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.
Coates & Seely and racing share many attributes: our grapes are grown on the south facing chalk slopes of the North Hampshire Downs, the home to many top racehorse studs – the perfect “terroir” for award winning wines and racehorse winners.
The Jockey Club: Virginia Coates, February 20th 2020
COATES & SEELY AND THE JOCKEY CLUB
Coates & Seely and racing share many attributes: our grapes are grown on the south facing chalk slopes of the North Hampshire Downs, the home to many top racehorse studs – the perfect “terroir” for award winning wines and racehorse winners. The vines thrive on the thin layer of topsoil, pushing their roots down into the chalk, never lacking water which emerges from the aquifers deep below. Racehorses bred on these grasslands have also been proven to thrive, many a winner has been raised on the chalk soil within a stone’s throw of Coates & Seely’s vineyards.
Racing has long been at the heart of British Society. It has been traditional for a day at the races to include fizz with friends, and now there is the opportunity to crack open English sparkling wines at the bar, in the restaurant or at your picnic – an ideal way to spend a day at the races or to celebrate a victory – a natural evolution of the traditions, as Coates & Seely is quintessentially a British brand, along with The Jockey Club.
Both C&S and The Jockey Club are so proud to be British and working in partnership. This harmony was confirmed by a curious coincidence: C&S acquired a retired 1952 British Leyland vintage coach, in British Racing Green, with a “champagne bar” fitted at the entrance, from an event company in Belgian. We repatriated the coach and were thrilled to realise the lucky synergy of the transaction, as it was registered with the number plate “JCK”. The return journey of the coach to Britain coincided with the signing up of our very special partnership with The Jockey Club.
Albion – an ancient name for Britain – as we have named the coach, gets taken to the races at Epsom, Sandown and Newmarket, where it acts as a perfect focal point to serve our English sparkling wines. So photogenic is this vehicle, that it has already earned its keep on a number of occasions, by appearing on request on ITV racing news with Francesca Cumani. Inside Albion are intimate tables to enjoy a glass of C&S, outside are bars in British Racing Green, the colour of our marketing long before we went to the races, with parasols to keep off the blazing British sun.
Coates & Seely is a young company, based on an old friendship, between Nicholas Coates and Christian Seely, who studied at business school together in France; idling many a day at the races. After their respective careers in finance and the wine world, they came together in 2008 to start a business with a mutual passion and the desire to create the very best English sparkling wines.
Their aim from the start was to create wines which reflect the high quality of the English chalk “terroir”, using only the best grapes under the guidance of the top French winemakers and consultants from Champagne. Their efforts were rewarded from the start – the wines were launched in 2011 and the first discerning hotels to order were the Georges V and Hotel Bristol in Paris; subsequently many top awards have been given; and in 2019 the International Wine & Spirit Challenge gave the trophy for the “top bottle fermented sparkling wine in the world” to Coates & Seely. It’s like winning the Derby with a newly discovered racehorse, who has been selectively bred from purebred lines, in new surroundings – and we are still celebrating!
Coates & Seely is listed in many top establishments including the Fat Duck, the Savoy, the Dorchester and Annabel’s; in museums and galleries across London; in five of the Royal Palaces and in ten different countries. The Rosé is served in Paris by Alain Ducasse in his restaurant, by the glass. In addition private clients around the world enjoy the fizz and C&S are so proud to be listed by The Jockey Club at so many of their racecourses.
When we cracked open our first bottle, we reflected that if we lived in a wine producing area of the world, or in Champagne, there would be food in the vernacular, local food matchings that would bring out the best in the wines. Just as winemaking has developed in Britain, so has the availability of top ingredients grown locally, making the development of local food matches a joy. At Coates & Seely we encourage people to drink C&S not just as an aperitif, or in celebration, but throughout lunch or dinner, as the wines work well with so many foods. I trained as a chef under Pru Leith and worked around the world as a private chef, and now work for Coates & Seely as the in-house chef and head of events. I take a particular interest in the wine and food served by the Jockey Club in so many spectacular locations.
