The English Wine Diaries
The English Wine Diaries is a weekly interview series with Rebecca Pitcairn, editor, journalist and founder of The Southern Quarter, an online lifestyle magazine about English Wine. Each week Rebecca is joined by a special guest from the world of wine (and beyond) to talk all about their English wine journey. From sommeliers to vineyard owners, hoteliers and some rather familiar faces too, discover how a love of wine – particularly that made on British soil – has helped shape their lives and careers. www.englishwinediaries.co.uk.
The English Wine Diaries
Episode 62: Jimmy Smith - Beare Green Winery & Wine With Jimmy
Joining me on this week's episode of The English Wine Diaries is wine educator and winemaker, Jimmy Smith.
Jimmy has worked in the wine industry for over 20 years. Having started his career in wine buying, he founded West London Wine School, one of the UK's leading wine, spirit and beer education facilities, in 2010, and in 2020 started online wine education tool Wine with Jimmy.
The school has won multiple awards over the years, including Consumer Educator of the Year at the International Wine Challenge in 2023.
Jimmy has more recently turned his hand to winemaking and, together with business partner and wife, Bethany Paterson, and fellow winemaker Sam Hill, set up Beare Green Winery in the Surrey Hills.
The winery crafts small batch wines made of grapes sourced from exceptional vineyards within the south of England and focuses on natural yeast fermentation, minimal intervention, innovation and creativity.
We talk about where Jimmy's passion for wine originated, how Beare Green Winery has given he and and Sam the vehicle to experiment with different grapes and techniques and the wine regions that have influenced their winemaking style.
To find out more about the latest wines from Beare Green Winery visit bearegreenwinery.com or follow Jimmy @winewithjimmy on Instagram.
This episode of The English Wine Diaries is sponsored by Wickhams, The Great British Wine Merchant. Visit wickhamwine.co.uk to see their award-winning range of English wine with free deliver on orders over £40. The English Wine Diaries listeners can also get 10% discount on their first purchase by entering the code TEWD10.
Thanks for listening to The English Wine Diaries. If you enjoyed the podcast then please leave a rating or review, it helps boost our ratings and makes it easier for other people to find us. To find out who will be joining me next on the English Wine Diaries, follow @theenglishwinediaries on Instagram and for more regular English wine news and reviews, sign up to our newsletter at englishwinediaries.com.
Hello and welcome to season 9 of the English Wine Diaries podcast. I hope you've had a great start to the year and are ready to get stuck into more stories from the world of English wine.
I'm your host Rebecca Pitkan, journalist and founder of the Southern Quarter, an online magazine all about English wine. Join me as I sit down with a special guest and talk all about their English wine journey.
From sommeliers to vineyard owners, hoteliers and some rather familiar faces too. Discover how a love of wine, particularly that made on British soil, has helped shape their lives and careers.
Welcome to the English Wine Diaries. The English Wine Diaries is kindly sponsored by Wickham's,
the Great British Wine. a chesula from Sussex.
Wickham's has a huge portfolio of English wines and has won awards for its collections. So whether you're after one of Britain's well -known favourites or want to try something a little off -piste,
check out wickhamwines .co .uk. And listeners of the English wine diaries get 10 % off their first order by entering the code TEWD10 at checkout.
That's TE... T E W D 10. Joining me on today's episode of the English Wine Diaries is wine educator and wine maker Jimmy Smith.
Jimmy has worked in the wine industry for over 20 years. Having started his career in wine buying, he founded West London Wine School, one of the UK's leading wine spirit and beer education facilities in 2010,
and in 2020 started online wine education tool Wine with Jimmy. The schools have won multiple awards over the years, including Consumer Educator of the Year at the International Wine Challenge in 2023.
Over the last few years, Jimmy has turned his hand to winemaking, and together with business partner Bethany Patterson and fellow winemaker Sam Hill set up bare green winery in the Surrey Hills.
The winery crafts small batch wines made of grapes sourced from exceptional vineyards within the south of England and focuses on natural yeast fermentation, minimal intervention, innovation and creativity.
Jimmy, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you? Hi, I'm Tickety Boo, thank you so much for having me. me. So can we go all the way back? Tell me about growing up. Was there wine on the table?
And how did you come to have a career in wine? Well, let's go all the way back. Yeah, it's an interesting starting point for me, actually, because I come from a family that was teetotal.
Well, the parents were teetotal, so there was no alcohol, nothing religious, nothing to do with a kind of want or need. It was just purely that my parents didn't drink alcohol.
It would be a classic, probably a small glass of something once a year around Christmas time or something like that. But I had three elder brothers who were very much keen on alcohol,
mainly beers and spirits, and that's how I got the segue into wine. wine because one of my elder brothers was working in a wine shop in my local town. He went off to university and I got to know the team there.
And I started working there. I should probably be legal about this. At the age of 18, I started working there. But yeah, that's how it began.
