Vineyard Diary – Page 2 – Coates and Seely

A Vineyard Diary Part 16

Coates & Seely, part of the gastronomic cornucopia in the Cheltenham Gold Cup Hamper.

Vineyards and Coronavirus

The story so far: with the prospect of freedom at last now beckoning, we look to provide some pleasurable diversion in the meantime…

Cast your mind back to last March.

The Cheltenham Festival.

A quarter of a million people, in tweeds, furs and trilbies, celebrated the pinnacle of the National Hunt season.

230,000 pints of Guinness were drunk, 20,000 bottles of champagne poured, five tonnes of smoked salmon consumed. The crowds milled happily from tent to paddock to course, meeting friends, talking racing, ‘fleecing’ the bookies and thrilling to the finest national hunt racing festival in the world.

A week later, a pale and drawn prime minister declared the first national lockdown in our country’s thousand year history.

The Festival was an ante-diluvian moment.

Nothing was ever the same after it.

Yet it happened, and it will happen again this year.

Only once in its 161 year history has the festival been cancelled, when the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001 succeeded where world wars and global pandemics have failed.

This year the racing will again take place as usual, although sadly we shall have to watch from home.

Yet there is cause for celebration.

Spring already beckons with the prospect of renewal, and the virus that has played such havoc with our lives, and the racing, is in decline.

Within a matter of weeks now we shall once again be mixing with friends, eating and drinking together, and enjoying fully one of the greatest national sporting calendars in the world. Meanwhile, to raise morale still further, and to tease your waist-lines, we have teamed up with our friends and partners at Boisdale and Fitzdares to produce an incredible Cheltenham Gold Cup hamper, for delivery direct to your homes on the day.

The Gold Cup hamper, designed for two and to last the whole day, is a veritable cornucopia of British delicacies.

Start the day, reclined comfortably in your bubble, with a Bloody Mary made from English Puffing Billy Stream Vodka and quite the best spiced tomato mix on the market, from the Pickle House.

Study the form while you do so, taking advantage of the free £25 betting voucher provided by our friends at Fitzdares.

As lunch beckons, open a bottle of Coates & Seely Brut Reserve NV, provided by yours truly, before indulging in a maritime saturnalia of Scottish langoustine (with home-made mayo), Dunkeld smoked salmon (with herby crème fraiche), Orkney pickled herrings (with dill and lemon) and potted smoked mackerel (with horseradish and chives). Do not leave your bubble. Protect the NHS.

Choose, then, between a main course of oxtail and parmesan pie (to be oven-heated for 18 mins – the only cooking required in the whole hamper) and the great Boisdale speciality of fillet of beef, Herefordshire asparagus, Cornish new potatoes and English wild garlic salsa verde, followed, in either case, by crème brulée à l’Anglaise with a praline shard and blueberry compôte, and topped off with a selection of Scottish cheeses.

Cheltenham Gold Cup Hamper from Boisdales

Finally, at the end of an afternoon of thrilling racing, as you count your winnings and contemplate the delicious cold supper ahead of you, indulge in some comforting gin and tonics made from London Distillery gin and Double Dutch mixes.

Whether you are in despair at lockdown, in early training for the re-opening of the British social season, or simply in need of an indulgence, these hampers will not disappoint. They are utterly delicious and amazingly good value. Go to Boisdale to place your orders and know that you will also be helping the Great British food and drinks industry back onto its feet…

A Vineyard Diary Part 15

Coates & Seely looks ahead to sunlit uplands and the launch of Glass Half Full Drinks

Vineyards and Coronavirus

The story so far: consigned still to our bubbles, we look through the mists of the current pandemic, and across the dreary terrain of lockdown, to the sunlit uplands…

There are three great ‘natural’ smells in the world.

The smell of freshly baked bread.

The smell from the top of a new-born baby’s head.

And the smell of fermenting wine.

