Coates & Seely launch the private tours of their Hampshire vineyard and winery including sparkling wine tasting and food pairing lunch.
Vineyards and Coronavirus
The story so far: after battles with disappearing workforces, collapsing markets, devilish frosts and government fug, are we seeing the early glimpses of a return to a previous life?
In anticipation of the re-opening of the hospitality sector next week, and in an attempt to make up in some part for the lost, but essential, life pleasures of eating and drinking in beautiful surroundings, we have decided to open our Hampshire gardens and English Sparkling Wine vineyards and offer socially-distanced Private Tours of our vineyards and winery, followed by tastings, food pairings and lunch under Indian Mughul tents.
Given the constraints we are under the tours, filmed below, can only be taken by groups of 8-12 people and are aimed principally at the corporate hospitality sector or perhaps for those special occasions.
Coates & Seely applaud and salute the hospitality industry inspired by generosity and care for their staff and the vulnerable throughout the pandemic.
Vineyards and Coronavirus
The story so far: beyond the struggle to survive pandemics and mother nature, and through the chaos and absurdities of current lockdown policy, the shoots of practical self-help continue to take root.
Commedia dell’Arte – also known as Commedia alla Maschera (masked comedy), or Commedia Improvviso – is said to have died out in the late 18th century.
Nevertheless, it appears to be making a concerted comeback, in only the thinnest of disguises, with our current leadership.
What could be more ‘improvised’ (and comic, if it weren’t so tragic) than the current farrago around quarantine?
Or a more perfect comic plot than the tortured issue of wearing (or not wearing) (or being seen to wear) a face ‘mask’?
It is as if Il Capitano, Scaramouche and Il Dottore have metamorphosed into some of our most (or least!) eminent politicians. (We will leave it to you to apply names to characters. By email, please – the best suggestions to qualify for a bottle of Coates & Seely).
Away from this hopeless mess, it is heartening to see so many of our clients within the hospitality sector – one of the worst to be hit by the pandemic – emerge with initiatives of their own, fired both by generosity and resourcefulness.
Into the first category fall the Caprice Group of restaurants, who in conjunction with the Richard Caring Foundation have opened the kitchens of The Ivy Collection, Scott’s, Annabel’s, Le Caprice and Bill’s across the country to provide 50,000 meals a week to the vulnerable throughout the pandemic. And our dear friends at Food Show, one of the most renowned events caterers in London, who have done something very similar.
These are wonderful, real-life performances, inspired by generosity and care for their staff, which we applaud and salute.
Initiative and resourcefulness also abound. Skye Gyngell of Spring and Heckfield Place has helped protect their inspired kitchen garden at Heckfield, their bio-dynamic farm supplier, Fern Verrow in Herefordshire, as well their own chefs, by supplying their renowned sourdough breads and kefir butter, cakes, jams and cordials and specialist store cupboard ingredients for their stranded London customers via an on-line shop.
Simon and Jason, at The Wellington Arms in Baughurst, have done something similar, turning their restaurant into the Welli Deli where each morning you can find their signature cheese soufflés, crab & asparagus quiches and home-grown miniature vegetables, along with bottles of Coates & Seely, alongside a good-natured gathering of satisfied local customers.
In London, the Cubitt House group have turned The Coach Makers Arms, The Orange and The Alfred Tennyson into purveyors of the finest takeaways; whilst the deeply talented Jonny Lake and Isa Bal – previously head chef and head sommelier, respectively, at The Fat Duck – have launched an online shop to supplement Trivet, their quite outstanding new restaurant in Bermondsey, which we urge you all to visit the minute lockdown is over (it is the most exciting new restaurant in London).
All of these inspirational establishments, as well as hundreds of our other friends within the industry, will in time thrive once more in providing outstanding service, at the very highest levels, to their devoted customers.
But we do urgently need the current cast of comic characters to speak their final lines, promptly, clearly and judiciously, without contradiction or inconsistency, and to remove themselves from the hospitality stage as soon as possible, as has now been done in almost every other European country.
Not just to save jobs, companies and whole industries, but to save livelihoods.
To ensure success, they might also quarantine the Home Secretary…
Finally, to soften this rather irritable tone, we invite all our friends of Coates & Seely to put themselves forward to win a fabulous prize of bottles of Coates & Seely, boxes of Summerdown Mint Chocolates and photo frames from our friends at Addison Ross.