And I did my WSET qualifications. When I was 18, I passed my 11th grade. three. And then went up from there. I went to university doing geology geography and that ties in quite nicely.
And I came back, did my diploma and yeah, started getting into the wine industry in London. - So did you do that degree knowing that you wanted to pursue a quick career in wine?
- That's another really interesting question. My parents, I make a degree in wine industry. them sound that they're not really right for me in some way, shape or form, because they were T -Total, but also they had a grand ambition for me to be an engineer in the Royal Navy.
So they pushed me, kind of convinced me when I was young, you know, when you're a child, you have no idea really what you want to do. And they were like, well, your eldest brother is really successful.
So why don't you... follow in his footsteps?" So they convinced me to do things like physics and maths at school, and I really didn't enjoy it.
But I then went into Newcastle University doing mechanical engineering, and I was dreading it, absolutely dreading it. But on day two,
so the day after the first night of the pressures, I went to the geography department and said, look, I'm really keen to change. Is it possible?
And to my surprise, they were like, well, yes, we do actually have an opening up in the geography course. And I was like, okay. And in my mind, my mind is sort of flooded with,
well, what about the UCAS system? Am I cheating the UCAS system? And in happened, I had an interview, and in that interview with my, to be a shooter,
he asked me, you know, about my interests. And I said, wine, he was kind of a wine fanatic, and it all went from there. He said, yeah, I don't see why you can't come on board. So I didn't get the grades to go to Newcastle for geography,
but I kind of slightly bypassed it. My parents found out about three or four four months later and that was an interesting visit from them, but needless to say,
it's all kind of water under the bridge now, all best friends. - And it's all worked itself out, the stars aligned. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's really, you know, when you have these conversations with people and you talk about those kind of seminal butterfly effect moments,
right, where the decision is made and it absolutely, it's all, it's all, it's all. changes the trajectory of your life. And that was that night out. I had that first night out in Newcastle, made a load of friends who were friends for life.
And one of them said to me, he said, "You should go and see if you could just get into the geography department." And I was like, "Really?" And obviously it had, I probably didn't say it like that. I was probably slurring my words or something.
But yeah, I would always remember that. It kind of changed everything for me. Otherwise, I'd probably would have had a go at the Royal Navy and dropped out and floated around a bit, but yeah,
it all changed from that moment in time. - And you finished university and did your diploma. Again, then, did you have any idea of what you want to do? Obviously, did you do your diploma because you were thinking,
right, that's me, I'm going into wine, that's what I'm gonna do? Or was it, I say just a bit of fun, anybody, I haven't yet done the diploma, but I understand that. it Incredibly, I'm waiting until my kids are a little bit older. I think and I can manage it But yeah,
was that something that you did sort of, you know for fun hobby or was it actually know? This is it now. I'm I'm headed for a career wine. Well, that's at university when I was in Newcastle.
I was still keeping my wine studies up remembering that I've done my level three just before in my year out and And I worked in a wine shop up there.
So I kind of kept it going. And it's actually the company that I've worked for previously, which was Thresher Group, which owned Wine Rack. So I was a part of that old,
old firm. And yeah, so I continue to work for them. And then at the end of university, I kept in contact with some of the sort of regional managers and so on. And they were doing they were opening new branches in London.
So I moved to London straight after university. They pay for my diploma. So I did buy diploma and I opened up a number of new shops with Oz Park. So we went around opening these shops up and it started from there.
And I started managing one of them in West London. But quickly they sort of noted that I was quite good at talking about wine in London. front of people and this is coming from somebody back then I was really nervous and anxious standing in front of people talking about anything else,
but with wine it was fine so I became a tutor for the thresher group at the age of 20, I think it was 23, 24. Then they went bust,
which was one of the big sort of breakdowns because of the credit crunch. 2007, 2007, 2008, they went bust. And I decided to set up my own wine school at that point,
with a bit of help, because I had no money, and I had a bit of help from a friend who, on another, actually, this is a recurring theme. I was having some beers again. And he,
as I said, I really would love to get a bit of money to start the wine school. And I asked him, and I sort of indirect costs that you've got a friend who's a venture capitalist, which you put up a meeting for me.
And he just turned around and went and he's one of my best friends still to this to this day, he goes, you don't need to ask him, ask me. And I was like, can I have some money? And he was like,
of course. So it all started from there. And I said at West London Wine School, which was a the first franchise in the first few years. franchises of the local wine school network.
And yeah, put my heart and soul into that school for 10 years, pretty much leading it on my own, but then it grew and grew. So people would come into the fold,
new tutors and marketing and administration. And my wife joined the fold as well. That's Bethany who you mentioned. So she started to do the sort of strategic management of West London Wine School.
