Richard Goring is making wine to match the best the French can produce and using that success to re-connect with consumers and plan for a farm subsidy-free future.

A planned winery restaurant serving his prize-winning sparkling wines will boost employment on his family’s sprawling Sussex estate and is a key diversification as farm support dwindles.

His focus is on soil and carbon for a no-subsidy future, with cover crops protecting water supplies, heritage wheat grown, along with environmental areas and extensive grazing of cattle and sheep on the rolling South Downs.

The Wiston Estate vineyard © MAG/David Jones

The farm’s winery is at the forefront of positioning his family’s 2,400ha Wiston Estate, near Steyning, for the next decade which will demand greater engagement with their customers.

“We are looking to close the gap between the grower and the consumer, we need to engage with people and try to regenerate the local economy,” he says.

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First grape harvest

When the first grapes were picked in 2008 there were three vineyard employees. There are now 12, and with a restaurant opening in November there will be 20 staff to serve a ready market of 1m people in the nearby Brighton to Littlehampton area.

Although the winery has won a stack of awards for its wines, bettering even French champagnes in recent competitions, Mr Goring says getting into wine is an expensive and volatile business.

Establishing a vineyard can cost £25,000-£30,000/ha for the purchase of vines, building trellises and the labour for planting, plus a host of specialist equipment such as narrow tractors and sprayers. Added to this, of course, the harvest is all done by hand.

All the time there is risk from the weather. Mr Goring points out that the Wimbledon tennis tournament starting in late June is often beset by rain just as flowering starts, and then later season rain can bring in botrytis grey mould.

“We get frost scares early in the season, then flowering scares, then botrytis scares, it all adds to the stress,” he says.

Growing vines 

Weed control is conducted with a French “boisselet” mechanical hoe along the rows, while grass is mowed between the rows and the field margins, but labour and spraying costs can get eye-wateringly high.

Fungicide sprays are needed to keep botrytis at bay and also control downy and powdery mildew. This can amount to 14 sprays in an average season, costing about £1,000/ha, 10 times the cost of an average wheat fungicide programme.

The result is that Mr Goring can sell top-quality Blanc de Blancs at £40 a bottle, but the flip side is that in the wet year of 2012, they did not pick a single grape and hence made no wine that year.

The Goring family have farmed at Wiston since 1743, and when the loss-making 120-strong dairy herd was disbursed in 2005 and the milk quota sold, there was money to invest in the farm.

Mr Goring’s mother Pip brought a passion for wine from her native Cape Town, and as the big French champagne houses had started looking hard for areas to expand along the South Downs, his father Harry decided to take a close look at the land.

Vines on the Wiston Estate © MAG/David Jones

Champagne soils

The South Downs farm sits on the same band of chalk soils that runs all the way from the Champagne area in northern France to the south of England, which prompted the French interest.

The farm’s chalky, sunny southern slopes were enough to attract top winemaker Dermot Sugrue from the nearby Nyetimber vineyard, and just over 6ha of vines were planted in 2006 in valleys nestled in the heart of the South Downs.

The first grapes were ready for picking after three seasons of growth, in the autumn of 2008, and the first bottles sold in 2012. But sales only really stepped up in 2013 and 2014.

A further area of just under 6ha was planted in 2017 to bring the total vineyard area up to 12ha, and there is another 80ha of potentially really good wine land. Mr Goring is cautious, however, and wants to add a chunk of vines only once every 10 years.

The three varieties which perform best in English conditions are grown on the farm – white grape Chardonnay and reds Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. The three are mixed to produce Cuvée and Rosé, and just Chardonnay is used for the top-of-the-range Blanc de Blancs.

Neighbouring growers

The farm’s winery uses all the 100t of grapes from the estate looked after by vineyard manager James McLean, and processes another 450t from six neighbouring farmers, which helps to spread the financial risk of wine making.

The farm’s original 6ha of vines may only yield 60t of grapes in a good year at a market value of £2,200/t, so although that might seem a high financial output, the inputs and investments are similarly large.

In addition, there is marketing and selling the wine. Mr Goring’s exports go around the globe to destinations including Norway, the US and Australia, and are also sold online (www.wistonestate.com), to independent stores and four local Waitrose supermarkets.

In early June, the vines grown in hidden valleys only four miles north of Worthing had escaped late frosts due to the mild influence of the nearby sea and winds funnelling through the valleys preventing frosts pockets forming.

Mr Goring is keen to emphasis that wine from the family’s vineyard is like no other vineyard, and he is eager to translate this to the uniqueness of food from the estate hence its milled heritage wheat will turn up as baked goods in the new restaurant.

Although the farm estate is profitable without direct Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) area-based subsidies, the phasing out of these payments will have a big impact on the estate’s long-term profitability.

“The absence of BPS will shift the way we are farming towards a focus more on soils and carbon,” he says.