The wine critic Jilly Goolden lives with her husband, dogs, horses, peacocks and former battery hens (their three children are all grown up) down a lane of rhododendrons in the Ashdown Forest in Sussex. Here she provides peaceful accommodation for two in a converted 1920s pump house a bit further down the lane, and regularly invites up to 14 people to turn up on her Arts and Crafts doorstep for an afternoon of non-stop drinking at her Wine Room.
“Have a sniff,” she says, putting her nose into a glass of chenin blanc and going quiet. “Sort of honey… honeydew melon… a little smell of cream… it reminds you of lying in bed upstairs and having a tiny waft of someone marvellous having made you breakfast downstairs. You get that smell of toast and butter… mmm.”
Goolden made her name in the 1980s when she and fellow Food and Drink presenter Oz Clarke vied to describe with unfettered precision exactly how this or that wine tasted. Best remembered is her gamay (the grape in beaujolais) “like trainers on hot tarmac”. At the same time the nation was falling in love with all things red, white and rosé.
Today, Goolden readily admits that when you’re drinking wine down the pub: “You just drink it, for heaven’s sake. Why not? But you’re probably missing out on 50% of what it has to say to you.”
On the course I went on she kicked off with a history of viniculture from ancient Egypt to the current boom in India, before demonstrating how to hold a sip of wine in your tongue, pursing your lips as if you’re about to whistle, then breathing in to pull the air across the wine to the back of your throat – where, crucially, you can smell and taste it at the same time, all the while “looking like a dog’s bottom”.
I was the only person in the group who was “anatomically challenged in the tongue department”, as Goolden kindly put it. “Let me see,” she said, with appalled fascination, as my tongue refused to move. “Can you curl up the sides? No…”
Over the next four hours we sniffed/slurped/dribbled – it didn’t really feel like drinking as such – 12 examples of old- and new-world charm from Austria to Australia, plus two glasses of English fizz, with a short break for tea and cake – “which is very unfriendly to wine but you have to tough it out”. (It was also one of the few mentions of food all afternoon.)
The group sat round a long table on high-backed chairs – two big, forbidding spittoons untroubled in the centre – under the steady gaze of Goolden’s Spitting Image puppet over in the corner. Among the tasters were artists, publishers and three people in the wine business, one the owner of a small vineyard. The real Jilly – petite, beady, standing off to one side with her own elegant spittoon – was on her mettle: “You’re frightfully technical, Martin. I honestly don’t know if they harvest after the equinox.”
People arrived and left by taxi (East Grinstead station isn’t far away) or made a weekend of it. There’s plenty of local accommodation, and a pretty old pub, the Hatch, down the road, with a bar wreathed in dried hops, that does food. Take a torch for the walk back from the pub if you’re staying at the Pump House, which has antique doorways imported from the Hindu Kush, hens wandering past the bedroom window and new-laid eggs in the fridge.
What did I learn from the course? Well, nothing about the price of each wine, which might have been enlightening. I will never forget, though, that pinot noir is the holy grail. That riesling is the class swot. That cabernet sauvignon is a grape of easy virtue. And that you shun chardonnay at your peril, because it’s the seductive David Beckham of wines, a global star, with Victoria as the oak, “acting like a sort of bra, I feel. What it does is it picks the fruit up and offers it up, as it were. So you can have a very flat-chested chardonnay, but you can give it a little bit of uplift and get it up to a B cup, or you could add a bit more toasty oak and wallop it up to maybe a C or a D. And then you can go the full extra mile and have a silicone implant… In all combinations it is gorgeous. I defy anyone to not love it.”
• The trip was provided by Jilly Goolden’s Wine Room (01342 822251, jillygoolden.com); the tasting afternoon (2.30pm-7pm) costs £125pp. Accommodation was provided by the Pump House (kentandsussexcottages.co.uk), from £229 for three nights, or £305 a week
More UK wine experiences
New Scilly season
The newest wines in the UK have just been bottled at Holy Vale, Britain’s most southerly vineyard, on St Mary’s in the Scilly Isles. Until earlier this year, owner Robert Francis gave entertaining tasting sessions that focused on his favourites from around the world but, since the successful bottling of 3,000 litres of Holy Vale’s chardonnay, pinot gris and three pinot noirs (a rosé, a classic and a reserve), these have also been incorporated into the fun and informal sessions. A the moment, the wine is on sale only in the deli at the local post office and in the two fabulous restaurants at the Star Castle Hotel (£102pp half-board, star-castle.co.uk), also owned by Robert.
• Tastings £17.50pp, holyvalewines.co.uk
Welsh wine wizards
Llanerch Vineyard, near Cardiff, is a Welsh wine success story, producing 10,000 bottles a year of five varieties for its Cariad label. Visitors can stay in the boutique farmhouse hotel (with restaurant and bistro overlooking the vines), tour the vineyard and even join the grape harvest in October (100 places only, register online).
• Wine tours £15pp, doubles from £120 B&B, llanerch-vineyard.co.uk
Wining and riding, south-east England
Combine wine tasting and cycling on a vineyard tour of Sussex or Kent with Ride Eat Drink Sleep, which started this year. Three-night group trips or tailor-made tours take cyclists through pretty countryside to vineyards including Bolney Wine Estate and Albourne Estate, meeting some of England’s best winemakers. Accommodation is in country lodges and converted barns, with hearty breakfasts and gourmet dinners to fuel the rides.
• Group tours (max 14 people) start again in May 2016, tailor-made tours until end of October, both from £599pp, rideeatdrinksleep.com
More UK wine experiences written by Allan Hennessy
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