PETER HALL warned me about the drive to Breaky Bottom vineyard in rural East Sussex. ‘Don’t worry if you get lost,’ he said over the telephone the week before. ‘It’s fine; we’ll just assume you’ll be late.’
I was late. In a hollow of the South Downs National Park, combed by Champagne-style vines, a flint farmhouse is flanked by a vegetable garden, a pond full of tadpoles and 35 nest boxes for barn, tawny and little owls. The first vines here were planted in 1974, after Mr Hall saw an advertisement for Seyval Blanc in a gardening magazine, and they’re still there, beneath fields with a hobby flock of Suffolk-Mule sheep, separated from the English Channel by a few undulating green hills. The wine writer Oz Clarke has called it the most beautiful vineyard in Britain.
Breaky Bottom produces between zero and 15,000 bottles a year: zero because, sometimes, an entire crop is lost to flooding, caused by soil erosion and hedge removal on neighbouring farms, or is eaten by pheasants released for commercial shoots. ‘I’m not against pheasants,’ explains Mr Hall, ‘or shooting for the pot, but we do have a responsibility to the land.’ The winemaker and his artist wife, Christina, allow the growth of tall grasses in their pastures, which act as a shelter for the rodents that feed the owls. The sheep are let loose to graze in the vineyards before first growth, enriching the soil with their manure.
Denne historien er fra May 19, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra May 19, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
