Episode 69: Alex James - Blur bassist, cheesemaker and Britpop drinks founder

Joining me on today’s episode of The English Wine Diaries is none other than Blur bassist, Alex James.

Blur formed in 1988 and their nine studio albums have all topped the charts in the UK, generating numerous hit singles along the way including Song 2, Beetlebum and Coffee & TV.

Now you may be wondering why a member of one of the most successful and influential bands of the 90s would come on a podcast about English wine but I assure you, there is good reason! 

Following a hugely successful career with Blur, and as a songwriter and producer for other big-name artists, Alex somewhat stepped away from the limelight in the early noughties when he moved to the country with his wife, Claire, and set up a cheese farm.

This 200 acre estate in The Cotswolds now plays host to The Big Feastival, which brings together over 75,000 people across three days in August to celebrate good food, good music and good times. 

What goes down well at festivals? Cider of course. And in 2019, Alex launched his first sparkling medium dry cider, which he aptly named BritPop. 

Last year he threw a bit of a curve ball into the mix and launched an English Sparkling Wine, also under the Britpop name and made with grapes grown on the Furleigh Estate in Dorset, the county where Alex was born and bred.

He has now added an English sparkling rosé  and elderflower wine spritzer to the range and I can attest to the fact they all go brilliantly well with his award-winning cheeses!

We talk about crisps as canapés, drinking Champagne for breakfast and what dream person Alex would love to share a glass of Britpop with.

The Britpop collection is available from laithwaites.co.uk and you can book tickets to The Big Feastival (which takes place between 23rd to 25th August 2024) at thebigfeastival.com.

With thanks to our series sponsor, Wickhams, The Great British Wine Merchant. Visit wickhamwine.co.uk to see their award-winning range of English wine with free delivery on orders over £40. The English Wine Diaries listeners can also get 10% discount on their first purchase by entering the code TEWD10. Please drink responsibly.

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. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the English Wine Diaries. Thanks for tuning in. For those of you who don't know me, I'm your host Rebecca Pickham, a journalist and founder of the Southern Quarter,
an online magazine all about English wine. This podcast is all about the people behind the industry and their incredible stories, which I can't wait to share with you.
So join me as I sit down with similiers, vineyard owners, winemakers and some rather familiar faces too and 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 Wine Merchant.
Alongside our world -beating sparklers, England also produces some stunning steel wines. Yes, the great variety, location, and winemaking matter, but Wickham's expertly curated selection and 100 % satisfaction guarantee is a great way to explore this burgeoning category.
Some of my favourites are Lyme Bay's 2021 Chardonnay, Biddenin's 2022 Gamma, and Huck's Bear's 2022 Orange Bear, which is made from Chardonnay,
not oranges. Visit wickandwine .co .uk and get 10 % off using the code TEWD10. That's TEWD10.
Always remember to drink responsibly. Joining me on today's episode of The English Wine Diaries is none other than Blurr bassist Alex James.
Blurr formed in 1988 and their nine studio albums have all topped the charts in the UK, generating numerous hit singles along the way, including Song 2, Beatlebum and Coffee and TV.
Now, you may be wondering why a member of one of the most successful and influential bands of the 90s would come on a podcast about English wine, but I assure you there is good reason. Following a hugely successful career with Blur and as a songwriter and producer for other big -name artists,
Alex somewhat stepped away from the limelight in the early 90s when he moved to the country with his wife Claire and set up a cheese farm. This 200 -acre estate in the Cotswolds now plays host to The Big Festival,
which brings together over 75 ,000 people across three days in August to celebrate good food, good music, and good times. What goes down well at festivals? Cider, of course.
And in 2019, Alex launched his first sparkling medium dry cider, which he aptly named Brit Pop. Last year, he threw a bit of a curveball into the mix and launched an English sparkling wine,
also under the Brit Pop name, and made with grapes grown on the Furley estate in Dorset, the county where Alex was born and bred. He has now added an English sparkling rosé and elderflower wine spritzer to the range and I can attest to the fact that they all go brinkly well with his award -winning cheeses.