Christian Seely of Coates & Seely talks about Vintage English Sparkling ‘La Perfide’ 2011.
Vineyards and Coronavirus
The story so far: from the Coates’ temporary office arrangements inside Albion, parked outside their Hampshire home, we move to the Seely home office in Bordeaux…
In addition to creating, under lockdown conditions, quarantinis of cosmopolitan brilliance (this week’s is a blend of Château Suduiraut and Coates & Seely in a one third, two thirds combination to produce the ‘Entente Cordiale’), Christian has embarked of late on a highly successful movie career.
Here we see him in his latest epic, ‘La Perfide (2011)’, (remember ‘El Cid’?), which tells the story of a small and select batch of the 2011 harvest’s finest grapes, converted to 300 individually numbered magnums of vintage Coates & Seely Brut Reserve, the last 100 of which are now being offered exclusively to Friends of Coates & Seely.
This vintage wine, which is a gold medal winner and won, on its release, the Trophy for the Most Outstanding English Vintage Sparkling Wine (UK Wine Awards), has been on strict allocation since its launch in 2018 and has been selling for prices in excess of £110 per magnum.
With the restaurant trade currently closed, we are now delighted to be in a position to offer these magnums exclusively to Friends of Coates & Seely at the reduced price of £90 per magnum.
It is drinking perfectly and is at its very best now.
Finally, a second movie, ‘The Entente Cordiale’, shows our up and coming matinee idol in a role in which he’s arguably at his very best.
The action depicted in this film specifically should be followed at home.
Nicholas Coates doesn’t miss the commute. In the latter years of his investment banking career, which he left at the age of 47 after working at Royal Bank of Scotland and ING Barings, he’d catch the 5:41 a.m. train to London and arrive back at his manor house in the Hampshire countryside around 10:30 p.m. Now Coates, 60, just walks through the rose garden between his home and the bucolic headquarters of Coates & Seely, a maker of English sparkling wine that he co-founded to take on Champagne at its own game.
It’s a calling that beckons a growing number of financiers. Bankers, hedge fund managers, and corporate lawyers are quitting London’s financial sector for England’s burgeoning vineyards. They’re buying up land in Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire and planting grapes among fields once reserved for wheat or cattle.
The path from rainmaker to winemaker is well-traveled. Historically, financiers fled to the châteaux of Bordeaux, the rolling hills of Tuscany, or sunny Napa Valley. So when Coates began telling friends and family in 2007 of his ambition to challenge Champagne in his wet and gray backyard, there wasn’t a great deal of enthusiasm. His father likened the venture to building a car in North Korea and going up against Rolls-Royce.
Since then, English wine has changed from a novelty or joke into a serious contender. In 2019, Coates & Seely’s sparkling 2009 La Perfide—named for “perfidious Albion,” an 18th century French playwright’s characterization of Britain—beat out French rivals to win a trophy at the International Wine & Spirit Competition in London, sometimes called the Oscars of Alcohol. “I wouldn’t want people to think that it’s easy, because it’s phenomenally hard work,” Coates says in his living room, where the walls are hung with unsmiling portraits of his family’s bewigged ancestors. “A lot of our blood, sweat, and tears went into this.”
The unusually hot summer of 2018 encouraged more producers to join the fray. For all its dangerous downsides, global warming also makes it possible to regularly ripen grapes at latitudes once considered marginal for cultivation. Overall output of wine in England and Wales increased to 13.2 million bottles in 2018, from 5 million in 2015, according to trade body Wine GB. The area under vine has risen 83% since 2015, to more than 8,800 acres.
Vintners have focused on sparkling wine because the English growing regions’ chalky soil is similar to that of Champagne, and producers of one of France’s signature luxury products have responded. For the likes of Vranken-Pommery and Taittinger, producing in England is a way to hedge bets and protect a key market no matter what happens with Brexit. The U.K. is Champagne’s biggest export outlet, with 27 million bottles shipped in 2018, according to trade organization Comité Champagne. That’s more than double the total production of wine in England and Wales, most of which is consumed domestically.
“The U.K. has historically been the shop window for the world, in that Champagne producers want their wines showcased here, where there is established demand,” says Davy Zyw, sparkling wine buyer at merchant Berry Brothers & Rudd. “But there’s a finite volume for vintage Champagne, and we’ve got a quality product that’s homegrown and can compete at that level.” Demand for British wine has been fueled by greater availability at retailers such as upmarket grocer Waitrose, which carries more than 100 choices, as well as at pubs and restaurants.