Yeah, and then we grew the school up to the largest provider of WSTT in the UK outside of WSTT. And yeah, we set up the wine bar,
which is Stretton Winehouse in 2016, because we lived in Stretton. For us, we moved to the and there was nowhere to drink wine in 2014,
15. And we both said to each other, probably over some beers again, it seems to be very frequent for me. We both said to each other, if nobody,
if no one comes in here and sets up a wine bar on the UK's longest high street in Stratum, Stratum High Road, then we'll do it. And of course, no one did. And then we set up the wine bar in 2016,
and then also had the opportunity to purchase South London Wine School. So that was around the same time. We also got married that year as well. Wow, a lot going on. And bought a house.
It was a big old year, 2016. And actually, was that the year that we, Brexit happened as well, wasn't it? My God, that was a, that wasn't, that was a stonker. All over the place that year.
Yeah. And then, and then we move into sort of more modern times when I, we came to the lockdown. So we had the three businesses at that point,
the two wine schools and the wine bar. We had to, you know, the word is pivot, isn't it? What happened? And it always reminds me of that Friends episode of Chandler and Russ with the second bit.
We had to pivot our businesses so that the bar became a shop and the schools went online. And the online was super successful because we were one of the first to start doing online education during that time.
Then 67 pound mile did the bottling kits and we went, oh, we can have a go at that and we still do that to this day, which is is really great. So, but one thing we noticed was that in 2020,
so those early dark days of lockdown, that people were crying out for online education. So we were offering that in the UK with the wine school, but I started putting a few videos out on YouTube about sort of WSET preparation and people were really liking them.
So our plan was to create studies for WSTT all the way to diploma.
So there's lots of written content and example questions and then a lot of exclusive video content that I film. You mentioned the diploma earlier that you've still got to do it.
I think we're now at, I filmed just over a thousand videos for the diploma and they're all about 10, 15, 20 minutes long to help people through all that content.
So the jump is 200 videos that I filmed for level three. to over a thousand for diplomas. That gives you an idea of the enormity, the kind of,
you know, the big step. It's like the Richter scale, you know, it really goes up in intensity. So, so yeah. And then that became so successful when it's become our main business that it's given us the capital to think about something new.
And that's where big Bergery Winery came into play in 2022. So during COVID lockdown, with all these new ideas going on, we just had our first baby,
so a little baby boy. He was born two months before COVID hit. So we decided that we needed space. We've got two dogs.
We're gonna obviously grow our family. We have a little girl. girl now as well. So we moved out to Surrey. We always were drawn around the sort of dorking and horseship area. And we found this beautiful place where I am.
Now it's got a nice bit of land to it. And the plan was to move into it with our family, use the agricultural land for a vineyard and use the buildings that we have here for a winery.
So we've done most of that. We haven't planted the vineyard yet just because of life. life. But it's forthcoming next year. But the winery we established in 2022. It's my wife and I.
And then we've gone into joint partnership with Sam. Sam is Sam Hill. He's a wonderful friend of mine. He's a tutor at the wine school.
He's a lot of the brains behind wine with Jimmy in terms of all the technical stuff. His trade trade is a research chemist and he studied at Plumpton College for winemaking. Once again,
it was probably wine this time though. We had some drinks one night. He was here with his lovely wife and we were like, we really want to make wine together. We have very aligned principles in wine styles and we talked in depth about it and I said,
look, we've got the land here, we've got the we've got some stables that have never been used for horses, but they're a wonderful looking building, you'll see it on our on our website. And we're like,
well, we can convert that to a winery. So we started very small in 2022, and have grown it this year in 2023. So yeah,
that brings us up to the winery, up to the winery. And we'll talk more about that in a second. What I want to do is go back ever so slightly and talk about sort of your introduction to English wine,
because obviously now you're making it. You would have been drinking wine and selling wine and discovering new wines and from regions all over the world and then telling people about it. But when did you sort of discover English wine?
When did it start to peak your interest in terms of how it could peak? become something in your future? Well, I think I suppose there's a couple of moments.
The initial moment would have been, this would have been probably early 2011, 2012,
maybe around that time when we start to see the emergence of, you know, chapel down and all those kind of names. And I've handled it and I think I've visited as well.
And I started to open my eyes up and that's really because of the wine school. People were asking for it and you start to see some English wines in supermarkets as well.
And I couldn't give you an exact moment in time or the exact wine. I did forge and still have an excellent relationship with the guys. guys at Gusbourne. So Charlie Holland,
I know he's jumped ship now, but good friends with Charlie and James White, who works there, and Laura as well. So I've always been quite close to them. I've always had their wines in my cellar.
