English Wine Is Having A Moment | Episode 14

0:03Jonathan Stevenson:Welcome to Uncaught, a Cult Wines podcast where we take you behind the scenes of the fine wine market. I am Tom Gearing, CEO of Cult Wines and your host today. And as always, I am joined by my co-host, Jay Stevenson. How are you doing, Jonathan? Very well, thank you. Very well. Good. Excited about the World Cup? Very much so, yeah. I'd just like to add as well for anyone watching that I am wearing shorts. That is a very important distinction. Just get that out of the way. Great, great to see you again, Jonathan. But of course, we have a guest. And this week, we are joined by Alice Griffiths, wine writer, communicator, and the voice behind Posing with Alcohol.

0:39Jonathan Stevenson:Well, actually, the former voice of Posing with Alcohol because there has been a recent name change. But those of you may know her from that name previously. One of the most engaging champions of homegrown British wine. Alice, before we start, two things worth celebrating. Last summer, you visited 80 vineyards. Yes, you heard me correct. 80 vineyards in seven days for a Guinness world record. Simply amazing. And this September, you launched Uncorked, the first UK lifestyle magazine dedicated to English and Welsh wine. I have to say it's a great name for a magazine. So it's been no small year. What I love about Alice's story is that she didn't come into wine the usual way.

1:15Jonathan Stevenson:20 years in agriculture, sheep and goats on a Kent smallholding, and then the vines she kept walking past turned into a whole new career. That sounds like a very exciting story. We can't wait to hear more about it. So why don't we start right there with an unlikely path into wine. Let's unpack the key trends, the trades and the talking points with people who know the industry inside out. Today, that means English and Welsh wine. And let's not forget the Welsh wine, because sometimes there's a lot of focus on English wine. So I'm looking forward to hearing what's going on on the other side of the border.

1:44Jonathan Stevenson:And the tourism boom that's fallen in it, which is also another really interesting talking point, because I have to say probably the number one thing that I hear from friends and family at the moment is, what's a good English vineyard to go and visit? So maybe we can start off with that because it was only a week ago on a friend's group chat with my friends from university that someone reached out to me and they said, hey, his wife's family are from Norway. They were over and they said, we want to visit a few vineyards. And they came to me and they said, which vineyards would you recommend? So why don't you tell us a little bit about your background if there's more to say, but I'd love to hear what your reaction would be to that question because I'm sure it's something you get asked a lot.

2:20Well, firstly, thank you for inviting me on the podcast. No worries. It's brilliant to be here and always wonderful to chat about passion projects so brilliant um i think that's quite a difficult question really um at the moment i think there's over 400 cellar doors in the uk yeah that you can actually visit so it's very much based around what you're doing and where you actually want to go and visit but one of the best things i'd actually suggest is to check out a vineyard trail right because there's so many of them operating um ones across hampshire um surrey vineyard trail you've got Kent Wine Garden of England heading over to I'm just trying to think Essex and so forth so it's really what they're interested in what they want to like have a look at just as ideas but I mean I live in Kent so I always start in Kent as a sort of starting point so a bit history Chapel Down visit Chapel Down head over to Gusbourne quite nearby and then head to somewhere a bit new with Domain Evermond.

3:20Lots and lots of different vineyards to visit and they're all quite close together and a lot of them are accessible by train as well. So there's lots to take into account.

3:27Jonathan Stevenson:When you say vineyard trail, what do you mean by vineyard trail? As in like that someone actually organises, I don't know, you explain that. Yeah, so basically a lot of vineyards have got together now because they've realised how much tourism is kind of growing and realised that ultimately connecting the dots is the most important thing of English one um we're not like America that we're one straight road in like Napa yeah um we're very dotted around and quite like disjointed lots of countryside and hedgerows that you can't see over driving that's particularly you know dangerous and the idea that you can kind of like start in one particular area and just kind of visit three or four in a row but I mean to that point so when I was doing a little bit of research and obviously we do know a few few vineyards if you look at that kind of Burgess Hill area just near Brighton that kind that does feel like quite out of all the places I looked at out of all the places I looked at that was the one where it had like the biggest concentration of vineyards where it looked like obviously it's a map it looked like you kind of throw a blanket over it compared to I know you mentioned obviously Gusbourne and Evermond I mean obviously they're close but there's still obviously a bit of driving there that actually looked like and maybe I'm wrong here but it looked like you could probably just go door to door and walk between the between between them I mean maybe that's stretching Maybe that's stretching it a little bit, but it did feel like a very concentrated area of all the areas that felt.

