24 ***^ Sunday 11 August 2019 The Sunday Telegraph
Features
I
n 1972, Sir Reresby Sitwell
ignored all expert opinion – and
local bafflement – and planted
the most northerly vineyard on
Earth in the grounds of his
Derbyshire estate, Renishaw
Hall. At a latitude of 53 degrees, 18
minutes north and only a few miles
from the smokestacks and steel mills
of Sheffield, this was far from
anyone’s idea of wine country. But Sir
Reresby, inspired by the vineyard his
family kept in the Chianti region of
Tuscany, could not be swayed.
The Renishaw wine, recalls his
daughter Alexandra, who took over
the estate following the death of her
father in 2009, was famously awful: a
sharp vinegary hit that would draw
one’s gums back over their teeth.
Local tenants would wince
whenever they were proffered a glass
as they came to pay the rent. “When
my husband used to come and stay,
Father would crack open a bottle and
I would stand behind him waving
‘don’t drink it’,” Alexandra says.
But the icy winters and dreary
summers against which Sir Reresby
battled in vain for decades are
increasingly a thing of the past.
According to a Met Office report,
Britain’s top 10 warmest years on
record have all occurred since 2002.
Last month, Derbyshire recorded its
highest ever temperature of 93.9F
(34.4C) at Cotton-in-the-Elms,
eclipsing the previous 93.4F (34.1C)
record set at the same location in
2006.
All this, according to winemaker
Kieron Atkinson, who now runs the
Renishaw vineyard, has created
conditions similar to those seen in the
champagne region of France 20 years
ago. As a result they are now able to
produce sparkling white, rosé and
even red wines, which have won
accolades in the Decanter World
Wine awards and are on sale in the
local branches of Waitrose.
“It’s difficult, as a wine maker, to
be profiting from what will be a
global catastrophe,” says Atkinson, a
41-year-old father of three who, prior
to entering the winemaking world,
served in Afghanistan as a captain in
the Light Dragoons. “All sorts of stuff
which is good for grape growing isJoe Shute visits the
northern vineyard
making top wines,
thanks to Britain’s
rising temperatures
Forget champagne... try Chateau Sheffield
bad for everyone else. But from an
insular perspective, the fruit and
quality from the wine making process
is far exceeding anything we could
have done even a decade ago.”
The world’s rapidly warming climate
may no longer mean the 17th century
Renishaw Hall is officially the world’smost northerly vineyard (that accolade
now belongs to Norway’s Lerkekasa
Vineyard, a two-hour drive south-west
of Oslo) or indeed even Britain’s, but it
remains at the forefront of the
country’s winemaking revolution.
In 1972, when Sir Reresby first
planted his vines, he was one of a
handful of winemakers in England.
Last year 15.6 million bottles were
produced nationwide, more thandoubling the previous record of
6.3 million set in 2014. The number of
British vines has increased by 160 per
cent in a decade to span 7,000 acres. In
2018, 1.6 million vines were planted
with a further two million expected
over the course of this year.
Even France’s champagne houses
are capitalising on the boom by
planting their own vineyards in Britain.
In 2015, Taittinger bought 70 hectares
in Kent to plant with chardonnay, pinot
noir and pinot meunier vines – with
the first bottles expected to be released
in 2024.
While Kent possesses a chalk subsoil
similar in structure to Champagne’s
Côte des Blancs, back north in the
vineyard dubbed “Chateau Sheffield”,
Atkinson is growing on free-draining
sandy loam.
But the soil, he insists, is not
necessarily as important as the
weather. “Even in this part of the
world, they are saying in 40 years’ time
we are going to be planting cabernet
sauvignon [a red wine grape
traditionally associated with hotterclimes]. And in the south of England it
will be too hot for fruit generally and
people will be growing raisins instead.”
Such predictions may sound
somewhat overblown, but Atkinson
has done his homework. After leaving
the army he studied viticulture at the
prestigious Plumpton College in
Sussex, and works as a consultant all
over the country through his company
The English Wine Project.
His experiences in Afghanistan
fuelled his interest in wine, as he says it
taught him that he wanted to produce
something rather than sit behind a
desk. “I wanted to avoid that classic
army route of going into the City and
earning lots of money,” he says,
admittedly somewhat ruefully.
His expertise has helped
turbocharge production at Renishaw
Hall, consulting advisers from the top
of the industry to ensure they are
creating wine of the highest quality.
“Wine is definitely an industry
where success breeds more success,”
he says.
One of the criteria for assessing thesuitability of a wine-growing area
is the so-called growing degree
days (GDD), which counts how
often, and by what margin, the
weather is warm enough for the
vines to flourish.
According to Atkinson, at
Renishaw they have progressed
from around 670 GDDs in the
Seventies to approaching 950
over the last decade – a rate
roughly similar to
Champagne 20 years ago
and Marlborough, New
Zealand, today.
Walking through the
centuries-old walled
garden of Renishaw,
originally used as a
paddock for racehorses
before being planted with a
hectare of vines, already
the grapes are set and
slowly ripening in the sun.
Roughly, Atkinson
estimates, the amount of
fruit each vine can produce
has increased from 2kg to6kg in a decade. He plans to harvest
the crop in October – unless the
wood pigeons get there first –
although last year the weather was so
hot and the fruit so bountiful he
ended up picking the grapes in
September.
“Last year we had about 60 people
in for the picking,” Atkinson says. “It
was like that scene from Jaws: ‘you’re
going to need a bigger boat’.”
However, experts have warned
that the British weather will continue
to remain as variable as ever – indeed
even more so as climate change bites.
On the same day we sipped sparkling
wine in the sun in the courtyard at
Renishaw Hall, 40 miles away, on the
other side of Derbyshire, residents
were being evacuated from Whaley
Bridge after the town’s reservoir was
damaged in heavy rainfall.
In 2016, a researcher at the
University of East Anglia
published a report assessing the
impact of climate change on the
British wine industry, concluding
that while opportunities were
being expanded as the country
warmed, turbulent weather
would continue to threaten
yields. To illustrate his point,
widespread frosts the following
year caused “catastrophic”
damage to vineyards in the
south, killing off buds that
had prematurely bloomed.
According to Atkinson,
Renishaw’s northerly
location means its buds
remain dormant for
longer, weathering the
worst of the spring frosts.
For now, though,
Chateau Sheffield appears
to have hit a winemaking
sweet spot. “I never
thought we would get to
the stage where it is
actually very drinkable,”
says Alexandra Sitwell.
“But I think my father
would be incredibly
proud.”Everything’s vine:
Kieron Atkinson
produces award-
winning wines from
Renishaw Hall, a
few miles from
Sheffield‘It’s difficult, as a wine
maker, to be profiting
from what will be a
global catastrophe’
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