The others – there are too many to mention – of musk roses at night, of newly mown hay, freshly ground coffee, or a lover’s hair, are mere scents.

For each of the great ‘natural’ smells is linked to birth.

If you have never smelt fermenting wine, you must come and visit us, one evening in late October or November, after the harvest, when the grapes have been pressed and the winery doors are closed to the cold and dark outside.

Inside, in the musty warmth, as the first great act of vinification occurs, the smell of fermentation – of a bready sweetness full of fruit and ripeness and mystery – is one you will remember.

Now, with the first fermentation over and the wines safely bottled, the heady smells are gone. But we console ourselves, knowing that the yeasts and sugars inside the bottles are working another small miracle, in the release of the eddying spirals of millions of bubbles that will one day thrill our palates and lighten our spirits.

Outside, in the vineyards, the vines – as if in sympathy with the surrounding gloom – are in a death-like slumber.

They will remain that way until the cold finally loosens its grip and the pruning starts, in March, before the onset of spring and the swelling of new buds.

By then it will be one year since we wrote our first ‘Vineyards and Coronavirus’ diary entry.

Who would have thought…?!

Like you, we remain isolated in our bubble, but as we look out through the mists of the current pandemic, and across the dreary terrain of lockdown, we do so in the knowledge that the sunlit uplands lie ahead.

By spring new shoots will be curling along the trellis wires. Last year’s wine – like a brilliant child – will be lying safely on its lees, developing its own unique and beguiling aromas, and the first steps towards the end of lockdown will be in train.

It is now just a matter of time before we are once again mixing with friends and family, eating and drinking, dancing, travelling, celebrating or simply sitting rapt, once more, at theatres, in churches, at concerts.

And if proof were needed that from adversity comes new growth, look no further than the launch of ‘Glass Half Full’.

Led by Tristram Coates, ‘Glass Half Full’ is the re-incarnation of the sales and marketing team at Coates & Seely into a fully independent sales and marketing company. It is now dedicated not only to that function for Coates & Seely, but to that of a number of other exciting, high-growth drinks brands.

Conceived in lockdown and bolstered by the appointment of a further four talented partners, ‘Glass Half Full’ formally launches next Monday, January 18^th – otherwise known as ‘Blue Monday’, supposedly the most depressing day of the year – which, by dint of their infectious optimism and undeniable talents, will instead be turned into a day of celebration.

Proof that from adversity comes new growth.

www.ghfdrinks.com

A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OUR FRIENDS OF COATES & SEELY!

A Vineyard Diary Part 14

This Christmas, as we retreat into our bubbles, we should treat ourselves to some bubbles.

Vineyards and Coronavirus

The story so far: No sooner do we exit a month of lockdown than over half the country is cast back there and we are each consigned to our Christmas bubble…

‘Bubble’.

It’s a curious word.

We share it with the Swedish ‘bubbla’, the Danish and Norwegian ‘boble’ and the Dutch ‘bubbel’.

It first entered Middle English as a ‘burble’, but eventually popped up – as burbles tend to do – in modern English as a ‘bubble’ (in ‘As You Like It’).

Cast as an image of hollowness, and then later of ephemerality and later still of excess (viz the ‘South Sea Bubble’), the hapless bubble has nevertheless also had its admirers along the way.

Remember Keats’ intoxicating ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’? Or Shelley’s ‘bubbles on a river sparkling, bursting, borne away’?

Each an image of joy and fragility.

And in Cockney, a ‘bubble’ means a ‘laugh’ (rhyming, as it does, with ‘bubble bath’).

Today the bubble’s imagery has once again – dare we even say it – mutated, and we now all find ourselves, irritatingly, stuck in one.

To a greater or lesser extent we probably always have been (stuck in one), but this is surely the first time we have been ordered there by decree?

Let us hope such grotesque legal overreach is itself a mere bubble – here today, gone tomorrow – to be pricked by the immunising needle of modern science.