4:43Jonathan Stevenson:And also the quality of, obviously you had like Sugru, you had Everflight, you have Ridgeview, you have Artillium. So there's actually some really high quality, high class producers in a very, very small area. Oh no, totally. Sussex is such a beautiful, booming sort of area. And again, being connected to Brighton as well, like you can ultimately go and stay in Brighton and you could visit, as you say, five or six in a day. perhaps not 16 like i did in a day but you could you could you could happily sort of visit sort of like um five or six and again that's set up in that area for that with um wine tour companies i think there's a big red double decker bus that actually travels around sussex quite a lot as well that does so you can actually incorporate doing a few in one day yeah um so yeah like you know those sort of areas are absolutely full to the brim with them i think walking might be a little bit of a bit of a stretch but ultimately you could definitely like you know you could pack them in if you're going down that way and lots of different stuff as well like um lots of little sparkling producers down there still wines so you can really mix it up a bit with different sort of tourism strategies and so forth yeah well Jonathan and I we we we love visiting wine ranges of course but we love our food as well and I think when we go to whether it might be Bordeaux or Burgundy or Champagne etc I mean I think one of the great bits about doing those type of trips especially those type of regions is of course visiting the estates but then it's like the food that goes along with it or the restaurants you can visit or maybe the hotels you stay in it feels like it's a whole package not just obviously visiting the vineyards so i just wonder like out of all the places in the uk do you think there's any particular area that's best set up for that whole if you think about as like one all-encompassing kind of trip that kind of touches on all those do you think there's one particular area that stands out more than others um i think mainly the south to be perfectly honest they've been going longer obviously like the north and like midlands and so forth are catching up but um if you're looking particularly around sussex and kent and so forth like that infrastructure is starting tourism is like massively booming and so forth and you're getting like decent restaurants getting set up wistom for example have their chalk restaurant hambledon now have a really and wistom was the one that was served for king charles's banquet right yes yeah wistom was yeah served for that which was all over their socials i think they're very impressed with that yeah i I mean, that's a great accolade to have, for sure.

6:57But they're very, Wiston are fantastic because they're very much heritage again. And like they've got very long age, sort of like very indulgent, beautiful sort of sparkling wines, which I think are very much made for that royal sort of banquet.

7:10Jonathan Stevenson:Yeah, yeah. Interesting. With the wine trails, Alice, because we spoke a bit before the pod and you mentioned, I think that going back to your kind of story with wine, am I right in thinking that was kind of how you fell into wine in the first place because you moved down to the south and then you spent a lot of time walking around hiking and such and then you started thinking hang on a minute this actually is an inch maybe if you kind of want to take a step back through I mean basically my background's always been agriculture I went to Meriswood College in Guildford um so I studied agriculture from age 16 I then moved up to Newcastle and I studied a degree in agriculture.

7:48I was more specialist in animals but I did do quite a lot of work with crop sciences and grassland management and so forth and after completing my degree I became a lecturer so I was lecturing up in Newcastle for about three or four years, took a career break to have children and then made a decision to move back down south again and I moved back down. I actually had a small holding so I had goats and I had sheep and I had chickens and whatnot and all of that kind of stuff and became sort of a town mouse into country mouse conversion. So a life of agriculture living up in Newcastle and then with no countryside around me where I was actually living and then moved down to the countryside, lived in the complete countryside and started walking around and slowly started realising that I was surrounded by vineyards, which I'd never seen before, obviously, living in Newcastle, although there are some up getting as far as Yorkshire now there are vineyards but um and then coming down south and walking out in my backyard and basically seeing these these vineyards popping up and I think a couple of the first vineyards I actually visited were Balfour and when I visited Balfour in Kent that was literally a park bench overlooking these brand new beautiful vines that they'd just planted at the front and now it's this massive tourism hospitality building with restaurants and like you know lots going on um and so I've kind of watched those those vines sort of grow up across the years and um so I started noticing these vines and I was like this is very interesting and then visited visited farm shops and because at that point there weren't many even sparkling wines in supermarkets really at that point it was just farm shops and cellar doors and so forth selling them so I started trying um English wine and I had a particular night a week um English wine night in my house um where we'd always open a nice bottle and got kind of like interested in in that respective sort of way and it kind of grew from there but those trails and kind of like discovering those vineyards as you say going back to like that entry point of where did you first kind of get into English wine it is from people like you saying to your friends oh well like you should go and visit here you should visit there and that's how the conversation sort of starts so yeah yeah and it got into that and then I was like oh I went online and started noticing people talking about on Instagram social media about um about wine and I was like oh I feel like I'd like to talk about my hobby now what I'm kind of doing along the way so that's how kind of the social media was born off that of just a real love and kind of wanting to learn more about something and