So that's been for 10 years, I should think now. So started to really get into those wines, but I've never been a huge flag fly.
flier ambassador for sparkling wine. I love it. And if you give it to me, I'm going to enjoy it. But I'm not someone who goes out their way to go and study the masters of champagne,
for example, I'd rather go and do the masters of Burgundy and Rioja and whatever. So it's not something I continuously drink. So the market,
of course, the industry suddenly started to boom with all this sparkling wine. Of course, we produced today 2 /3, 70%, and it starts to dominate. And yes,
it's great. And we're trying these wonderful examples. But I think it was a few wines coming out of 2015 that I tried, mostly sort of whites, certainly Chardonnay from the likes of Gus Bourne,
and then the 2018 vintage for Reds that made me really, really think. long and hard about still wine production in England and the possibility of really great wines coming from our more Germanic influenced background with the likes of,
you know, Bacchus and Riekensteiner and all those, but also the Chardonnays and Pinots that started to get planted quite significantly. So it was a couple of really strong vintages.
the 2015, the 2018, and of course then coming into recent times, 2020 as well, the real strong examples of Pinot Noir. That's what made me realise,
along with Sam, that we don't want to make sparkling wine, we might do down the line, but there is real good potential for still wine in England. That's where the whole point of our clonal project.
has come to play, but I don't know if you want to talk about that now or... Yeah, no, we can. Yeah, continue. You're concentrating on two different ranges of wine,
and there's one that is, I would say, is a bit more of a serious side to it, and then another range where you can have a bit more fun with it. Do you want to talk about a word,
not to say... serious, I mean, it's geeky, let's call it geeky or nerdy. We have that range, which is called our clonal range. So that is where we've invested a lot of time and research.
And then our second range is our fun range, where we have a lot of experimentation we find there from all of my travels. I was, wine education,
I travel constantly and I'm talking constantly to winemakers at trade shows, at the wineries, you know, and I know a lot of people around the world now. So I feed off their energy and their creativity and their innovation and come up with these new ideas.
There might be some concepts that a lot of people are already quite used to things like skin contact, for example. But there are others. like we're doing for our Pinot Noir that we're integrating to really sort of change things up.
We don't make wine specifically to a template. We utilize proper practice, but we're very much willing to give ourselves the options to create something different and unique.
So that's the fun range. We called it the fun range because I was having a conversation with one of my other tutors and we hadn't really come up with a name for that range and I just said, "Yeah, it's just the fun stuff we make," and he goes,
"Just call it the fun range." I went, "Ah, yeah, that sounds great." So we have the fun range, which focuses for us right now on Bacchus, Pinot Gris, and Pinot Blanc,
and then we have our geeky nerdy range, which we call that clonal range, which is on Sharpen named Pinot Noir. So, that clonal range. the older vines,
and certainly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir with English wine making, taking inspiration from people like Richard Kershaw, who's the first master of wine down in South Africa.
He makes wine in Elgin, and he bottles by clone as well. And he's done a lot of seminars, a lot of public speaking about it. His research paper,
I think for his MW was on clones. So I took that inspiration. I was like, it's a fascinating concept because... because clones are developed over hundreds of years and over millennia.
And, you know, they are unique, sometimes minute mutations which change each genetically identical break variety, right? So you have hundreds of Chardonnays and you have hundreds of Pinot Noir.
And that really fascinates me because, yes, we can talk about how geology, climate, weather, aspect, aspect, the environment, and human influence can impact the style,
but clones is another one of those which can impact it, because you can see from different clones, different size of berries, different thickness of skins, different resistant properties, and that's really what fascinates us.
So the model that we came up with and how we've approached a number of vineyards, because we buy all of our fruit currently. The model is that sparkling wine clones versus still wine clones,
there is crossover, but they are different. And sparkling wine clones, generally you want that high acidity, and you want a fairly neutral base wine to then put it through the traditional method to go through yeast autolysis and so on.
Whereas still wine clones, you want clones that are going to give. you more structure, not necessarily the highest acidities because we have bucket loads of that in England, of course, but more body,
more structure, more fruit ripeness. And that's what we do. So we actually go to a lot of vineyards who we're working closely with and we say, look, this is the model that we come up with.
We will take some of the fruit. This is if they don't make still, by the way. We will take some of the fruit, which actually might be too powerful to structured for making a sparkling wine.
So we take that out of your production, we buy that fruit from you and as a result, they have the possibility of making an even better sparkling wine because they are identifying with our help the parts of their vineyards which make great still wine but not necessarily sparkling.
So we work with quite a few, we work with five. five vineyards with one of them making sparkling wine, but they supply most of our fruit. And we work with them super closely in the vineyard,
helping, of course, with spraying regimes, with green harvesting, but also identifying the plots that we take out of their vineyards because it makes brilliant still wine.
So it's a really, really good wine. model, which we are really looking to expand in the future, approaching more and more vineyards to sort of work with them because it's a win -win.
We get brilliant fruit for our still wine and they have the potential to make even better sparkling wine. So that's the clonal range. We are currently working with three clones of Chardonnay.
