ED DALLIMORE:
WINE AUTHOR & PHOTOGRAPHER
The Wine Garden of England. It’ s a great line. In Kent, we have a rose bed of excellent wine producers that make this my favourite kind of garden, which is of course one that is full of great wine.
English by birth, after a decade living in the southern hemisphere, I returned to spend the spring and summer of 2021 photographing and writing my book, The Vineyards of Britain. Over six months, I visited 147 producers. Not a bad gig, unsurprisingly. I saved Kent until July. The garden is at its best after flowering and in the vineyard the vines are alive. What a joy to revisit a place with all the familiarity of
home and fond youthful memories of cricket at Canterbury and Tunbridge Wells, but through the eyes and with all the appreciation of someone from somewhere so far and so different. Not necessarily a case of saving the best to almost last, but more so- with any luck- to see one of my favourite counties in all of its glory.
As it turned out, 2021 was about as cold and wet a year as you could ever imagine. Even for England. These are the years that the true professionals separate themselves from the rest and Kent is perhaps blessed with some of the best.
I love how every single vineyard is different; it’ s why visiting them will never get boring. But, it’ s the people, their personalities and stories that stay with us. People like Galia and Adrian Pike at Westwell. Previously, Adrian launched the music careers of Florence Welch and Hot Chip. Now, Westwell’ s still wines adorn some of London’ s finest wine lists.
Their Pelegrim sparkling doesn’ t get the press it deserves, mainly because their still wines are so good and we seem determined to think of producers as specialists, exclusive to one category or the other. The biggest producer in Sussex tasted Westwell’ s sparkling and planted a vineyard in the very next field … that’ s all you need to know.
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