Of course we are, at Coates & Seely, purveyors of bubbles ourselves, and over the years have developed our own observations on the subject.

Bubbles, we have observed, are best consumed.

Not chased, or pricked, or invested in, still less retreated into.

They should be consumed: ideally, in extremely generous quantities of tiny, eddying spirals that tease the palate with a natural and spontaneous thrill.

Consumption should be frequent, too, so that the bubbles’ natural evanescence is counter-balanced with regular replenishment.

This is very good for the spirit (and for Coates & Seely sales).

Our forbears discovered this long ago and we have happily maintained their tradition.

We drink, in this country, twice as much Champagne as our American cousins, with only one quarter of the population. That is eight times more Champagne than the average American.

It makes you proud to be British.

So this Christmas, as we retreat into our bubbles – lamenting, as well we might, our loss of traditional freedoms – we should know that not all our national traditions have died.

We should treat ourselves to some bubbles.

They will raise the spirit.

Bubbles within Bubbles. There are worse ways, after all, to spend a pandemic…

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OUR FRIENDS OF COATES & SEELY!

A Vineyard Diary Part 13

To ease our clients through further pandemic chaos Coates & Seely are curating a hamper of Christmas food and goods from local Hampshire producers.

Vineyards and Coronavirus

The story so far: after a small but perfect harvest, pandemic chaos strikes again and we enter another lockdown…

Lockdown strikes again and we have re-occupied our positions on Albion – the perfect socially-distanced pandemic-proof office.

It’s sometimes a little nippy, but nothing that long-johns and a hint of vintage fur can’t cope with.

Sales have flat-lined once more as our wonderful clients – hotels, restaurants, pubs and events companies – struggle themselves to deal with the devastation that lockdown creates for them.

We are truly all in this together…

Meanwhile, one of our corporate customers has placed an order for bottles of Coates & Seely to be sent to their clients and has asked us to curate a Christmas hamper of locally produced food and goods around them.

The variety and quality of the produce we have on our doorstep in Hampshire (with the occasional foray into Somerset) is astonishing.

From hand-made Christmas puddings, dressed in calico, made to an original nineteenth century family recipe (Plum Duff & Stuff), to mince pies with home-made mincemeat of pear, walnut and brandy, and delicate sweet pastry (Mrs B’s Kitchen); from Christmas pudding flavoured fudge that literally melts in the mouth (it melts hearts, too) (Marsden’s Confectionery), to chilli, sweet and smoked flavoured almonds and cashews for your Christmas day ‘quarantinis’ (Cambrook Extraordinary Nuts) and mature cheddars made from an ancient recipe and a single family herd of 320 organic dairy cows (Godminster).

And, whilst not exactly edible, you will probably be tempted to eat, when you first experience their delicious scent, Mariana’s home-made soaps of lavender, lemongrass and sweet orange, hand-wrapped by Mariana herself and which, like your bath, will provide the perfect ending to even the most trying of days.

What each of these – and the many other local producers we work with – all share is an artisanal approach to production, using the highest quality craftsmanship, the best and most ethically sourced ingredients, recyclable packaging and rurally-based production facilities, within a family environment.

The artisans are the great sanctuary of quality, the family the last stronghold of happiness. When they disappear, and the big brands take over, all will be lost.

If you are interested in any of these products, or in our Christmas hamper, do please click on the above links or respond directly to us if you’d like to order any of our sparkling wines which will produce the fizz and the sparkle we must all surely deserve after the trials of this rather extraordinary year!

A Vineyard Diary Part 12

There is a genius in these English chalk soils that produces Champagne varietals – Chardonnay and Pinot Noir – of great quality, which even pandemics and late-spring frosts can’t affect.

Vineyards and Coronavirus

The story so far: after late spring frosts, record levels of rainfall and a resurgent pandemic, how will the harvest be affected?

Chardonnay Harvest 2020 at Coates & Seely — Chardonnay Harvest 2020

The harvest is finally in.

