Viva Brighton Issue #56 October 2017

WINE
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Cloudy Ridge
Red wine, made in Plumpton
A short while ago I wrote about a local-produceonly
delicatessen in Brighton Marina and came
away with various items including some Sussex
chorizo and – almost as incompatible sounding
– some English red wine. It was made, it said on
the label, by Plumpton College students, and it
turned out to be extremely palatable. I decided to
investigate further…
I’m greeted outside the college’s very modernlooking,
curly-wurly-roofed Wine Centre by
‘Winemaker and Winery Instructor’ Sarah
Midgley, who’s volunteered to show me round.
Plumpton, of course, is the only educational
establishment to enrol at in the UK if you’re
serious about learning how to make wine. They
offer all sorts of courses, from week-long tasters to
postgraduate degrees in viticulture and oenology,
offering to impart know-how in both the practical
and the commercial sides of the business.
The modus operandi is this: all the wine-making
work is done by the students, under very close
supervision by Sarah and her colleagues. Plumpton
Estate, using grapes cultivated on vines in Scaynes
Hill and at the foot of Ditchling Beacon, produces
around 22,000 bottles of wine a year. Of these,
around 1,000 are red.
Sarah explains the difference between making
red and white wine as she shows me round the
squeaky-clean centre: there’s a warehouse full of
shiny silver machines and vats, a couple of brightly
lit analysis labs, a classroom and an admin office.
Red wine, I learn, is made from the skin and flesh
of red grapes; white wine is made from the skinless
flesh of either red or white grapes (or both). While
perfect for sparkling wine and a certain type of
white, the British climate isn’t warm enough
(“yet!”) to fully ripen the varieties of grapes that
produce the sort of full-bodied, 14% reds that sell
most in supermarkets. “But some German grape
varieties, which produce a lighter wine, grow well
Photo by Emma Croman
in England. For our red we use a mix of Rondo
and Dornfelder.”
Sarah is constantly experimenting. She uses a
method to get the best flavour out of the grape
skins by pressing them gently (think teabags) and
has started aging the wine in oak barrels. The 2016
vintage is 11%, and is pretty versatile, either as a
session wine, or with food (“it’s particularly good
with lamb.”) The 2017 grape crop was threatened
by an April air frost, which will affect the yield,
if not the quality. “This isn’t a bad thing for the
students: the more they encounter the sort of
problems they are likely to face in their career, the
better the training.”
Sarah stresses that the education of their students
is more important to the college than the sale
of their wine, which means, for example, that
production – from harvesting to bottling – has to
be completed within an academic year. But their
wines are proving to be increasingly popular,
stocked, for example, by Waitrose. At the Lewes
branch a bottle of 2016 Cloudy Ridge will set you
back £9.99; I leave with a complimentary one in
my bag. Alex Leith
plumpton.ac.uk
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