This is only our second vintage just happened. So three clones of Chardonnay. Chardonnay and two clones of Pinot Noir, but we are certainly looking to expand that to, I don't know, what we'll see.
We don't have a huge amount of space. And for this idea, you need a vat for every clone, right? So it's a little bit more complex,
but that's the clonal side of it. Our Chardonnay and Pinot from 2023 are currently currently maturing now, so the Chardonnays have finished their ferments.
They're on their gross leaves in vat proportion of it in barrel. The Pinot Noirs are the same. They're ready to go through mallow as it warms up, and we are tasting super differences between those,
even from the same sites when we've got different clones from different sites. So we're really excited about that because we will independently bottle those wines. So we'll have Chardonnay 121 clone,
Chardonnay 95 clone and Chardonnay 96. So you can then purchase those, taste through those to understand the differences. And then we'll use our skills for blending as well to make almost like a house blend for a Chardonnay.
- So that's our clonal. - Wow, it's fascinating. Going to the 2020. 2022 vintage, though, and those are the wines that you have available at the moment for people to purchase, and you very kindly sent me a bottle of your Pinot Blanc,
which I have here, and I have already tried it, but can you talk us through the sort of star, why you decided to go with Pinot Blanc, and yeah, just why we sort of really?
Sure. Yeah. So that was the clonal range. Then it brings me to the fun range of which we are experimenting a lot with. And in the first year, as you just mentioned, 2022, we only made two wines.
So we made one fun wine, which is the one you've got in your glass. And then we made one clonal wine, which is our clone 95. And in fact, I forgot to mention that vineyard. We worked with a small vineyard just north of Brighton as well in Falmer.
on the south -facing Chalks or to about 100 meters, and that's where we get a clone of 95 Plone Chardonnay,
which made our first ever Chardonnay, that's the 2022, and we get some Pinot Noir from there, but the Pinot Noir makes a rosé for us from that area. So yes,
we make the fun range. The first wine you've got in your glass is the Tripple Triple A Pinot Block. So the Triple A is fruit that we sourced from Crouch Valley,
from right off the river Crouch, from the Fleming vineyard. And we, we, what we wanted to do with this wine is not just make another English white wine.
We love English white wine, but we wanted to do something a little bit different from drawing from the influences that both Sam and I had had. So Sam, who I make the wine with,
has had two harvests in Alsace. And Alsace is certainly one of my favourite places in the world. And then Alto Adige is where I visit quite frequently and have helped harvest there as well.
So we both have influences from Alsace and Alto Adige. So... So what are those influences? Those influences are making pina blanc in that really saline way,
which is going to be quite natural coming from England, because we have such high acidities. But then also, not just treating it as a spring release wine,
maturing it throughout the year on lease to give it body and texture. So that's what we've done with this wine. It was wrapped off this grossly. leaves, but then batonaged and fine leaves age for about sort of 10 months,
roughly 10 months, which gives it body. So it smells very green and fresh and salty and saline. And it smells like it's going to be just a quite a delicate like wine.
But when you come to taste it, there is roundness and softness which comes from that idea. on on the finalese, giving it that that little bit of texture. So that that is our first sort of sort of attempt at our fun range.
We're really pleased with it. And the name comes from those influences. So it says AAA, the triple A means Alsace, Alto, Adige. So it is a kind of a homage to our our influences.
for what kind of style we're making. And the color splash you see on the front of it is the kind of fruits and florals that you'd expect to get in that wine.
And the labels are designed by a student of ours who's an excellent wine label designer, a guy called Miguel, and he's come up with that beautiful design that you see on that label.
So, hopefully, you're ready to go. it. Yeah, I mean, it's lovely. All those words you were saying, it's I mean, I think it has got a lively nose to it, though. It's not, you know, when you sort of say it looks when you look at you think,
okay, yeah, traditional kind of English still, it's gonna But yeah, it's got a really lovely lively nose, really fresh, lots of citrus, bit of apple.
I'm gonna I get a little bit of pear as well sort of tiny little bit. Yeah, and you know, it's a lovely, it's a nice level of acidity, but it's the minerality,
the salinity that I kind of, you get, but it's not, as you say, it's got the, the backup, I was like, the backbone behind it. Yeah, and that's exactly what we wanted.
We wanted to give a wine that has the topicity of an English white, it's going to have that, that acidic freshness and the acidities around six. six grams per litre in this, and then we wanted to give it a slightly counterbalance.
Now, in our first year of making wine, everything is very new, and we're very, Sam and I are very keen on experimenting with things like skin contact,
for example, but in this first year, we only had 500 litres of this Pinot Blanc, so we had very small amounts, and we didn't have the space,
the vats to do a bit of experiments with it. So we've made a traditional sort of English white, but we wanted to do the spin of an alpine edge to it, which gives it that kind of roundness.
