1. Home
2. People & Opinion

Five minutes with Stephen Duckett, Hundred Hills Winery

I’m from a farming background, but I had a tech business, here and in California, which did very well, and I started to look at what was going on with English wine. The climate had changed and was 2°C warmer than in 1970, and it’s the same temperature now [in Oxfordshire] as Champagne in the 2000s. Fiona [Duckett, his wife] and I started looking for the best place in England for vineyards. From 2009 we looked at something like 300 sites – 100 in detail – touring England for the perfect place, with help from Oxford University to analyse them.

This valley, a natural amphitheatre, was ideal, with airflow funnelling over the hills, and we haven’t had a frost yet. And from the starting point it was then critical to get the clones right – high quality and low yielding, with the challenge being to create fine wines, meaning long hang time and getting phenolic ripeness.

The market for English sparkling, even in England, is still at the ‘awareness’ stage, it still has to be a hand sell, with a somm at the point of sale. The marketing strategy should be focused on making quality wine, and we need to create a category on restaurant lists, not just be an add-on to the Champagne. The copying of Champagne Houses is not a good model – that’s like marketing Coca Cola; if you are going to copy something from Champagne, then grower Champagne is, for me, what we need to do. We have the climate and soils here in England, plus a fantastic restaurant scene, so that is everything we need to grow.

• English wine
• producer
• english sparkling
• five minutes with
• Stephen Duckett
• Hundred Hills Winery