Winemakers are often motivated by convivial factors beyond the bottom line. In October 2007, a year after retiring from a career building high-yield debt markets in Europe, Coates flew with his family from London to Bordeaux to visit Christian Seely, a friend who was already in the wine business. Coates had known Seely since their days studying at Insead business school near Paris.
The Englishmen stayed up drinking fine wine and watching their home country lose to South Africa in that year’s Rugby World Cup final. In the early hours, Seely opened a second bottle of Pol Roger Champagne, uttering a maxim variously attributed to Napoleon or Winston Churchill: “In victory one deserves it. In defeat, one needs it.”
It was then that Coates suggested planting vines in the south of England. To his surprise, it turned out that Seely, who heads the management of about a dozen prized vineyards around the world owned by French insurer AXA, had been trying to sell a similar business proposal to his stepfather. They hired talented winemakers from Champagne to help them bottle a range of wines that now start at £31.95 ($42) per bottle.
“You need to learn from someone, just like the Romans did from the Greeks,” Coates says, slipping into navy velvet slippers to stoke a crackling fire. “For us, the Champenois are the Greeks, and we aspire, one day, to be the Romans.” Because of the similarities between Champagne’s terroir and the English turf, there’s a “huge value delta” between the two regions, Coates says. A hectare (about 2.5 acres) of vineyard in Champagne can cost more than €1 million ($1.1 million), 10 or 20 times the cost of a similarly sized plot in England.
Still, would-be investors must take a long view: Coates & Seely took about eight years to break even. After securing key accounts in the U.K., including the Jockey Club, a horse-racing consortium, and the Historic Royal Palaces, Coates wants to build his sparkling wine brand on the international stage. It’s already gained a foothold in key Parisian battlegrounds such as the George V Hotel and chef Alain Ducasse’s flagship restaurant. It’s now sold in eight countries, and Coates has hired his son Tristram to drive more expansion abroad over the next decade.
“After that, I have a hammock out in the garden, and my ultimate dream is to swing in the hammock as permanent life president of the company and be paid to do absolutely nothing,” Coates says. “If anyone was ever going to write my obituary, I wanted a bit more on it than ‘investment banker.’ ”
The story of Coates & Seely‘s 1954 British Leyland coach ‘Albion’.
Vineyards and Coronavirus
The story of Coates & Seely’s 1954 British Leyland coach ‘Albion’.
Scroll back to February 2019 (in happier times…)
It’s three in the morning and pouring with rain.
For once, it is not frost that has hauled us reluctantly from our beds, but a quest. Paulo, our vineyard manager, stifles a yawn and gets into the waiting car.
We are about to set off for the Channel Tunnel, and thence to Belgium, to make a 10am rendez-vous.
The week before we have won the exclusive contract to supply the Jockey Club and we now need a branded vehicle to represent us at such iconic forthcoming events as the Aintree Grand National and the Epsom Derby.
This is our quest.
Seven hours later, we pull up at a warehouse on an industrial estate, 150km to the east of Brussels. Rusted iron doors screech painfully as the storage facility is opened up for us.
We peer in and there she is, sandwiched uncomfortably between a vintage fire engine and a clapped-out hearse: a 1954 British Leyland coach, already painted (as if by miracle) in the Coates & Seely livery of British racing green.
Having once plied the London to Maidstone coach-route, and subsequently been used for continental weddings, she is now woefully neglected.
There is a frisson as we see her in the flesh for the first time.
Forget the red Lamborghini, the chrome cylinders of a Harley Davidson or the smooth curves of a Ukrainian supermodel.
This is the real thing: a veritable ‘crise de coeur’ of the full-blooded, mid-life variety.
She stands like a faded diva, bereft of her youthful looks, but with the unmistakable lines and posture of a super-star.
Six weeks later and our Polish master craftsmen, Andrez and Pavel, have stripped her bare, re-positioned her ageing seats, built drinks tables and re-applied her maquillage in a fresh racing green.
The final coup-de-grace is her new name-plate – ‘Albion’ – which nestles like a tiara above her noble brow.
And we are only just in time.
