I visited my old friends Peter and Christine Hall at Breaky Bottom Vineyard in East Sussex on December 22nd. It had been a few months since we’d last seen each other – too long for friendship, in truth, so we decided to welcome the return of the light together. The winter solstice passed this year under starlight and over frost. Peter’s carp were, consequently, somnolent to the point of being comatose. Not so the avian gaggle around his clustered bird feeders. It was an aerial souk.

Breaky bottom vineyardOur friendship dates back to 1989. That was when I first drove up the long, pitted track which winds over the whale-backed downland to the vineyard. I made the journey another twelve times that year, writing a series of pieces called ‘The English Vineyard Year’ for Wine magazine. He had a house full of strong and beautiful children back then, and made still white wine from Müller-Thurgau and Seyval Blanc.

Now the children are gone (though the grandchildren drop round from time to time), and sparkling wines have replaced still. The Müller has been uprooted; Chardonnay and Pinot are replacing the Seyval. There have been huge setbacks along the way, including a harrowing flood which meant that Peter and Christine had to move into a caravan in the yard … for three years; snail infestations; assorting winery disasters; legal battles for compensation. I never thought I’d see Peter give up his hand-rolled cigarettes. Even those have gone. Every last wisp of Old Holborn.

He’s the same man, though. I’d brought a bottle of René Rostaing’s 1998 Côte Rôtie La Landonne to share over lunch (a stew of hare, shot with some reluctance by Peter’s son Toby – but it had developed a costly taste for vine shoots…). Those who know the label may remember that there is a quotation on it: “Ce vin de Viennois à odeur de violette …” ascribed to Pliny the Younger. Peter read it, and pounced:

Peter Hall: He’d make a fine Duke Orsino – and half the lines consigned to heart these 50 years …"If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."

Success is a strange phenomenon, as chancy as everything else in life. Some have too much; far more, not enough. For some it comes too early; for others, too late. For most of the time I have known Peter, sales have been a struggle, harder than the wine itself deserved. Now the tide has turned: sales are brisk. The wine isn’t quite on allocation yet, but if 2008 is as short a harvest as 2007 has been, it may be.

That success has been partly based, of course, on the switch to sparkling-wine production. (Non UK-readers may be surprised to learn that the Champenois are scouting Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire for potential vineyard land, but they are: Stephen Skelton MW recently showed Frédéric Rouzaud of Roederer around, and Steven Spurrier is perpetually on the verge of going into partnership with “a Champagne house” in order to plant his Dorset garden.) Breaky Bottom sparkling wine is very good indeed; Peter’s vineyard is planted on the purest chalk, in contrast to some of the other pace-setters, and the intrinsic vineyard style – which Peter often referred to as being rather severe and ‘military’ in its youth, needing the softening attentions of age – is perfect for sparkling wine base.

Setting about the birdBut some tide of fashion has also changed, and drinking English wine is now viewed as the choice of canny insiders rather than the insanely patriotic. People want to serve it rather than feeling that they ought to serve it. They enjoy it rather than joke about enduring it.

Wonderful – but when I think back to the beautifully silvery still wines Peter made in 1990, wines utterly different to anything you will find in the Loire valley or Germany, wines with a hedgerow poise, freshness and delicacy every bit as uniquely English as ‘The Enigma Variations’ or ‘Abraham and Isaac’, it seems to me a shame that we had to wait so long for public estimation to catch up with what we both knew all along.

Want to know more? Visit the Breaky Bottom website: http://www.breakybottom.co.uk/