So that's our step. But we quickly realised that actually, as that wine was aging, we were like, we want to give us the opportunity to have options to craft a wine that we really,
really, really love to do. And that's what we've done going into the 2023 vintage with the Bacchus and with the Pinagri that we have sourced from places like Totten,
like Peas Lake, and so on. So what we did this time is we got a a lot more, you know, we've got two full vats of Bacchus, we've got a full vat of Pinot Gris,
so that's a total of about 3 ,000 litres. And we also did a small pressing of both of those on skins. So we did a small vat of skins of Pinot Gris and Bacchus for seven days,
because neither samurai samurai are keen on putting it in wood for texture. We're not keen on putting either of those grapes through malolactic, because we want to protect the kind of backbone of the identity of each grape.
So where are we going to gain body from? Two places, skin contact with a small proportion of fruit, and then blending. So what we've come up with...
is our main white, which will be released in about sort of six to eight weeks, is a Pinot Gris Bacchus blend. So we've blended those two together.
We've tasted quite a few, really like what the guys are doing down at Kinsbrook with Joe, really interesting blends around similar sort of great mix. But also what we've done is into that blend added about 10 % of skin contact Pinot Gris.
which gives us weight, texture, body, all those names without using oak or lees contact or malo. So we have got this beautiful wine with a bit of body behind it,
a little bit of changed sort of fruit and flavour because you get a little bit more spice that comes through but the wine tastes fantastic. And it's our first time making personally us.
making skin contact as well. So the two individual vats of skin contact of Bacchus and Pinot Gris, those two small vats of skin contact of each of those grapes. Yes,
we're blending small proportions of those into our other, what we call our house whites, I suppose. But we've tasted them and we love them independently as wines.
So full on skin contact. peanut grief for seven days, full -on skin contact backers. We did a blending day here last week with a lot of my team across my businesses,
so a lot of educators, many of those guys have had experience in sort of winemaking and harvest and so on, and of course they taste wine for a living. So they all came down here,
there was a group of 12 of us, and we just listened to everybody as they talked through all of our wines. wines, straight from that. And then we discussed what people thought of them.
We had some consumers actually and we had some retailers in that group and we wanted to hear everybody's opinions and we had some wonderful validation because life is about validation, right?
I mean, we don't talk about it directly, but you're trying something new or you're trying something, can you? And putting your brand behind it and you're putting your passion behind it and it's nice to hear that people were just loving the wine.
So we're very confident in that and loving the skin contact, PinaGree, and we even have people loving the skin contact backers. So there's a debate now whether we're definitely making a skin contact PinaGree on its own.
That's tasting just out of this world. The backers. Bacchus, the difficulty with Bacchus is neither Sam or I would be necessarily massive flag flyers for Bacchus.
- Yeah, okay, I hear you. - Yeah, I mean, it's a good workhorse, great variety behind still wines in England. It gives England a point of difference.
It delivers a lot of very sort of aromatic character for what it is, and you know, and it's... it's a really interesting great but I wouldn't necessarily say most backers I can sit there and drink a bottle of it.
For me it's a one glass wine and not a bottle wine and and I like wine by the bottle not by the glass. So with with backers we we were very keen if we were going to take it on and we got offered some backers Sam and I were keen to do it in a different way,
which we would be proud to serve to people. You'll get this from anybody who's making wine, of course, but we said, look, we're not going to put it in barrel.
Quite a few people in the UK put backers in barrel or put it through lease contact. We're not doing any of that. We've got skin contact, and the plan was to use that proportion of skin contact,
which is about 20 % of the volume. of the back as we have and blend it fully in to give it that body. But we've now got a debate because some of the people on that focus blending day that we did were absolutely loving the standalone skin contact back us on its own.
And one of them is a good friend of mine who's a retailer, owns a number of wine shops. And he said, "Jimmy, if you bought that up, I'll buy most of it off." I was just like, "Don't tell me that! That's another thing I'm going to think about.
So we've got some decisions. So we've pretty much made the decisions, but there are decisions to be made. So we're really happy of how our Bacchus is coming out.
It's going to have the aromatic that you expect from Bacchus, but have much, it's not as intense. It's a little bit more muted, which is very important for Sam and I. And then the body on it is going to be weighted because it has that 20 % skin,
skins behind it. So we're very keen on that, that's coming out, that's going to be really fun wine. The Bacchus, we've got the P -degree Bacchus blend, which has a proportion of P -degree skins in it as well.
Really, really delighted about how that's coming out. Then the P -degree full -on skin contact on its own, and then we have some rosease as well. which is part of the fun range too.
You'll notice there's quite a lot of wines coming out in spring. There's going to be two wines in the first year, and our spring release, there'll be another seven. And then in autumn will be when our Chardonnay's and Pido's come out,
and there'll be another seven, I think, coming out then. But the Rose, we were kind of forced into it. We bought some fruit from a vineyard that we bought the previous year.