When you arrive at the races, a glass of Coates & Seely is the perfect way to get you in the mood for the day, so I would start with a glass before lunch. To follow, if you are having a picnic, the Jockey Club chefs have put together an inspired British Luxury Hamper to serve at the races. The range of ingredients and menu choices reflect the best of British food, yet cooked with Continental flair and confidence, using imaginative recipes, all of which will pair perfectly with the bottle of Coates & Seely Rose NV included in the hamper. The only snag I can see, is you will feel tempted to open more than the one bottle provided!
Chicken Liver Paté, to start, works perfectly with the Rosé, the earthiness of the paté, matches well the sweet fruit of the fizz.
The Beef and Smoked Salmon, so British, are also a natural pairing. I love to make Quail Scotch Eggs to serve at picnics, so I am glad to see them included alongside the healthy lentil salad.
The puddings are too tempting, and at this point in the picnic I would take a break from the C&S to pace yourself, with the South Downs Water, to clear the palate and save the last glass of Rosé for the wonderful selection of three English cheeses – another example of the skill in British craftsmanship. If there is any fizz left in the bottle, bring it out at tea time (or order another one!) – the cream tea, an essential English experience, served with strawberry jam, will be enhanced by a glass of Coates & Seely, and by then you will hopefully be celebrating your victories.
A bottle of Coates & Seely can be found within the LuxuryHamper in the Great British Picnic enclosure at the Investec Derby Festival.
At Coates & Seely we while away the magical hour between 6pm and 7pm, when the deliveries are done and our worldly cares vanish in the innocent blush of a first drink, with the creation of a number of new cocktails designed specifically for Coronavirus lock-down (collectively, a “quarantini”).
Christian out-classes us all in this particular endeavour, devoting his considerable knowledge and energy in pursuit of perfection.
His current masterpiece is what we have decided to call a ‘Sbagliato Cinese’: 1/3 Campari, 1/10 Carpano Antica Bitters and the rest sparkling wine (best, of course, with Coates & Seely)
You should not wait for the lifting of lock-down to try this quarantini, nor be deceived by the name. It is utterly delicious, and by altering the fractions of the ingredients you can achieve either a sensible or a thrillingly rapid ascent to heaven (a useful contingency in current circumstances).
On the subject of quarantinis, you will have noticed the current pandemic is spawning a new vocabulary.
A “coronacoaster”, describing the emotional gyrations in a pandemic – loving lock-down one minute and weeping with anxiety the next – would, if we were classifying each new word, definitely be awarded a ‘first-growth’.
There are many others, which you will no doubt have seen. What you might not have seen, however, is that there is a saint who shares a name with this pandemic: a young female martyr, slain by the Romans in the second century AD for comforting a tortured enemy soldier, and canonized subsequently as St Corona.
Today, she is revered principally in the small town of St Corona am Weschel, in Austria – which is, perhaps not surprisingly, still under lock-down.
Do visit, though, when lock-down is finally lifted.
Its principal attraction is its state-of-the-art theme park.
“The Corona Park”, we are told, is set amongst verdant hills and its centrepiece – the “Corona Coaster” – can be experienced (by contrast to the Sbagliato Cinese) with either a comfortable or a thrillingly rapid descent (in this case, to hell…)
Still to be pondered at this stage, though, is an apposite word for the socially-distanced drinks party that will soon be following once lock-down is lifted.
We have already received early orders of Coates & Seely in anticipation of this new phenomenon.
Its merits are clear, presenting as it does, with its guaranteed distancing of up to 2 metres from any bore in the room, the perfect alibi for not listening, with near complete protection from even the most determined of spittle, and capped by significantly enhanced escape (and exfiltration) potential.
But we do need a name for it.
Answers please, and a bottle of Coates & Seely (or, for the hard-core among you, a Sbagliato Cinese), to the winner.