The following day she is driven to Newmarket at full speed (a stately 37mph), again at three in the morning. It takes us five and a half hours. It’s her first time out, and she’s due to appear before the start of the 1,000 Guineas.
That afternoon, the equally lovely ITV racing correspondent, Francesca Cumani, spots her and comes to sit with her on camera.
We bristle with pride.
The Derby and The Oaks then follow, as do more of the TV cameras, drawn to her blend of vintage good looks and old-world charm. A cross between Grace Kelly and Marlene Dietrich.
Today she is parked outside our home, providing the perfect office for a pandemic. Four tables, designed for glasses of Coates & Seely in happier times, make perfectly distanced desks, away from the din of telephones and the family scramble for working space in the kitchen.
One day, when all this is over, she will grace the great race-courses of England once more, but in the meantime we are happy to be in the hands of such a trusty and versatile family friend.
Coates & Seely battle the most deadly of viticultural threats… the vineyard frost
It’s Tuesday, 3am.
The thermometer in the Landrover is showing just 1°C and the sky is bristling with stars.
It is utterly silent.
We head onto the old Whitchurch Road, driving along the valley floor and turn right at the Watership Down pub, heading north along a narrow lane.
When we reach the top of the hill the sky broadens out and to our right the eastern horizon is already beginning to glow.
A pale half-moon hangs, brilliantly frozen, to our left.
As we approach the vineyard the thermometer drops to zero.
We can see Paulo, our vineyard manager, and his wife, Luisa, in the arc-light of the giant fan he has positioned at the bottom of the vine-rows, facing up the slope.
They have the same look of nervous excitement on their faces that we feel in our bellies.
Along the northern and eastern perimeters of the vineyard dozens of wood fires, built the previous day, stand ready to be lit. Clumps of green hay lie alongside them, to generate smoke.
A brief parley.
It is still only 3.30am and the temperature is falling rapidly. We are in trouble. At this time of year the young vines will survive at -1°C to -2°C unaided.
Between -2°C and -4°C they need external help – from heat, air movement, smoke or water – if they are to avoid destruction.
Below -4°C and all bets are off.
The vines, at this stage, are like young children. They need protecting.
Paulo starts the giant turbine that drives the fan. The shape of the blades is designed to blow cold air away and suck in the warmer air that sits directly above it. Its arc covers one quarter of the most vulnerable area of the vineyard.
It is the latest technology, from New Zealand.
As he calibrates the angles of the fan-head, the rest of us move along the long line of fires with firelighters and tapers, lighting each with military precision. Once the fires are raging, we will layer the green hay across them to muffle the flames and create a layer of smoke.
This is the old-fashioned way to prevent vineyard frost.
A little later, having finally positioned the giant fan, Paulo appears on a tractor pulling what is known as a ‘Frostbuster’.
Imagine a giant hair-dryer on wheels, but a hundred and fifty times bigger, fuelled by huge gas cannisters, that is towed behind the tractor and blows out an endless stream of hot air.
It is the equivalent of a thousand management consultants, all consulting at once: a lot of noise, a lot of heat, and not much effect.
It is yesterday’s technology.
But in times of crisis, action – almost any action – is consolatory.
When we started out as vignerons it was hard to accept, at first, that we could not control our lives, that we were at the mercy of forces beyond us. So we learned, early on, the therapeutic value of activity, and a hard-won resignation.
By 5 am the temperature has fallen to -2°C and is still falling. By sunrise, in 30 minutes, it will have hit the danger zone.
All our defences against the vineyard frost are now up across various parts of the vineyard. There is nothing more we can do. I walk to the top of the hill.
Across the valley, looking eastwards, the faint pink light that had earlier smudged the black silhouette of the treeline is now a blazing orange. When the sun finally rises it catches the delicate layers of smoke that lie across the valley floor, turning them to shades of angry red and black.
It is hard to imagine a scene at once more beautiful and lethal.
I walk back down through the vines to the others.
As I do my hand is drawn instinctively to some of the frosted vine leaves. I stroke them dry, as I once wiped my children’s fevered foreheads in their sleep. It is only then I realise how much all this means.
We won’t know how much damage there has been until later in the day.
Our work is finally done. We thank one another and part with a comforting sense of solidarity, before making our various ways home. It has been a long and exhausting morning and all the team have worked well. We are fearful but, in the circumstances, could not have done more.