Really good quality in 2022. But the Pinot Noir came in slightly underripe, you know, a bit translucent. And we tasted a lot of the fruit and Sam and I just looked at each and said,
we can't make Pinot from this, but let's try and make a Rose. We've never had the desire to make a Rose. It's not on our immediate plan,
but as a winemaker, you've got to be reactive and you've got to deal with your materials. You've got to make commercial decisions, don't you? Yeah, exactly.
And we were like, let's make a Rose, but let's give ourselves options. And you'll notice, I keep saying this, because we're not just fermenting backers and sticking it in the stainless steel vat and dealing with all that throughout the year,
right? And what we're doing is making different vats, some of it's skin contact and so on. Some of our Chardonnay's in barrel, some's not. And then what we're able to do is taste that and come up with the perfect wine.
It's about giving yourselves the option. Not many people have this possibility because they don't have the amount of vats we have. We're a second year winery and we've got 14 vats and we've got 14 vats. We've got quite a few and it's going to only expand and it gives ourselves the option.
We do that with the rosé. So the rosé for me, so it's Pinot Noir, it was supposedly destined to make a red for us, but it came in a little bit translucent and we were like,
okay, we're going to make a rosé. But it's Pinot Noir and the real why not many people make a rosé out of Pinot Noir is because commercially it doesn't make sense because if you market a red wine from Pinot Noir,
you charge more. If you make a rosé, of course, you have to charge less. And people, you know, you might not sell it, and that's a big issue.
But I went to Oregon in 2022, in summer 2022. and they actually are probably, along with Burgundy, probably the country in the world that makes quite a significant amount of rosé out of Pinot Noir.
And I was tasting Pinot Noir rosé after Pinot Noir rosé from all across the Willamette Valley, and I was like, wow, this is really lovely. And then they take it a bit of a hit to make this this this rosé,
but that gave me quite a you know coming into winemaking with some Pinot Noir I was like if I'm going to make a rosé in England out of a black grape I'm happy that I'm making it from Pinot Noir so what we've done is we've made three three types of Pinot Noir to give ourselves the options.
One thing I was going to ask is you talk a lot about you and Sam being very aligned um have there been any sort of points of difference or or perhaps from a wider point the sort of challenges that you faced over the last few years?
I mean, I'm a strong character. I'm very talkative and Sam's a bit more of a reserve character. So in terms of how we interact,
there's definitely like roles in it. There's my role and his role, but we interact so well and his through winemaking and through teaching that he does his confidence with wine is just sky -high.
He's fantastic at what he does. And I suppose I talk a lot. You know, he is he has chemistry background. So he's scientifically so in tune with what's going on.
Whereas I'm probably more the romantic and the emotive. I understand it all. And I do it all. But I travel a lot. I speak to a lot of people who don't know me. And I do it all. But I travel a lot. I speak to a lot of people who don't know me. And I do it all. me. And I do it all. But I travel a lot. I speak to a lot of I speak to a lot of people who don't know me. And I do it all. of Weimeggers.
In fact, there's a little funny thing that Sam always says that he knows when I'm traveling. If he's forgotten, he'll know because his phone will go off and then he'll suddenly remember that I'm somewhere.
He goes, "Jimmy, where are you?" And I'm like, "South Africa." And he's goes, "Tell me what you've learned "and what we're gonna be doing." And it might be like with our Pinot Noir, I learned a really interesting technique.
of drying the stems. So there's a great producer out in South Africa, good friend of mine, and he told me, so he's made sanzo,
this really gorgeous sanzo. As you probably know with sanzo, sanzo is normally very light, delicate, but he's got great, lovely structure, fine, delicate, grainy structure. And I was just like,
how the hell do you get that in sanzo? Did you, what are you? blending into this?" He goes, "I'm not blending anything." What he does is de -stem it all, about 20 % of the stems he then dries in the sun for about a day,
and then he reintroduces those back into the ferment to add a finely grained texture from those stems. So that's what we've adopted here for our Pino. We can't do it in the sun in October. Generally,
it's not that strong. So what we do is we de -stem our Pino. We take about 5 % not scared about those sort of things and it comes from our relationship,
right? The two vats of Pino we have, we have a triple seven and a one one four and we were just a little bit anxious that the one one four was a little bit too delicate and we could just do with a bit more body.
And I turned to him and I said, well, why not try a bit of repasso? And he was like, and what I meant by that is take a little bit of the skins out of the triple seven, they're both fomency.
fermenting by the way, and add them to the 114 because the triple seven has a lot of structure, more tannic coming and much more color coming from its skins. And Sam's mind,
you can see it working and he goes, yeah, that's, you know, he's going through the science. He goes, yeah, this is fine. So we, we introduced a few of the stems in, sorry, some of the skins into the 114. So it's like a little bit of a rapasso method,
just to give a little bit more body behind that, which we were very keen on. So those kind of things, I learn a lot from the world of wine and he puts it to the practice and we introduce those kind of techniques.