10:15Jonathan Stevenson:kind of taking people on that journey with me as well yeah yeah interesting nice so you're proof that a big career change uh can work um what from your earlier lives do you still draw from today um it's it's I always say this with wine it's everyone I speak to is completely sidestepping into it I don't think necessarily anyone I've ever met has gone oh do you know what when they were 16 I'd really like to be in wine and we were all into white lightning in the park at that point really but um but when I was 16 I wasn't really you know interested in that and it was about kind of like agriculture and animals and so forth um but what I've kind of got from it all and from talking to other people as well is that every skill that you've kind of had comes in you can harness it like i used to lecture to classes of like 20 30 people so that talking in front of people has kind of moved into social media um and just um the grassland management for example i'm really i'm really into viticulture i love viticulture so much like more and more as i get into like you know wine and i've done just completed my diploma and so forth and education and all that kind of aspect i find myself going back to vines and just how much i love just being around nature and in the countryside and almost taking you back to what your first yeah it does it really connects back to that and then kind of learning on the job around it all as well like um one particular thing that always comes up is that obviously i've got a degree in agriculture i understand sheep so when i go into i was at a vineyard the other day and i was like oh there's the sheep out in the fields and i was talking to like the vineyard manager about how to use the sheep in the fields and how like you know um crop um crop management and so forth how you can make it work and soil and all that kind of thing so I just feel like everything kind of goes hand in hand with that do you think like there will be a full circle moment in the future where you do end up wanting to get back amongst the vines and actually farming yourself making wine my back's too bad I call myself a half day harvest girl I can manage about half a day and then I'm like oh my goodness no I'll leave it to the professionals I enjoy the science side behind it I could see myself in a lab in the future doing like you know sort of um analysis and so forth but at the moment i feel like yeah okay i've i have worked at a vineyard before and it is back-breaking i don't i don't know how they do a full harvest in in the u like watching them work in the uk from like seven in the morning till 10 o 'clock at night my goodness it's longer actually two o 'clock in the morning um it's crazy yeah no it is i mean obviously in the time you spent following english wine are you surprised by the kind of growth of the english wine industry the success of the vineyards and the quality that's coming out is it has it been a surprise to you or do you see do you see that just only going to continue to develop and get better from an agricultural perspective knowing obviously maybe what some of this land was used for previously and yeah obviously a lot of these vineyards are new right people are planting on new land and you know I suppose there's always a degree of risk of knowing whether that you know obviously you can analyze the soil but until the vines are planted and you find the right type of grape stock whatever I've seen I mean like I think I've been kind of like working in English wine for like sort of inferior like 10 years etc and I've seen it massively change yeah and we saw off the back of 2018 harvest is so pivotal right because it was when basically we really saw the extent of like you know those wines are still around now and they're incredible wines it was such a fantastic year but what it actually caused as well as this big sort of like boom of people planting right And those wines that were planted in sort of 2019, 2020 are starting to come into effect now.

13:48And we've seen this massive sort of boom, like we're over a thousand vineyards now. I think there's 1 ,103 vineyards currently in the UK.

13:54Jonathan Stevenson:And what would that have been 10 years ago? 10 years ago, I think it was half that, if less than that. It's literally doubled. And what we've seen is from a business... But that's just from a wines perspective. Some of the existing sites, I guess, would have expanded their vineyards. So like vineyards under vine, what's that? Is that also a hundred percent increase? Is that even greater? I'm not entirely sure but I have known many vineyards go from 20 sort of acres through to 100 acres in three four years. So the established ones have grown more and obviously there's been new ones being planted at the same time.

14:21Absolutely and we've just got an increased like amount of wine and potentially not the sales channels to sell it. So you've got kind of like a business perspective where you've seen this massive boost and people are like wow. Because again people looking at grape prices as well of like particularly 2021 which was a very poor year and everyone was like goodness me the grapes are so expensive. I'll plant loads of vines and I'll just sell my grapes on. The reason why they were so expensive was there was no grapes. Lack of supply. It was a very, like, you know, it was a difficult year. So I think we're going to see a big boom, but we will see a...

14:54Jonathan Stevenson:Consolidation? Consolidation. We'll see, in my mind, I call it a Pac-Man effect. I think we'll come along and we'll see some bigger vineyards eating up some of these smaller vineyards in order to kind of like actually like, you know, create these bigger brands that are able to kind of like sell the wine. because you can make wine we know we can make wine in the uk we know that we can like you know grow vine um grow vines and grapes and so forth but what we haven't yet seen is can we sell all of that wine yeah i feel like that's what came out a little bit we had luke spalding from everfly on on the podcast and it felt like that kind of consolidation element was what came out of his thinking which was you know the next few years are quite pivotal in order to you know age the vines in order to even just from a marketing perspective make sure that there is the right distribution channels for the wine.