Neither the coldest late-spring frost in decades (Diary Entry 4), nor the wettest day ever recorded in the UK (October 2, mid-harvest) – nor even a global pandemic – have managed to affect the quality of the fruit.

The harvest this year might be very small, but it’s undeniably beautiful.

A vintage year, despite it all…

This afternoon, with all the fruit now picked, I stood on the hill overlooking the vineyards.

They lie in the quiet, wooded hills between the clear chalk stream of the River Test that flows along the valley floor to the south and the high chalk ridge of Watership Down to the north, in a secluded v-shaped valley.

They are a winemaker’s dream, where chalk soils and clay caps disgorge rugged flints that help retain the heat of the sun, warming the top-soils; whilst in the late summer and early autumn the enclosed valley helps trap the last of the season’s heat to ripen the grapes.

C&S Pinot Noir Vineyard Harvest 2020 — Coates & Seely Pinot Noir vineyard during Harvest 2020

The fruit that then emerges contains the perfect balance of crisp acidity and sweetness, as well as the saline minerality, that lie at the heart of all great sparkling wine.

There is a genius in these English chalk soils that produces Champagne varietals – Chardonnay and Pinot Noir – of great quality, which even pandemics and late-spring frosts can’t affect.

People still express surprise when I say this, but why shouldn’t it be so?

It was as recently as 1830 that a Mr Cox, from Buckinghamshire, planted an English apple tree called an Orange Pippin. It was an experiment. Today, Cox’s Orange Pippin – with its razor-crisp flesh, beguiling sugars and thrilling acidity – is an apple unsurpassed anywhere in the world!

And so it is proving with English, chalk-grown grapes for sparkling wine. Just look at where the Champenois are now beginning to plant.

Chardonnay grapes C&S Harvest 2020 — Coates & Seely Chardonnay grapes

As I turn my back to the vineyards to head home, my phone pings.

Trade talks with the EU have been abandoned.

I feel a sadness, after all we have been through together, that we can’t even agree our trading arrangements.

After all, ten thousand years ago you could still have walked – just – from where I am standing, overlooking the vineyards, all the way to the region of Champagne, before the ice-melt of the last glacial period finally severed the last remaining land connection to the rest of the European continent, setting us off on our long island story.

Geologically speaking we are at least first cousins.

We share, too, the same long hinterland of triumphs and endeavour and sacrifice, same side or not.

So whatever the final outcome, we shall continue to work with our continental friends, to learn from their craftsmanship, to enjoy our differences and to sell them our wines.

It will take more than politics to prevent that.

As it takes more than frost, or a pandemic, to degrade our wines.

A Vineyard Diary Part 11

Virginia Coates, Head of Events demonstrates local and seasonal food pairing with English sparkling wine from Coates & Seely.

Vineyards and Coronavirus

The story so far: life begins to return to something closer to normality, with the hospitality sector having taken the first early steps towards re-opening, (although crowd-related ‘events’ remain prohibited). Meanwhile, we have completed the first curated tours of Coates & Seely on ‘Albion’, our 1952 vintage coach…

In addition to a curated guide of the vineyards and winery, with transport provided by ‘Albion’, our tour-guests are also treated to food matching – with canapés made from our own ingredients or those of our neighbours – followed by lunch outside under Indian Mughal tents.

Virginia’s culinary skills at this point play a leading role, proving that the chalk soils of North Hampshire not only provide outstanding fruit for the production of English sparkling wine, but also the perfect ingredients for food pairings with our wines.

Food pairing with English Sparkling Wine

England has no food and wine ’vernacular’, in the way that French or Italian wine regions, for instance, have developed – sometimes over centuries – local food dishes that perfectly match the local wines, but we have made an exciting start at Coates & Seely, knowing that no wine is ever entirely complete without matching food and the deep pleasure of accompanying friendship.

Here is Virginia at work.