Alex, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you? Absolutely marvellous. Cheers. Yes, a beautiful sunny day here in the Cotswolds. Yeah. Yeah, you down on the farm now? Certainly am. Yeah, looking at the cherry trees are record about three days off ripe cherries.
If the birds don't get them first. Crack it. There must be quite a lot to do down there because obviously you make your cheese, but you do all sorts of other things down there as well, don't you? Well, feast of all is the big one. That's about eight weeks off now.
So everything's just about lockdown. And yeah, just sort of brace bracing ourselves for that, basically. But yeah, it's it's it's it's it's I thought I was moving out here for a quiet life,
but it seems to be bigger than ever. But I love it. We will talk more about all the projects that you've got on the go in a little bit. But what I wanted to do initially is just go back to sort of life growing up because you grew up in Dorset.
Yeah. And that's also where your first English sparkling wine you've partnered with a vineyard down there to produce that. And we will talk about that in a second. But what was it like growing up in Dorset? What was the food scene like?
So I was a kid in the 70s, so it was a very different kind of food and drink landscape back then. I guess we were still recovering from the war years,
actually. If food was rationed, bacon was still rationed until my dad was in his 20s. It's crazy to think that a generation ago, we ran out sculpted our whole kind of kind of the way we think about food and drink in this in this country.
We kind of we do tend to guzzle like it's gonna it's gonna run out. My granddad was a was a chef at one of what was for four kind of grand hotels on the on the south coast in the days when the when the AA was the kind of had to kind of last word.
Now we kind of refer to the Michelin guide but but when I was at it was the AA the AA guide. And there were like four, five -star AA hotels on the South Coast. My granddad ran the kitchen in one of them.
So my first job was, by the time I arrived, he had his own place and my first job was working in his kitchen. So I was kind of really lucky to grow up in an environment where kind of food skills,
cooking skills were kind of abundant because, you know, By parents generation, cooking skills weren't kind of passed on because there was nothing to cook and recipes were lost and it took a long time to recover.
But I mean, really my memories of, you know, I suppose my earliest memories revolve around food, picking strawberries used to be able to,
I think the cat and fiddle pub on the way out to, on the way out to the forest from Bournemouth, there was a really brilliant, pick -your -own -strawberries outfit there. And that was kind of like the best thing in the world to just go and eat ripe strawberries in the warm strawberries in the sunshine.
And yeah, I think that's probably what was possibly one of the reasons I ended up living on a farm, maybe. I don't know, but the food of your childhood and the music of your adolescence kind of it never leaves you really.
You know I'm still a sucker for salad cream and bacon crisps. Talking of smoky bacon crisps actually one of the crisps that you or one of the food items that you serve with the cheeses when we were when you were launching your latest release of the Brit pot English word was a frazzle.
Yeah well blue cheese on a frazzle is quite good actually. Yeah, I think it's quite good. I quite like mixing up, you know, mixing it up. You know, there's lots of books about wine and beer.
There's not many, I've never seen a book about crisps. Maybe I should write one, but you know, that was one of the things that we had when I was a kid was amazing, amazing fizzy drinks and amazing crisps.
You know, you can't get a monster munch or, you know, even if he struggled to get a watsit anywhere else. Do you know? So I think there's something it makes a really good canapé,
a bit of blue cheese on a frazzle. Yeah, it kind of works. It went really well. And also, as you say, it has all that kind of nostalgic feel for anyone who was sort of like growing up around the kind of Britport era.
Those snacks as well were kind of around that time and before as well with your sparkling wines. Now, let's go back to the cider and let's go back even further to your cheese. So the cheese making,
what was it that initially made you want to make cheese? - Well, just really like it. And I found myself living on a farm. My wife and I actually bought the farm on our honeymoon,
Claire and I. And it was at the point when Blur were kind, I don't know, We kind of met at college and it was all we'd ever done for like 15 years and it always gets to a point with every band where you kind of want to try other things and a lot of musicians do end up living on farms.
I don't know, I just, we were looking for a house and we came to look here and I've never kind of ever wanted to leave since I just arrived I just I loved it but I didn't know what the hell I was going to do.
