Wine and sport came together as the beaters carefully blanked in the vineyard slopes, pushing the birds forward into a broad, grassy valley Tuffon Hall Halstead, Essex

A mosaic of carefully planned cover crops has created a testing partridge shoot as well as garnering a conservation award – and the birds here are not the only thing to fizz

- GRAHAM DOWNING

How do you take your partridges? With a sensuous rosé, perhaps? Or maybe a zingy, sparkling white? Then High Field drive at Tuffon Hall in the rolling countryside of north Essex is the place for you, where the birds fizz directly out from between the rows of Pinot Noir and Bacchus, and where top-quality partridge shooting and oenophilia collide. Ten years on from converting 35 of his 1,200 acres to a vineyard, Angus Crowther has a clutch of medals for his wines plus a glittering Purdey Award for game conservation. At Tufton Hall, quality English wines are an accompaniment to a dedicated programme of game and wildlife management.

Fourth generation of his family to own and farm the estate, Crowther has built what was a farm shoot yielding maybe 70 birds once or twice a month into a significant East Anglian partridge manor. The story started in the late 1980s, when his father, Michael Crowther, planted 30,000 trees and created six new drives with the assistance of the Game Conservancy’s Martin Tickler. Thirty years on, with the spinneys and coverts now maturing, Angus is bent on replacing all the shoot’s maize cover crops with wild bird seed and nectar pollen mixes, a strategy that found great favour with the Purdey judges when they visited the estate.

“We’ve seen a massive increase in small birds,” Crowther told me as we stood back behind the gun line on the second shoot of the season. “We’ve seen lots more skylarks, yellowhammers, wagtails, finches, tits, and wrens. We continue supplementary feeding long after the end of the season, which gives the smaller birds a helping hand in the cold months. The house sparrows have come back and we now see huge clouds of them.”