Liz Sagues tells the rags-to-riches tale of Penny Streeter, whose English venture has just released its first wines, and catches up with a contract winemaking company and some of its clients.
The story is a PR dream: rags-to-riches South Africa-based woman entrepreneur buys crumbling English country house with totally neglected Grade I-listed gardens, plus nearby golf course with hotel, spends hugely on restoration – and creates a new vineyard aiming to showcase the best of traditional method sparkling wine.
No hype here. This is the truth about Leonardslee Family Vineyards, which launched its first three wines early in June. The restored gardens and Leonardslee’s Michelin-star restaurant are massively popular, and the wines are showing great promise, in a splendidly English way. Star of the three is the elegant and very aromatic 2020 Blanc de Blancs, from Chardonnay, which shines on the clay-rich site. The Chardonnay-heavy 2021 Brut Rosé, where Pinotage – unique in the UK – adds subtle colour and structure, is also a delight, while the Brut Reserve 2021 for the moment whispers rather than shouts.
They are the fruit – literally – of South African expertise, from viticulturalist Barry Anderson and winemaker Johann Fourie. The latter is one of his home country’s rising stars, formerly head winemaker at KWV and now in charge at Benguela Cove, Walker Bay, which intriguingly is claimed to have the longest coastline of any vineyard worldwide. And that brings us to Penny Streeter. Born in what was then Rhodesia, she was a near-penniless single mother with the highest ambitions, determined to build a decent future for her children – and herself. There were other steps along the way from living in social housing to ownership of palatial Leonardslee House, close to Horsham in Sussex, but it’s her involvement in wine that matters here.
Streeter’s first vinous venture was in 2013, when she bought Benguela Cove, whose then owners failed to recognise the potential of this cool, wind-blown 70ha site. Then, she recruited Fourie. With big improvements at her new project that was barely underway, she turned her eyes to England and the prospects for creating a South African-style wine hospitality venue. Mannings Heath golf club, with its two 18-hole courses and a building big enough to turn into a classy hotel, was identified as ideal and the first vines were planted in 2017, replacing nine holes of one of the courses. The site is sheltered and gently sloping, so frost – a constant hazard in England – rolls away. But there’s a unique factor in the soil, Fourie notes: buried golf balls.
This remains the major vineyard area, but two years later Steeter bought nearby Leonardslee and more vines went in, to bring the total to 16ha. Remarkably, unlike the classic champagne varieties at Mannings Heath, the choice was Pinotage. That wasn’t a homage to the South African connections; instead, the decision was purely a practical one. Fourie explains that he discussed with an English consultant the characteristics of Pinotage: thick skins, a short growing season with early ripening. It perfectly countered the English issues of frost, disease and chilly autumns. Vines were brought from Switzerland, and some, as at Mannings Heath, were heeled in by English wine celebrities and wine journalists (my name is on labels at both sites…).
This is a high-investment enterprise, with a lot of care going into it. Anderson explains the sustainable approach, using cover crops, minimal tilling and the arrival soon of pygmy sheep to graze between the vines. The results are proven: a square metre of soil at the start was lucky to contain two earthworms, now there are around 35. More than half of the vines are Chardonnay, and the wines will continue to be dominated by that variety, he adds, simply because it is doing so well.
For Fourie, long an enthusiast for English sparkling wine (it’s his first choice of category when judging in major wine competitions), there’s one particularly big difference between South Africa and England: in the former, the challenge is to keep alcohol levels down, in the latter, to keep them up. Acidity levels vary, too: for example, his South African wines never go through malo while those in Sussex often do.
The presentation of the bottles doesn’t follow the norm for smart sparkling wine. Prominent on every label is a gilded swallow, chosen both because the bird follows the grape cycle, flying from Africa to the UK in spring as flowers open and back in the autumn as the fruit ripens. Many of the migrants touch down first in Sussex – as did Streeter with her English wine venture. And on the bottle neckband four small swallows – the Streeter children – follow the parent bird. Usefully, both dosage and disgorgement date are shown on the back label.
I know there’s a lot of publicity hype around Leonardslee Family Estates, but it’s far, far more than a vanity project. What Streeter has done in renovating the superb Grade-I listed gardens with their series of lakes is of huge importance to the English landscape heritage, and her whole wine hospitality initiative is a top-level contribution to the overall progress of the UK wine industry.
Defined Wine
But there is so much more going on, and often in a very different way. A fortnight after the Leonardslee launch came a London tasting organised by Defined Wine, a contract winemaking company, with some 40 clients, many of them tiny – some have less than a hectare of vines. But these growers are far from the ‘hobby’ vignerons whose wines once made teeth scream after a lengthy tasting. And alongside the small names are such big, deservedly respected ones as Busi Jacobsohn.
It’s immensely to the credit of Defined’s CEO Henry Sugden and head winemaker Nick Lane (formerly of Cloudy Bay, Moet et Chandon and Dom Pérignon) that the wines I tasted from a baker’s dozen of growers were not only generally very good, but they were also individual. No mass vinification, no imposition of style. “We have a lot of very small tanks,” says Sugden, explaining that growers can have as much (or as little) input into how their wines are made, as they choose.
Many of those showing their wines were on early harvests, the results – both sparkling and still –very drinkable now and promising well for years ahead. That bright future was, I reckon, confirmed by the older vine wines of Shotley Vineyard in Suffolk, whose youngest plantings are 2010, with the oldest going back to 1990. Charlotte Davitt-Mills, who rescued the abandoned site in 2015, showed Bacchus and Pinot Noir that had impressive concentration and depth.
As part of the Defined tasting, a panel of the great and the good of English wine (an umbrella description that includes the Welsh product too) considered whether the future would be boom or bust. Generally, the speakers, who included WineGB CEO Nicola Bates, were optimistic, but there was serious concern that selling wine was far less easy than planting vines. With the UK vineyard area set to grow from the current 4,200ha to some 7,600ha in a decade (in 2010 it was just 1,300ha), that means building the market very substantially. The generous 2023 harvest has given 20 million bottles, yet current sales are barely half that.
Tourism was seen as a crucial element in finding buyers – there was an emotional connection for UK consumers in seeing the vines and drinking the product where it was made, speakers stressed, also highlighting the support for minimal vineyard to glass distance. And while overseas exports had a role, there was a much closer market to be exploited – that north of the current English and Welsh wine growing regions.
Emphasis, too, came on quality. “Value for money doesn’t mean cheap, it means quality,” said Charlie Holland, ex-Gusbourne, now winemaker at the new Jackson Family Wines UK enterprise. English sparkling wine, he added, was excellent, and the potential of some still wine, notably Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from the Crouch Valley in Essex, was “equal to the best in the world”.
With June’s English Wine Week bringing a notable surge in visits to vineyards, and trade body WineGB reacting to the British general election campaign with its own manifesto for the industry’s future, these are encouraging times. Much more information, including details of the manifesto for growth, the new tourism report and the medal winners in the 2024 WineGB Awards, is available at winegb.co.uk.