What was it that you loved about it was it the open space was it peace, privacy? There's something quite monastic about it actually and you know and I guess farms you know there's something about the sort of sort of patient devotion to making food you know monks Monks and nuns applied it to food and to music.
Like, you know, everything, I don't know, there was just a kind of sense of peace and rest, I guess, maybe all those years of living out of a suitcase,
just wanting to put some roots down somewhere. But the English countryside is like a vast, stately home. It's kind of really expensive to run,
but it's kind of like a huge national monument, actually, like, you know, as soon as you, everything changes when you, when you cross the, cross the channel to, to, to France,
and that in France is where all my kind of love as food as a child, really kind of child and a teenager really, really grew because you just, it wasn't,
wasn't like going to another country, it was like going to another planet. It was just and the average French person's devotion to eating and drinking well is staggering.
You know, they're prepared to go and buy bread twice a day and take a three hour lunch break in order to buy some cheese and go home and cook lunch. They literally still go home for lunch.
It's brilliant. Yeah, so I think we fell in love with the place and I started writing about the move from kind of club frothing musician to kind of quiet country gentleman in the independent,
like a weekly column, kind of like a low budget version of Clarkson's Farm, I guess, just saying like this has gone wrong, that's gone wrong, this has run away, that's fallen over,
I over needed, you know, it was like constant disasters. And then, and then a local cheese maker was returning to the cheese maker from from who grew up in the village was moving back and was looking for somewhere to start making cheese.
And I was like, Oh my God, cheese making, that's what I've always wanted to make cheese. I hadn't quite realized how do you know, it's always got like the hardest thing in the world, like actually working out what you want to do,
you know, it took, you know, it took, It took two years of kind of scratching my head, living on a farm loving cheese before someone else said, "Can I make some cheese at your house?" And I was like,
"Oh my God, absolutely. "That's a brilliant idea." And I wrote about it in the column, "Gonna start making cheese." And it just, it really, as a columnist,
like the best thing you can hope for when you file your copy is kind of nothing. It means that the subs have swallowed it. Sometimes they write back and say, "This is crap.
Can you do it again?" But really, if you get nothing back, that's a result. But the phone rang literally five minutes after I'd filed it, and it was the editor going, "Geez, I love it.
Write me a feature." And so I blightingly did. And I think at that point, "Geez, this is going back like 20 years. So I think cheese was probably then going through a kind of cosmic inflation phase that we're seeing with wine.
Now, you know, in the Second World War, there was only one kind of cheese being produced in the country. It's called national cheese. I think it was a kind of like a mild cheddar, pretty nasty.
Nobody makes it anymore. he's yearning for it. And, you know, it's a very different environment for farmers 20 years ago. Whenever you saw a farmer on the telly,
he and it was always a he was always crying because he'd had to like exterminate all his cattle because of a mouth or a sheep or BSE or, you know, it was, it was,
it was, it was a kind of disaster zone. You know, you think of a farmer now you think of Jeremy Clarkson living happily ever after laughing his head off. And so it was,
I think it was it was difficult for dairy farmers who couldn't make money on on milk. Diversity was it was like classic classic classic British innovation and enterprise,
you know, rather than selling in commodity, which you've got absolutely no control over, like, you know, how much it rains in the war in Ukraine or, you know, like drought in China,
you know, all these factors that are behind. If you can make a really nice lump of cheese, you're kind of, you're bomb proof. And families that have been into dairy farming for generations turned to cheese making as a kind of way to make ends meet.
And old recipes, you know, great classic cheese recipes were revived. And, and I think And I think that as a result, there kind of been a food.
It was all starting to pick up. You know, even after the Second World War, you had Ian Fleming writing brilliantly about food as kind of food as fantasy in the James E.
He writes so brilliantly about food, Ian Fleming. And then Elizabeth David, first of all, and Jane Griggs and kind of himming this Mediterranean lifestyle.
