Recording interviews for the Food Program of July 27th/28th has given me a chance to visit some old friends as well as new estates on the English sparkling wine scene.

Sales are booming at Breaky Bottom; Ridgeview is expanding fast (Mike Roberts is aiming for a quarter of a million bottles annually by 2010); Plumpton College is going from strength to strength. (Wine grapes at £2,000 a tonne, according to Plumpton's head of wine studies Chris Foss, are now a very attractive crop for anyone with the right land.) And I finally caught up with what the irrepressible Dermot Sugrue is up to at Wiston Estate.

Cotes de Sussex at Wiston

First, though, a bit of background. Wiston House, remodelled in the C19 but with a C16 core, is an imposing country mansion with a pretty little church beside it, and the Wiston Estate occupies 6,000 acres of prime chalk downland in West Sussex. Yet … it’s not on the map. Odd.

Putting jaw jaw into practice Those hunting it will find a discreet left turn off a typically dangerous West Sussex A-road (the A283). We followed the drive to … some very heavy security barriers. We got through, eventually. You might be able to gatecrash if you arrived in a tank, but nothing any smaller would do the trick. What’s going on?

The answer goes back, improbably enough, to the ruins of Dresden, the horror of the Nazi concentration camps, and Mussolini’s corpse swinging from an Esso garage forecourt in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. The ‘Wilton Park Conferences’ were a Churchillian initiative, supported by Ernest Bevin, to discuss European policy and the building of durable democracies in Europe, and especially in Germany. Initially (from 12.1.1946) they took place at C18 country house called Wilton Park, near Beaconsfield: a posh POW camp during and after the Second World War for the significant and the influential. I quote from www.wiltonpark.org.uk:

"From 1946-8, more than 4,000 German POWs discussed democratic processes with visiting British intellectuals and political figures such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the social reformer Lord William Beveridge, and Lady Astor, the first female Member of Parliament. ... The atmosphere was more that of an English residential university college than a prison. Prisoners, all volunteers, were free to travel outside the perimeters. ‘Any prisoner could escape if he wished, but none do so, or wish to do so’ wrote the Editor of the New Statesman magazine, Kingsley Martin, in an article in April 1946 on what he called the ‘Prisoners' University.’ He concluded: ‘Wilton Park is discovering the nucleus of what may become a new democratic Germany.’"

The last of the POWs left in 1948 – to begin to help build the Germany we know today. At that point, it came under the Foreign Office wing, acquired civilian status, and began to broaden its focus. Wilton Park left Buckinghamshire in 1950 (the building no longer exists) – and moved, with the change of only one letter out of six, to Wiston House, where it remains to this day. From 1957, it was opened to all members of the OECD, and now hosts around 60 key conferences a year. This was one of several locations where the ANC met the National Party prior to the ending of apartheid; much of the talking that has led to growing peace and stability in the Balkans happened here.

Which explains why it isn’t on the map, and why security is strangely high for a Sussex country pile.

The estate, by contrast, belongs to the Goring family. (They lived in the house until 1926, then it was privately leased until World War Two, at which point it became the HQ for Canadian forces prior to the D-Day landings. It then briefly became a girls’ school before Wilton Park moved in in 1951.) After some years watching the rise of English sparkling wine, and hearing about the desirability of chalk downland, Harry and Pip Goring have decided to produce some themselves – and Dermot’s the boy to do it for them.

Dermot's the boyI first met Dermot at Nyetimber, when he was winemaker there under songwriter Andy Hill, who bought the house and land from the legendarily industrious Chicagoans, Stuart and Sandy Moss. The arrival of present owner Eric Hereema at Nyetimber seemed to be followed by almost everyone who worked there leaving, which I was sad about: every vineyard needs a memory.

Dermot, though, has a habit of falling on his feet (he got the Nyetimber job before he’d even finished his Plumpton course). The 6.5 ha spread of vineyard (Champagne varieties, of course: 55% Chardonnay, 35% Pinot Noir and 10% Pinot Meunier) which Stephen Skelton has planted in the Findon Park sector of the estate looks magnificent … and Dermot tells me he has found an even better terroir on the estate, an amphitheatre known to the estate workers as ‘the bowl’, which he is busy trying to persuade Harry Goring to let him plant.

It was, though, when we got to the winery-to-be that Dermot rocketed in my estimation. It’s a semi-suicidal swerve off another horrifically busy road (the A 24). I’ve rarely walked into a grimmer building. Its two floors of agro-industrial decay look like the setting for the denouement of a particularly sadistic thriller. Dermot’s brother is in the building trade, and he described what Dermot is planning to do there as “polishing a turd”. What’s more, the karma is terrible: it was an old killing shed for turkeys. It has a huge electrical supply, and a huge boiler: the hapless birds, apparently, were chucked into hot, electrically charged water, which not only put an end to their existence but made all their feathers fall out at the same time.

But if anyone can redeem all of that, Dermot’s the boy. It was as if we were looking at different buildings. My spirits were falling faster than a Hebridean barometer in November; he was pacing enthusiastically about, pointing out where the tanks would go, showing me the tasting area and guest facility, and above all, introducing me to the new lady in his life (metaphorically, of course: he’s about to get married): a traditional Coquard press, as used traditionally in Champagne. I couldn’t see beyond the physical facts and emotional significance of the past; all he could see was the future.

Now that's what I call a coquard(Dermot, by the way, claims that his Coquard is the first in the UK. True, in that his is the first example of the traditionally designed ones in the UK. But progress never stops, and there now exists a fully mechanised Coquard: it looks like a big box within which angled pressing plates crush the grapes laterally rather than vertically. Underneath it has ready-made plastic dividers for the different portions of juice. Guess what? Mike Roberts has got one of those at Ridgeview. Cost a mere 90,000 euros.)

Bottles of Wiston Estate are still the best part of a decade away, but I’m looking forward to them already. Remember, when you eventually come across one, that the happiness every bottle brings will help restore the disequilibrium in the universe caused by unredeemed turkey misery. And it may be great sparkling wine, too …

By the way, Professor Richard Selley has just published a revised edition of his book The Winelands of Britain. Richard is a geologist of great distinction from London University's Imperial College, and I thoroughly recommend this book not only to those who might be interested in viticulture in the UK but to anyone who wants to learn more about the mechanisms of terroir more generally. He's a geologist with a sense of humour, too, so look out for the teasing asides. Find out more (and if you wish buy a copy) via www.winelandsofbritain.co.uk.