15:41So it sounds like you're kind of in agreement with that. Yeah. Yeah, how it will, you know, the next few years will be quite pivotal. I think it will. I think we'll see over the next few, I mean, supermarkets, obviously, they're starting to get on board now, supermarkets are. They are, you know, we're seeing like a massive increase in supermarkets picking up English wine and that gets it into consumers and so forth. But ultimately what we need to do is lead that back to the cellar doors. We need to kind of like, you know, have the ability to be like, yes, that's great, you can buy this. but ultimately take it up that sort of ladder branding you know wonderful that you want to buy like you know a charmat method from a supermarket but why don't you go and visit the vineyard now why don't you kind of like you know buy more prestige or think about again creating your cellar yeah you know do you want to become like you know an english you know wine collector yeah um get some sparklings in and have them long term or the stills for example that we're seeing to start to really grow in like norfolk and up in east anglia yeah um in essex crouch valley do you want to start a cellar you know getting people really involved from that potential as well do we i mean obviously english sparkling wine um is is obviously kind of the first thing that comes to mind but do you think wines beyond sparkling are kind of the next step to to really kind of making english wines you know more competitive attractive you know bought and consumed in the space do you think or do you feel like it's really going to be the english sparkling wines that lead that and the rest of the alternative you know great varietals etc are kind of really going to be secondary in in the english market i think number one it's such an early early like you know it's we're literally baby steps now we are so early on and it's very i find the industry very fragmented um people don't know which direction they really want to go to and lots of people trying different techniques and so forth and regions that are regions are making wines that perhaps in 10 years they'll be like oh actually maybe we should have stuck to this or so forth and everyone will chop and change and it should hopefully come together um what we've seen with with still wines particularly growing is actually learning and going gosh that region actually really works for it such as east anglia with like you know the soils and the temperature and the rain like the rain levels and so forth yeah i mean they sit around the same as Tasmania.

17:56Right, interesting. Yeah, for growing degrees days. So like, you know, we've got some actual science there that backs up that still wines work in that region. So I think we'll continue to see that kind of... Trial and error a little bit. Yeah, trial and error happening along the way, but we will, as time goes on, start to be more concise with it all. But one of the things is that still wines really support sparkling wines because if you're producing sparkling wines, you have to wait. And if you're a new vineyard that's setting up and so forth and you've got to wait three, five years, well, longer for vines to grow, obviously, first of all, and then you've got to wait for these sparkling wines to be ready, what can you do in the meantime to actually bring in some revenue to keep the vineyard going?

18:40So I feel like a lot of that works hand in hand. And we've also seen a massive growth as well of more experimental wines like orange wines appearing, Pet Nats as well. like lots of different sort of like you know alternatives coming along so i feel like um it's quite fragmented but there will be a path i think at some point that kind of like streamlines it all that's i guess that's the biggest challenge which again kind of felt like i got from luke and it was just you have to be so careful obviously because there's only so much time and space you have in people's focus and attention obviously if you go and produce a still wine that is just maybe helping to you know fund or um like you say bring money in yeah that could actually end up if it's not good enough or perceived to be not good enough by people that try it it could easily have quite a damaging effect so it strikes me as a yeah a sort of challenging landscape in that respect because again you need to be you know conscious that there are so many great wines everywhere in the world and obviously if if they're trying to break into the space with any particular wine that it has to be of a certain standard, right?

19:49Yeah, yeah. I mean, a big boost. I mean, one of the biggest things I see in kind of like English vineyards is rosé. Like it's great to sell in Salador. It's a very sort of like easy drinking. But I sometimes find it's a bit of an afterthought, really. It's something that vineyards are making to fill that gap to get people. And it's not always the best. It's sometimes trying to copy styles such as Provence because there's such an obsession with like, you know, lighter sort of like styles. um and it's not really harnessing into like you know what we could actually create here with like for example sugar i love like this rose and so forth yeah and um some of the others produce these sort of deeper more flavor intensive roses which are really high quality yeah um there's one over in kent um cobham they make one out gamay for example um which is a fantastic rose really really good and it's not an afterthought yeah but i sometimes find that like producing these sorts of wines just as kind of like cash grabs aren't, as you say, going to really help long term to create an industry that people talk about in the news.

20:52Jonathan Stevenson:Interesting. I did remember my question. It was really boring. I said it was really good. I promised it was a good question. And I was like, oh, no, that was actually a really tepid question. But I'm going to ask it anyway. Watch out. You can tune out for this bit. It's boring, apparently. If you're trying to listen to this going to sleep, this is a good bit to turn up. um no i what i was interested to know is like with obviously the increase in vineyards being planted is there like a commonality of like the land that gets transferred into vineyards like is it or is it just pretty random in terms of like you know obviously were these farms before or what was what was the land being used for before is there much commonality there and then like what when you when you decide okay i'm going to start planting vines you know does it take a lot from an agricultural perspective does it take a lot of preparation of the land before you can start planting of vines or is it quite a quick process um well i actually have a great story so it wasn't boring yes come on well worth it so i was at the vineyard show um about three years ago i'm just walking around my merry way and i bumped into this chap and it was my friend tim who i went to university with and tim's an onion farmer right and um i was like tim fancy meeting you here and he was like oh i'm digging up my onion farm to plant vines right and that answers your question is that a lot of it is about diversifying from different crops.