I mean, I love, I absolutely love Jane Griggs and Elizabeth David. And so there was a lot of groundwork being done, but suddenly I think when Marco Pierre White won three Michelin stars in the,
in the mid 90s, it was the youngest, but youngest first Britain, the youngest person ever to do that. And there, there was also great restaurant tours in London, Chris Corbyn and Jeremy King,
the restaurants that they ran in the 90s, the first of all, the Caprice and then the Ivy were the best restaurants in the world, like the most glamorous rooms you could you could walk in on the planet,
you know, you didn't know it was going to come in next, like a pop star or a princess or it could, you know, it was absolutely incredible. So there was and then and then you kind of had the right,
so Mark Marco great restaurateurs and then the rise of brilliant television programming about food and and in Jamie Oliver, you know, massive just just sort of bringing bringing there's this kind of perfect storm of brilliant things and and suddenly English British food was was back on the map.
There was a kind of appetite. I think Randolph Hodgson at Neil's Yard Dairy was brilliant in kind of championing small dairies. It's kind of like the indie music scene. You know, it was like cooler,
much cooler than the kind of mainstream supermarket chunks of cellophane junk. You know, something that was kind of made with real love. And so it was,
I think there was really, we'd gone from one variety in the war to, you know, We hosted the British Cheese Awards here in the mid -2000s and there was like 996 different kinds of cheese there for judging.
I guess cheese kind of needed a poster boy and I was very happy to fill that role but it wasn't all we were doing here. The first thing we I got the keys it was it was it was actually it was mid -August there was a beautiful daylight today it was really hot and I was wandering around a really overgrown kind of back garden and there was a there was an ancient orchard in there and there was peaches actually growing
up the wall and they're still my favorite plums and the peaches I think are my favorite things and I didn't even know you could grow peaches in this country but the apples come a bit later, but all these incredible kind of local heritage varieties that you don't see.
Really small red ones called Spartans are so sweet and these incredibly nutty, russet. Just so different in flavour and in texture and colour and some of the orchard had kind of died out.
It was a Victorian orchard, basically, and it did run its course. So you can buy new apple trees for like, it's like a tenor to buy an apple tree.
And you bung it in the ground and just ignore it. You can ignore it, abuse it. It just, there's something about growing apples in this country that just works. So we were like,
well, trees are really good, bit, it takes 18 months to make a kind of a mature cheddar, but to start growing apples and making cider.
It just takes a bit longer, but sort of Somerset, Herefordshire, kind of probably more synonymous with apple grain, but it's a fair amount in Dorset actually where I grew up and in Oxfordshire,
and there's plenty of people making their own side. It's incredible, you know, you juice the apples, leave them in a barrel. In spring, and then in spring, you've got cider, you know, that's the simplest recipe.
And I mean, actually, it's not really that much more complicated with grapes to make wine. But if you want to, I mean, I guess it's the same with cheese. It's like, and with music,
like, you know, I could teach you, I could literally teach you how to write a song in 20 minutes. I can teach you how to play three chords with open tuning and you could write a song in 20 minutes. Wouldn't necessarily be a great song,
but I can do it. And it's the same like mozzarella. That takes like 20 minutes to make. And I can teach you how to make a possible mozzarella in 20 minutes to make,
but to make a kind of hit song or a hit mozzarella or a hit wine, it takes absolutely every ounce of kind of patience, determination and sort of and straight if you want to do something in doing anything really well is really hard I think.
Yeah let's talk about these wines then because what was it I mean back then did you ever think that you might produce an English wine that that might be on the cards someday? Well so I met when I was living in London like as soon as Blur had a had like a hit record I rented a flat in the West End and it was above like a cocktail bar and one of the one of the bar mates there was was Alice Templey whose dad
so this is going back to she was it she was working there part -time when she was at St Martin's College studying fashion and I remember her saying that her dad made cider brandy and it was like wow English brandy but I mean,
that is now my all -time favorite tipple in the entire, I don't think there's anything to touch it. Somerset to Cider Brandy, it's absolutely incredible. But yeah, I mean, in a very,
very, very short space of time, well, you know, I think kind of beer and we, you know, in the same way that we don't celebrate crisps enough,
maybe we don't celebrate a kind of great English beer and cider enough, you know, cider has become, you know, a bit like, in a bit, the same sort of sad way that people tend to buy cheese,
you know, you just get, you just get the cheapest, you know, you get the cheapest cheddar. And that tends to be the way that the people buy cider, you know, just like, what's the strongest cheapest cider I can get.