It's the same with the Chardonnay and Gros Lees. Differences. So we're very much aligned. We love skin contact. We've worked a lot with different variations of skin contact.
Different vessels we have. clay pot here, which is a clave that we got from Genoa in Italy, which we're gonna be doing some of our Chardonnay in. So we're very aligned on those kind of principles.
But there are things that we talk about frequently and we have discussions about certainly like the rosé. When we were blending those rosés, Sam was purely focused on the rosé.
on the last one in barrel for three days, because it's gorgeous. But I was like, that's fine for you and me and a small proportion of other people, but there's going to be a wider market that need it.
And it's those kind of conversations that make, when there's two of you making wine together are so important, because you're able to ground your own bias or your own,
is when you're like, you can get in your own head right and just make wine for yourself, but you need to sort of put a little bit of a spin on that 'cause if you're making volume,
like we are starting to make now, we're gonna need to sell that volume, right? And it's, if you're just making wine for your own palette, it's not always gonna work, is it? So I would say we align most of the time,
but there are definitely discussions that we have quite frequently. - We do a few quickfire questions. The wine that has surprised you the most? - I'd say it would be Georgian wine because it changed my perception of orange and skin contact wine and really maybe think about tradition,
an old school wine making techniques, clay pots, things like that. So it will be that. - Favorite. Favorite food and wine combo? Favorite food and wine combo.
Do you know what, at the minute, and I did this last night, a proper English hot dog, right, but with American mustard, and by the way,
my wife, Bethany, I've mentioned a couple of times, she's American, so we often have the raging debate between beef versus pork. pork, hot dogs, and so on. But a proper British pork,
so bramley apple sausage with an orange wine, like last night I had it with a Rebula from Slovenia. And that kind of appellino and the pork character with the mustard goes really well with orange skin contact wine,
but proper one month skin contact wine as well. Bye for it. wine memory? One of the funniest and definitely one of my favorite is how we used,
this is a friend of mine who I used to go traveling a lot with, a guy called Matt Wicksteed, he's currently my chief wine buyer across my business. We were traveling in my vintage Volkswagen campervan,
so we have a 1971 Volkswagen campervan. campervan called Jeff. And we were in Burgundy, near Merceau, it was absolutely hammering it down.
And we, the sat nav, it was an old Tom Tom, if you can remember that. So this is kind of like, like 2008, 2009. And the Tom Tom was not great. It took us through the coat door.
We were going through this bit where it was a dirt road with with two vineyards and it was getting really boggy and camper vans are not great in those conditions. So we had to do a kind of a 50 point turn to get the car or the van around.
But as we were doing that, we started sliding down the slope. So my friend Matt had to get out of the camper van, hold up the camper van whilst I had it in reverse, but it wasn't working. We were slowly like every sort of five minutes an inch moving down and it was looking perilous.
But we just put a champagne, had loads of champagne in the back. So I decided, I was like, I got an idea. I emptied all of those whilst I put like a heavy bag on the reverse and Matt is holding it.
It's still hammering it down. - Right, yeah. - And we opened, I opened up all the boxes of champagne, used the cardboard as tracks behind the wheels. And you know what? - Well, it let it work,
we reversed up. and then we parked there and we decided to open one of the boxes of champagne and we sat there in the rain,
drenched drinking champagne overlooking Merceau. That's one of my funnest. What was the champagne? Champagne, I can't remember, I don't think it was about the champagne,
it was about the fact that we just dodged a bullet. bullet. Final question, Jimmy. If there was one wine that you couldn't live without, what would that be and why? One wine that I couldn't live without,
I'm not going to give you any cheesy answers like Bairgree, Bairgree winery wise. I think it might be Riesling. I always come back to Riesling and...
when it has some serious age behind it, it could be from Austria, it could be from Germany, it could be from Australia. There are some cracking examples that I just love the purity and the delicacy,
the length. It would probably be Reisling. But ask me on another day and it would be a different answer. Well Jimmy, thank you so much for talking us through your English wine.
journey. It's been a fantastic lesson and I'm good luck with the spring launches and the rest of Bear Green Winery's journey. It's been lovely to speak to you. Thank you very much. That was Jimmy Smith,
founder of West London Wine School, Wine with Jimmy and Bear Green Winery, which is situated on the Surrey /Sussex border and is very much pushing boundaries when it comes to the styles of wine we can can successfully produce here in England.
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the English Wine Diaries, kindly sponsored by Wickham Wines. If you enjoyed it, I'd love it if you'd like and subscribe and leave a rating as it helps other people find us.
You can catch up with more English wine news over on my Instagram, just search for "English Wine Diaries" and don't forget to tune in next week when I'll be back with a wine maker from the West Country.
Until then, cheers!