22:10Obviously, climate change is not just affecting vineyards and so forth. It's affecting agriculture in a general, you know, in lots of ways. And he was like, we thought it'd be a good idea to maybe jump on and try and grow some vines in order to, because they're up in top of Norfolk, Brecht's Vineyard. And their idea was that basically if they plant some vines, they can sell their grapes to some of the other producers around there.

22:35Jonathan Stevenson:and um yeah and diversify but how do they evaluate are they evaluating on like you know a pound per square foot of land that they have that's appropriate like is is it is there less land appropriate for vines versus onions or it's pretty much it's a light for light basis and then you're looking at vine density potential yields and then obviously as you said if you're looking at 21 prices you know price per you know whatever hectolitre i suppose they would sell it in or something like that i think it's again it's just is it very kind of financially economically driven do you think for a lot of these i think it's quite so and again it's passion projects some people will be planting simply because they're back garden they thought it'd be a nice nice place to have some vines um and then they'll obviously get people in to analyze the soil and so forth see if it's worthwhile um you get people just like trying to find land that they can go and plant absolutely yeah i know a lot of people who said oh i look for two three years to find a suitable piece of land because the conversation has changed so much when we first started it was all this chalk we've got the same vein of like champagne chalk running through um that obsession with chalk um because it's changed and we've moved to like oh actually clay works very well with um london clay obviously and then we've got up in um crouch valley like lots of clay up there as well and green sand down in hampshire and so forth because we're talking more about different soils people have gone well i have that i have green sand yeah i set in that that little neck of that good sort of area so i feel that that's opened the dialogue how well do existing landowners owners know their soil composition though um because i guess for like just a general product i don't know like again i i'm just i'm such a noob i'm probably asking the most stupid questions but if you have like an onion farm i don't know like how i mean how much interest they have on like what is the subsoil two or three meters down like they're probably not that interested or probably doesn't matter because the roots of onions don't go for that far or tell me if i'm wrong oh no i think they're really really like my like you know my friends who've like you know tim who's done agriculture like he will literally be analysts yeah every sort of like you know a couple of weeks right checking on stuff what's what levels of nitrogen and all these sorts of factors are in there and obviously vine roots go a lot got a lot deeper than yeah yeah but he would have looked at that to see with water retention and so forth and how like you know that works with irrigation of crops and so forth so there'll be a lot of like you know intense sort of work with that but then compare that to um a lot of the vineyard owners i've spoken to who are planted and I'm like, oh, well, we didn't know anything about our soil when I just got someone round from an agency to check it out.

24:57Jonathan Stevenson:But they're using it for livestock, for example, rather than actually crops. Or do you see most of the transfer happening where it's like a crop-based land? It's completely different. Yeah, it's so random. I know people who have built vineyards on top of old pig farms. Right, but then they might make terrible wine. So then, you know, you go, well, don't do that. Yeah, exactly. Pig farms cross. But in the UK, because we are kind of like... Onions tick. Yeah. but because we're boosting kind of like you know the amount that's going on here there are lots of companies who'll come out and do this sort of soil analysis and so for you so they'll kind of work it all out and see where you lie but from your perspective do you see like i don't know if you've done any analysis but maybe anecdotally or if you have done analysis that's great do you see any pattern like because obviously you've got an agricultural background so you're coming at it from that background you're seeing this transformation process you know the different areas of the country you know the climatic conditions really well i'm surprised people the people consult you when they're looking for this type of vineyard they have random chats with me right yeah yeah you must be an interesting sounding board but yeah i mean like from your perspective like if you know if you had to go out there today to create your own vineyard and plant vines like where would you be going right now probably um norfolk um essex all that east anglia probably because that's for the climatic reasons or because of the terror or terror arms a french where it probably hasn't come over Singleton yet.

