Choice selections from brave souls who dare to make their own wine
Gutter & Stars Star 69 Chardonnay Crouch Valley, England 2022 (£33, Gutter & Stars) Like many wine lovers, I sometimes contemplate making my own. But my soft-focus daydreams of tenderly tending vines in a gently sunkissed valley only ever get as far as a few back-of-a-crisp-packet sums before the precarious reality of making a go of Château Williams brings me back to earth. So I can only admire those brave souls who do have the will and talent to turn their idle fantasies into something concrete. A journalist by trade, Chris Wilson still writes for a variety of wine magazines and websites. But, he also runs Gutter & Stars, an urban winery he set up in a converted windmill in Cambridge in 2020. Wilson recently sent me a sample of his chardonnay, which he makes from grapes bought from the Missing Gate Vineyard in Essex’s Crouch Valley and which I am happy to report is outstanding: a vivid, fluent, subtly oaked dry white with pristine stone fruit and a cool-stream freshness.
Vinos del Viento Garnacha, Campo de Borja, Spain 2021 (£14.50, Oxford Wine) Many of our British winemakers, dismayed by the erratic summers of southern England, end up pursuing their vinous dreams in more reliably sunny climes overseas. Such as, for example, Calatayud in Aragon in northeastern Spain, where the Scottish master of wine Norrel Robertson makes a range of superb and always reasonably priced wines from high-altitude old vines. Manda Huevos Carramainas Macabeo 2021 (£15, Wine Society), a gloriously mouthfilling, pithy, Burgundy-esque oaked white, is a new-to-me highlight. And it’s not just British vinous émigrés who are drawn to the remote mountainous beauty of Aragon: the man responsible for the effortless flow of strawberry juiciness that is Vinos del Viento Garnacha is the Californian Michael Cooper.
The Long Road Syrah, Walker Bay, South Africa 2022 (£18, Tesco) If you were looking for a tale to illustrate just how risky a business starting your own winery can be, then it’s hard to look past the recent story of Samantha O’Keefe. It’s a tale of hair-raising ups and downs, which begins in 2000, when O’Keefe swapped California and a career in television for a new life for her young family in a disused dairy farm far from any vines in Greyton, in South Africa’s Western Cape. Despite having no winemaking experience, O’Keefe had managed to turn her Lismore Estate into one of South Africa’s most admired wine producers. But then disaster struck and wildfires destroyed her home, half her vineyards and all of her 2019 vintage. As well as being a typically elegant, finely stitched, refined expression of syrah, then, the Long Road is a tribute to her resilience.
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