But, you know, But actually, sparkling wine is just cider with a marketing budget, I think. And there are some truly fantastic ciders. And it actually,
sparkling wine starts with cider, right? Because from what I understand, farm workers in Somerset were paid in cider.
So having the best cider, it was a big advantage. You could track the best workers. We had coal -fired glass manufacturing in the UK,
which meant that our glass was stronger than French glass, which were using rubbishy wood -fired oven technology, which wasn't as good. In order to up the alcohol content,
they put a spoonful of sugar in the bottle before corking it, And so you get this secondary fermentation, which made it more pleasingly fizzy and more alcoholic. And we were cracking on with that in Somerset.
And basically the French came over and went, that's good. And nicked it and nicked the idea basically and applied it to their kind of lackluster white wines.
And it's been like 300 years of, it's incredible kind of marketing of sparkly wine champagne, you know, 300 years ago, the French were gifting it to the champagne grows,
we're gifting it to royalty, so that bourgeoisie would want to get FOMO. And, you know, they sold us the air in the bubbles and it's incredible that there's kind of,
there's no situation which wouldn't be improved by a glass of champagne. you can have it for breakfast, you can have it at a business meeting, drink it when you're happy, drink it when you're sad.
It's all, you know, it's completely socially acceptable. People spray it, spray it around on victory podiums, you know, it's the kind of toast of success.
And so the fact that we've, climate change is a thing and we now have the same climate apparently here.
It's Champagne's the nearest wine making region to to England and it's the same kind of soil. A big overhead in in sparkling wine production is the marketing budget.
You know, so if you can make, you know, if making English sparkling wine, you're kind of buying into 300 years of free free marketing. It's so true. And it's but I just have you read that.
But have you ever met a guy called Henry Jeffries? Yes, he's been on the podcast. Yeah, really? Oh, my word. His book is his book. Binds in a Cold Climate. I'm just I can't recommend.
I mean, if you if you if you're if you're listening to this, then then then you need to read that book. I mean, it's it's it's a brilliant story, wonderfully told. And I'm enjoying this. I'm listening to it on audio,
but I'm enjoying it the second time round more than more Well, more than the first, that's a sign of a really good book, but it just tells the story of the people and the places and it's an incredible kind of,
prior to 1990 he says there was no English wines, I mean they were obviously Romans, the Romans grew vine seed, but there was a huge,
huge gap post -war, no English wines available at all commercially. And now, I mean, sparking wines. And actually, we did a big taste test of rosés here a few weeks ago,
12 English rosés. And I chucked in a couple of ringers from Provence, like the Bamford Leu, which is very popular around here. And a Whispering Angel, I think the other one was. And we did a blind tasting.
And No one could pick those out. There was a couple of lemons, but it was all of a pretty good quality. But the thing is, with rosés,
it's substantially more expensive. We haven't got that provence. I think you need more sunshine. So the quality is there,
but It's not a cheap option in English rose, but with English sparkling wine, it's I mean, for years like Camel Valley been kicking it down in Cornwall,
like cleaning up at the big competitions. And of course, you've worked with the early estate was for the first one. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well, I mean, we do a lot of blind tasting tastings here.
It's the only way to I mean, I love a blind tasting, don't you? I Yeah, I do. It's good. It's good fun. Because, you know, I've worked as a food writer over the years and,
you know, Blind Tasted everything from mince pies to, you name it, after vegan cheese. But there's, it's incredible,
actually. As soon as you know which is the expensive one or which is the cool brand or which is the one that you think you're gonna like it completely skewed you've got to you've got to do it blind.
