyard and on still wine production in particular.
We have planted ortega and bacchus to produce a still wine every year. Our other two grapes, chardonnay and pinot noir, need more sunshine hours to be considered good enough to be turned into our still wines. In cooler years these will be used for our traditional method sparkling wine.
Sir Quentin Blake kindly provided the beautiful artwork for our label and we will donate a percentage of our profits to Survival International. Please consider supporting one of his charities.
The script on the label was provided by my sister, Amalia.