26:14Number one, because there's a lot of collaboration going on. We've got France and South Africa and America who are quite interested in plantings there and making wine. So that collaboration means that there's potential for money. Number two, because of the climate. And number three, it's kind of quite newly sourced and there's probably undiscovered regions. Is the land cheaper there? I'm not really sure about it. Because I feel like in maybe Kent and Sussex

26:38Jonathan Stevenson:there's been such a furore around sparkling wine. Obviously it's much more established. we've seen Tattinger come over we've seen you know obviously the Roche we mentioned I know that's Crouch Valley but obviously we have seen more established bigger players globally come in to that south part of the country and buy out vineyards or at least work and collaborate collaborative projects so has that kind of heightened competition a little bit for the land there has it increased the price per hectare where maybe somewhere like a Norfolk is still a little bit more undiscovered maybe I don't think we're there yet no I really don't think there's enough conversation to kind of like say that that land would be worth more than that land because of viticulture basis right i think it's more because you're close to london yeah that land could be built into you know turned into you know and also as well like particularly in kent um if you think about it used to be fruit farming and apples and cider and so forth right um that's obviously changed there's been lots of like digging up fruit farms and replacing with vines and so forth because of the long-term thoughts about it with regards to producing wine and less sort of like every year, you know, digging up and restarting and so forth.

27:42So I feel like that has more of a sort of factor rather than actual like we're not quite burgundy. We're like, you know, long-term, I think that's on the cards. Don't get me wrong. I think long-term it will be like that's worth more.

27:54Jonathan Stevenson:As the quality goes up and maybe the diversity goes up and we're seeing more of that end product, as Jonathan mentioned earlier, maybe not just still sparkling wine but seeing some of these still wines coming through and actually gaining good reputation maybe selling a high price point you can imagine that's going to start then creating a bit more of that yeah it's definitely and there are lots of vineyards that have just that are up for sale and come up for sale and um obviously people i'm a bit of a bridgerton gossip everyone tells me all their gossip um and i know when someone says don't worry this isn't recorded i won't tell my secret but when people kind of like come to me and they're like oh so-and-so has put their land up for sale and they're like i wouldn't touch that of a barge pole you know and then other land comes up and people are like oh my goodness like you know yeah just jump on that one quickly because that that's that's got the the integrity behind it it strikes me that as well i mean not that i know loads about farming but obviously post brexit um it seems like it's never been harder for arable farming and yeah a lot of them have so much of this land that they kind of almost need to monetize in some way and trialing out some vines seems like one of those avenues i mean we just recently went over to the art of white i know you did quite recently as well but um we stopped back at west wittering on the on the way home and they just had this like massive caravan site which was basically just part of a farm but like those additional means to try and monetize what otherwise would have just been yeah you know fields of more typical crops i feel like that's kind of where the this exploration for vines is is kind of coming from now but then fast forward in a few years time perhaps when they start finding those pockets and go actually you know what this is a perfect microclimate for this particular grape then it will change the conversation um 80 vineyards in seven days yeah let's why wasn't 81 it was 81 no it was meant to be 81 but sadly we lost one along the way yeah um were you late or no it got sold it cuts old while i was on the way no turn it back to onions yeah well you've all obviously heard of english wine week yeah yeah so last year i was a bit like oh i would like to do something a bit different what time of year is english wine it's about two weeks ago in june okay yeah it's in june so english wine weeks it's i think it's roughly around the middle to the end of june every year and lasts about nine days it's not a week it's about nine days um and i thought i'd do something a little bit different just to kind of like showcase exactly how tourism and hospitality and how easy it is to visit English vineyards.

30:25So I decided to start a challenge, which was to visit as many vineyards as I could in one week. And after announcing that, I was like very secretly put on the side through to Guinness World Record that I'd be interested in doing it. And then I actually got accepted to do that. So then it turns into a Guinness World Record challenge rather than actually just a challenge of doing it. But yeah, my general plan was that I wanted to try and visit as many as I possibly could. I wanted to get up to Yorkshire, but it was a bit too far because there's a big gap of nothing going on on the way. But yeah, so I completed it.

30:57So it was 80 vineyards from, I think it started on a Saturday. We started at Squirrey's Vineyard over in Kent, which was really wonderful. And we actually started at the same time as Park Run at nine o 'clock in the morning. So all of these joggers turned up and they were like, why is there a woman wearing a jumpsuit just drinking wine at nine o 'clock in the morning? and they were all like, oh, do we have to do that too? I was like, no, I'm actually doing something different. But, yeah, so we pressed the horn because you officially have to press a horn with Guinness World Record to show that you've started your challenge.

31:29And so we did at that point. Day one was across Kent and that was the biggest day we did, which was 17 vineyards. Nice. So we did 17 vineyards in one day on the first day. Then drove overnight to Cornwall to do the whole around Cornwall and so forth and then wrapped my way around the rest of the country across the last sort of like five, six days.