It's a bit like when people tell you know if you're if you're doing a tasting and you're trying to smell the you know the notes of a wine or something or someone soon as someone tells you something you smell it. Yeah yeah yeah yeah I love that yeah that's pretty oh yeah yeah and everyone's like oh yeah I'll get that now yeah yeah I mean I thought it's it's always a it's a always a really sort of wonderfully
convivial thing of food tasting. I've never, I've never really seen, I was a judge on, on Costa Prize once, you know, the, like the, the,
the, it's like a book prize. And it was just, and nobody on the panel kind of agreed with each other. Everybody was just trying to be cleverer than everyone else. And, and it was just, it was really ugly.
Actually, it's horrible. But I've, you know, I've judged that like countless kind of food and farming awards, great tastes awards, cheese awards and I've never seen a scrap. There's something about like just it sort of generates concord and harmony kind of eating and sharing together.
I've never seen it get ugly. There's always kind of like one that kind of sings that's just singing out and singing. And so, I mean, so we started with the with the cider because basically apples were easier to grow here than grapes.
And it really worked. You know, feast of all, it just, it was, I sold everything else. It was just like clear, this could work. So I thought, you know, champagne,
I drank quite a lot of it in the 90s. And I was going to say, did you have a favorite? It depends. It depends on the time of day depends on the breakfast.
- Breakfast? - Breakfast, you'd want Krug maybe, nice. - Good choice. - Strawberry in it. I've always kind of wanted, I think I've always wanted a sparkling wine with my name on it more than I've ever wanted to cook a Brit award with my name on it.
- Aw. - No, I mean, it was kind of, it was a great kind of prop in the 90s, a glass of champagne, 'cause it was, they were kind of, I was young and they were kind of,
it was a time of kind of profound peace and prosperity looking back, you know, it was always going to end with a bang. It was a kind of, it was a time for celebrating it.
I just sort of, so the band always had champagne on the rider and the people knew that I kind of had a taste for it, so it was sort of presented to me wherever we went,
you know, whenever a record did well, you know, it was like champagne. So when I wrote my first book, which is a kind of, you know, autobiography about the rock and roll years,
it was, I said I'd spent a million pounds, I'd done the maths and worked out I spent a million pounds on champagne. And I might have been making it up a little bit, but but everybody believed me.
But I mean, it would, it would, it would be very easy to spend a million pounds trying to grow, trying to go champagne grapes and messing up and not having any fun along the way.
So I just thought, well, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's try the, fairly, fairly, I got to know. And so we did a blind taste test with actually, with a couple of my favorite,
favorite champagnes, like a non -vintage tassenger, which I've always liked. So that's kind of like a sort of benchmark I've always thought. And thought and the and the and the and the on the earliest dates it was just it was just it was just singing so well let's try and people absolutely loved it a feast of all and then and then we thought we'd try a rosé and I hooked up with Henry Lathaway who is who is a kind
of wine making magician actually um no the first people the first thing people ask is when you present them with a sparkling wine is sparkling wine is like,
do you grow grapes? But it's sort of like, I've never made my own milk, you know, to make a good cheese, you need a good milk supply, you need a good cheese maker, you need good marketing.
And I guess I'm kind of more of a kind of marketing machine than, you know, the fact that Feastable's here and we're celebrating the best of kind of British every year.
But why not. And I also think what I've found with the wines is that English sparkling wine, champagne, it's seen as a premium product and it is. There's a lot of, as you've said,
time and effort that goes into these products and that's why it's an expensive product. But I think you are making it quite accessible as well because they're both really good traditional methods, sparkling wines with the three champagne grape varieties,
but yet price you know it's you can that they are affordable they're a bit more accessible I mean actually wine shouldn't be stupendously expensive and I think it's it's something that possibly it's we do need to educate people I think people we're still we've come a very very long way but you know the French,
and the way that they eat in Europe is that a French person goes to the supermarket, picks up a chicken, looks at it and thinks, "How nice is this chicken?" Like an English person,
just picks up a chicken, goes, "How much is this chicken?" And it's the first thing to think. And it's almost like we're kind of, I don't know, that we're sort of afraid to spend money on kind of eating.
It's always the first place we look to kind of save money on food, you know, and in France, everyone eats like a king. That's what I love about.
