Viva Brighton Issue #80 October 2019

MY SPACE
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wine industry have received at least some of
their training at Plumpton. Winemakers, cellar
hands, assistant winemakers, buyers, marketers,
sales managers, consultants, specialists… The
UK wine business needs all sorts of skills, but
we also train people for international careers.
There’s a lot of movement in wine making.
Wine makers and grape growers move all over
the world.
You’re Australian. What brought you
to Sussex? I’ve spent the last twenty years
working in viticulture and wine making – I
was the director of a research facility in New
South Wales, a lecturer at the University of
Melbourne, and my PhD is in Botany – but
I was aware of Plumpton Wine School from
Australia. I’ve been here for close to two years
now. It’s nice to be part of a rapidly expanding
industry and I love teaching.
The English wine business appears to
be booming. What do you put that down
to? One of the drivers is climate change.
Historically, the UK had a very marginal
climate, but this is changing, allowing us to
ripen grapes and make some pretty smart wines.
The English climate and terroir are well suited
to the production of high-quality sparkling
wines, some of which have won international
awards, giving the UK wine industry a fair bit of
profile. South African companies are buying UK
vineyards and Taittinger have bought and run a
vineyard in Kent.
It was an unbelievably good vintage last year
and, with all the planting and expansion going
on, Wine GB envisage that we’ll be producing
40 million bottles of wine in ten years time.
Plumpton’s wine school has been here for 30
years which is a testament to the foresight of the
people who originally set it up. Sussex is well
placed in the middle of a swathe of vineyards
that start in Essex and reach to Hampshire, and
it's growing massively all the time. Lizzie Lower
plumpton.ac.uk/courses/wine
@plumptonwine
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