31:54Jonathan Stevenson:Nice. Can we get into the technicalities of how you do a Guinness Book Record? First of all, it's not easy. Setting it up, the admin was harder than the challenge. Right, right. It was horrific. What sort of oversight is there? Do they have someone following you around for the day with a clipboard? No, and you have to video everything. Right, okay. So the whole time I had my camera videoing all the challenges. and they were very clear because it's an alcohol challenge so they were very very like we have set rules and one of the major challenges was well not a challenge actually it was quite easy because i didn't really want to was i was not allowed to drink at all right had to be seen to be spitting the challenge was visit as many vineyards as possible and have at least two wines while i was right okay so this is what i was thinking like yeah the technicalities had to have two wines equals a visit yeah per visit but do you have to like go into the winery so i had to go meet them the doors and they just go and no no and they i set out all of the standards to them i said you need to basically tell me a little bit about your vineyard it was a 20 minute visit for each vineyard um you need to um basically i need to try two wines and um fill in all the paperwork around it and have it videoed so um yeah it was and i had to be seen to not be drinking so every so some guy out there reviewing all of my footage had to watch me spit basically continuously on camera for about 570 hours.

33:14I think it worked out of me just like stopping at vineyards, drinking two wines and spitting into a bucket. So not the most attractive video to watch.

33:21Jonathan Stevenson:And what was the, did you have any personal favorites of the 80 you went to visit? So day one was Kent, obviously, and that's my home. So that was amazing. That was really, really fun. And it got going quite quickly. We visited a couple and I won't name. Towards the end of the day, I visited one particular vineyard and they were having a party that evening when I arrived. Not for me. They were just having a party. So I arrived and everyone, I wore like a Challenge Annika jumpsuit. I think you know who Challenges, I keep saying to youngsters, they don't know who Challenge Annika is. Annika Rice, yeah.

33:54So I went and I wore my jumpsuit and everyone had to sign it. So I arrived at this particular vineyard, which is a party vineyard anyway, which is just amazing. You need to go.

34:03Jonathan Stevenson:We can't get the name for this one. Oh, you can't, it's Herbert Hall. I was going to say, it's going to be tough. Yeah, so we turned up there and everyone - And where's Herbert Hall? In Kent? It's in Kent, just near Margin Station. You can walk there and you can walk home so you can drink. It's fun. From the station. It's good. It's well worth a visit. But yeah, so we arrived and signed my jumpsuit, had a glass of wine. And then all of a sudden this random lady called Linda turns up and goes, can I sign your jumpsuit, please? And at this point, Linda's very intoxicated. So all these vineyards have signed my jumpsuit and Linda.

34:34Jonathan Stevenson:Right, okay. So yeah, that was amazing. Linda was just a random punter. Linda was a random punter. having the best day ever um and she signed my jumpsuit and she'll be forever like in history immortalized immortalized yeah if you're listening then then uh yeah yeah but as time went on like people got it and people understood it more because when i sent out this original email to these vineyards a lot of people i don't really understand this challenge and by day two and day three like they they'd got it like people coming out with signs in the street i had like billboards when i arrived and stuff like you know it was fantastic and the social media was went really really well and everyone was on board and it was it was super super fun amazing there was there was there was some fantastic ones and a lot of them as well were not even established vineyards they were ones who had literally just started like right and i was trying stuff out of barrels i was trying new releases i was subraging bottles that had never been opened wow i tried so many new wines across that like you know sort of seven days that people no one else had tried before which was just fantastic what did it what did after the week what did it teach apart from obviously needing a long sleep i'd imagine what what did it teach you about like the uk's wine tourism um build a road yeah a little country lane oh my goodness like um if you'll start before you put vines in before you put tourism and hospitality in before anything please build a road um because i hired a car for it all and um the car was just bump bump bump bump over all of these kind of dirt tracks and finding vineyards that were like reversing and going back is that the road is that the road where are we because i put everything i used every delivery driver app to do it all so i actually plotted every single vineyard into this delivery app and it told me when i needed to drop the parcel off when i need to leave and so forth and it was all down to the minute and it was like you're running late hurry up kind of thing with that um and kind of putting that in and like putting the postcodes in and being like postcode not recognized and you're like oh my goodness this is gonna be that was that was chaos yeah i know like you know so yes build build a road good good advice one thing for any world record is it how long it will last is it beatable um well it's still actually being processed at the moment it takes a long time it takes at least a minimum it said to actually get something done is five months and i had to resubmit some more evidence as well like driving licenses to prove i wasn't speeding i'll see you no record for it originally no one's ever done this before and i actually no one's crazy enough no one's crazy enough but also it doesn't exist for the whole of the world so actually so this is so this is not just a uk centric this is most vineyards in five days so mine is down officially as the uk yeah but if you want to do this you should resubmit it for global so globally in theory it would be actual an actual global record because nobody's done that many so yeah that was one of the things i did research i was like this doesn't exist at all yeah maybe james suckling has done it which without realizing it just on a sunday um okay so i guess obviously during that you were covering lots of that on socials which is why it was getting good following and so on so jumping slightly onto your social um community really so you know how did that all start you know what makes the content land with people what do you feel like you've as you've gone it's really evolved into something you thought it would be beforehand or it's kind of taken it into a direction that you didn't think was how it would start like how yeah give us a bit more about you know yeah well socials was I mean that's how I kind of landed into English wine was through social so I'm always incredibly grateful for it and it built up a community it got me kind of like you know um talking to winemakers it got me invited to amazing events which and press trips and travel and all wonderful things that have ultimately supported me with English wine because like visiting other regions actually teaches you more about the region that you want to learn about because you understand how someone's doing it better or doing something worse so it's it's really helped me with regards to that and create community and um and make lots of friends as well so it's been really fantastic with that and when you're passionate about something you want to tell people about it and it's wonderful for me to like have that platform to be able to go i've just tried this wine please join me on this adventure as well um but it's also really helped me launch my career into different ways as you go back to like earlier when you're saying like you know starting a new career um at 40 plus it's like fantastic to actually like go somewhere from something that you started as kind of hobby on the side into into different ways so it got me into writing and I now write for vineyard magazine which is a kind of industry-led geeky magazine about English wine which is fantastic so I can look at tractors and um look at crop science and all that kind of stuff so I really enjoy that um it's actually really helped me with other wines I now write for a little column in a women's weekly magazine, which is called My Weekly, which is aimed at kind of like the 50 plus fabulous crew, introducing wines to them and stuff that they've never tried before.