And everyone can. And I think there is a real, there's this kind of sweet spot around sort of 25 quid where you get huge value on, if you buy the right one,
you get kind of like huge, huge value on I mean, it's, you know, not to say I've never, it's, I went to, when we finished recording the new Blur album,
when it was in the bag and it was like, oh my God, we've made a good record. That's brilliant. I went to, I went to Wilton's with, with Ollie, it's my, it's a fantastic, like, old school restaurant in St.
James' German Street, like literally the kind of poshest street in London. And it's got a spectacular wine list. I went with Oli Smith to celebrate. And his favorite wine was on the wine list.
And I was like, come on, let's do it. And it was a stupid amount of money. But I mean, it was-- - What was it? What was the wine? - I can't remember. - I can't even remember. I mean,
it's like a telephone directory there, wine list. - Well, Oli's been on the part, actually. - Really? - Yeah. - He's brilliant. He's been really positive. Yeah,
But just enjoying his pleasure as well. My friend was in a restaurant in Paris with his wife and they'd had a really,
really hard week. And they were having a weekend away and there was Chateau Latour on the menu. He saw it on the menu and he was like, "Oh my God, they've got the Chateau Latour." And she was like,
Darling, darling, we've had a hell of a week. You won the Chateau Latour. Get the Chateau Latour. And he's kind of arming and arming. He says, "Yeah, but it's this much." He said,
"Darling, darling, I know how much you love it. You still haven't stopped talking about it the last time you had it, and that was 10 years ago." So, you know, there's this great kind of argument.
So the Chateau Latour comes and it is decanted and poured with grapes so many. I love it when you go. I love all that kind. It's the only order of posh bottle of wine. It's one,
I love all that. And he drinks it with great ecstasies. And at the end of the evening, the bill comes and the wine's not on there. They go, hang on a minute.
We should say we did have the Chateau Latour and they said, oh, that guy over there is getting it. They said, "What?" They went over to say, "Thank you." He said, "Oh yeah, I own Chateau Latour. It's my vineyard.
Love to see people enjoying my wine." - Oh, what? How lovely is that? - I think, I think, I do think there is a real, there's this kind of spirit of kind of, it's the same in cheese,
actually. There's a kind of spirit of kind of love and generosity in sort of small scale, small scale production like that. But that's my favourite expensive wine story.
Well, you spoke about your memoir actually and also you've had your second book called Cheese is Great and Small. I understand you're writing another book, is that right? Can you talk about that?
Blur got back together again last year quite unexpectedly. So yeah, I guess the first one was like Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. This one's more like kind of wife and kids and rock and roll and just I just I've got five teenage kids now and who all thought I was an idiot until you know they until they came they were too they were too young to kind of remember because it's like you know nearly 10 years since
since the last time blooded anything but it was just it was it was just a wonderful is it unexpected magical 12 12 12 months that kind of brought the family together and kind of was obviously like a,
it was great to kind of to be reunited with, you know, my oldest friends. So again, but also like, totally mental. And I just needed to like sit down and, you know,
writing about something kind of helps, you know, it's kind of therapy. But it's so, so just, it just tells the people always kind of want to know what's happening behind the scenes. And there's a kind of,
there's an element of kind of, of kind of, as soon as you point, you know, in quantum physics, when you start trying to measure something, it starts behaving differently. Like whenever you point a camera at, you know, documentaries are great,
but when you point a camera at someone, they do start behaving differently. I think it was good to just sort of, yeah, just telling the story of what the hell happened, basically. And so your kids think you're cool now?
No, it's worn off now, but there was, no, the moment, at the moment. It was great. It was great. And Blair were doing like basically all the kind of biggest festivals in the world and it was really good for actually,
I didn't think the kids would want to come here. It's brilliant because they all kind of have a role to play at Feast of All. So it was really good for them to kind of do a bit of industrial espionage at all these other kind of global events.
Let's talk about Feast of All quickly because as you said, it's only about eight weeks until it happens for 2024. Who have you got lined up and is there anything new this year? Well,
there's a thousand festivals up and down the UK every summer and everyone copies it. When Feast of All started, we were kind of the only one that was kind of majoring on food and people kind of expect good So,
you know, I think you need to kind of, you need to keep trying new things. You know, it's no mean undertaking like organising. You know, you need to,
you can't go all in. You know, you can't, it's like growing grapes. You can't kind of, you can't nibble at it. You're all in or don't bother.
But, you know, I've got like, Five loaded kids make, you know, loaded tunes, loaded children, loaded cheese, live on a farm,
like a drink, love a party, you know, it all sits, all sits well within my kind of preoccupations. I mean, so, you know, you kind of want a balance, you want a balance to kind of line up with the music.
So, you know, we've got Becky Hill on Friday. Oh, love her. I mean, Ministry of Sound Classical would be good on Saturday, but you know, and then from food, it's like everything from sort of mud pie kitchen for the kids to kind of like Michelin -starred food and the warmly street food,
cookery schools, like dining experiences, because I mean, there aren't that many universal pleasures actually, but you know, food is certainly one of them. Actually,
a hot tub, like bubble baths is another, So we're doing hot tubs in the woods this year, I think. - Oh, cool, that sounds very good. - I mean, I think it's actually, when people get,
you know, the countryside is all lovely. It's just, you know, this, and actually, you know, what I enjoy about being here is just like, you know, lazing around in the woods.
And so like actually, you know, and like actually really simple elemental stuff, like, you know, like haystacks and fires and you know all that stuff works really really well but you can't put like haystack bonfire on a poster and expect people to turn up you know you need yeah you've got to put the Michelin star and the and the English bubbles on there haven't you I've got a couple of quick fire questions for you
before we finish yes favorite place to drink wine and who would you be drinking it with oh in the garden with actually do you know I love drinking with kids. I absolutely love it.
I really do. There was, oh my god, they were, we played, we played in Luca in Italy last summer. Beautiful. And there was, you can't eat bad food,
you just can't, you know, you go to a petrol station in Italy and it's like, it's the food's amazing. And the restaurant next to the hotel was just incredible. And we all sat down, we all had to cut the, the, the,
like the, know that the massive taste of menu with the wine pairings as I found it was just way it was just wonderful that was really that was really nice that was food and wine combo. Oh like I would say cheddar on a bit of crusty bread and can I have cider you can have cider that's absolutely fine yeah that's that takes some beating actually on a day like cheddar and cheddar and cider,
crusty bread. If there was anyone in the world dead or alive that you could share a glass of your Britpop, whether it be the English sparkling or the cider.
Do you know what, we've got a cut and we've got a cutting. I mean, you know, when you buy a dog near Christmas, they always put on Christmas Day. We've got a couple of apple trees that we got from Brogdales,
like the Heritage Fruit Tree Archive people, they said that they are cuttings from the tree in Newton where the apple that fell on Newton's head.
Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I'm sure they may. I'm sure they may. Apparently. I believed them. But like five years in, I thought, maybe that's not true.
But nonetheless, I think like a glass of cider with Newton, that would be, that would be, he was a dude. And finally, if there was one wine you couldn't live without for the rest of your life,
what would it be and why? Ah, well, it would have to be a sparkling wine. And I'm going to say a rose, I mean, I've done, yeah, sparkling, sparkling, right? There's something, it's just like a, it's just,
it's just like a kiss. It's like, oh, so gentle, like just got a little, just got a little bit of really faint kind of acidity but just like or just enough to make you kind of want more and oh okay well yeah well balanced English Rose Sparkling all the way.
Amazing. I just thought I'd be saying that you know it's incredible you know 30 years ago people who laughed at you wouldn't they. They would. Well Alex cheers. Cheers, thank you so much for joining me.
Good luck on the rest of your English wine journey. I don't know where it might take you, who knows. But good luck with the festival as well, and yeah, cheers. - We're here, many thanks indeed. Cheers Rebecca, lovely. - That was fun.
My teenage self would be very jealous right now. Who'd have thought English wine would lead me to interview such a 90s music icon, but I suppose it just goes to show how exciting and varied this industry is.
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The English Wine Diaries which is kindly sponsored by Wickham Wines. If you've enjoyed this episode or others I'd so love it if you'd like,
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