39:36I can also slip English wines in occasionally as well. So educate further with that. And it's just really like, you know, improve confidence and help me kind of like get my name out there to increase like, you know, visibility in the industry. Yeah, I guess because that's kind of where we felt it would be great to have you come and join us today. I think we're always trying to pare it back to lots of the conversation points that we have with our clients and with people both in and around the industry. Clearly, the wine market has been through one of its more challenging periods in the last few years, not just, I know we've been talking about English wine, but wine and fine wine that we work in.

40:17um you know a lot of the conversation is around are people drinking less what age demographics are coming through are younger people drinking as much wine people are more health conscious um you know do you now having got to where you are with your socials do you feel like you're kind of almost a necessary ambassador for wine and and making sure people aren't you know fearful of how to get into wine and they get all of these you know additional you know means with which to kind of help them develop like you have a you know a passion for wine perhaps at a later age than they might have thought yeah I think um social media is a very interesting one because a lot of the time like people are like oh you shouldn't dumb down wine you shouldn't you know there's a particular you know but ultimately you want to make wine accessible if we want to increase the people drinking and again people are drinking still but they're drinking better quality then you need to kind of create content that ultimately lets them do that if you talk over their heads and you don't like you know you're not hitting anybody and you're not kind of you know I always like to think like you know that entering wine is like a ladder you know the first time you try it if someone's snobby to you and says oh well like you know I remember when I first got into wine and I really I like red wine don't get me wrong but I much prefer white wine even if I can appreciate red wine but if I'm choosing what I'm going to drink for an evening I'll choose white wine and I remember like early on people saying things like oh well like if you you know when you're into wine when you prefer red wine to white wine I was like oh okay I'm never going to be into wine then am I because I just don't um and as time's gone on and you start learning and people say that's absolutely stupid you're like oh that could have stopped my whole journey someone saying to me oh my goodness you're never you're never going to be into wine so I feel if you start early and Like, you know, you create that kind of first step to the ladder by saying, whatever you like is great.

42:11Like, you know, even if you like, you know, my mum loves white Zindenfell. But I'm never going to turn around to her and say, well, you know, don't stop drinking that, mum. I'm going to be like, it's great you like that. How about we try this? And that for me with social media is about kind of like creating those first sort of steps. Telling someone, go to a supermarket and buy a bottle of English wine from a supermarket. If you enjoy it, why don't you go and visit one on the weekend? once you visited one why don't you buy something from the cellar door and kind of like gravitating upwards so that people start building on their own experience their own expertise so they become little mini wine experts in themselves yeah i think that's interesting i think that's something that we've we've been discussing quite a lot internally at the moment is you know the whole experiential side of wine and how that really can elevate the whole thinking of it i think if people just simply look at it on the shelves in a in a in a supermarket or in a wine shop and it's it's the decision they're making between what else are they going to drink whether it's just wine whether it's spirits whether it's not alcohol at all but obviously what you can get as tom you know you talk about a lot which is just like the whole experience you can get within wine is just way beyond lots of other um alternatives really particularly in the in the alcohol space so yeah i think that is definitely really important and i think experiences is very important as well I was literally having this conversation with a vineyard the other day and they were saying that like just having the wine available for sale is not enough.