Susanna Forbes is currently studying at Plumpton College and is in the process of launching www.drinkbritain.com highlighting the best producers of drinks in the UK of interest to...

The 'news' that Nyetimber, an English sparkling wine, had supposedly beaten Champagne Bollinger in a blind tasting organised in Italy, was picked up by the British wine media, and consequently...

So how was vintage 2009 in the burgeoning vineyards of England? Plumpton College, the academic outfit with its own vineyards profiled here , sends a fully illustrated report. (Thanks to...

Before the recent AGM of the Royal Household Wine Committee at Buckingham Palace, the penultimate before my two three-year terms as a member are up, we tasted dozens of wines, blind as usual. One...

A year has now passed since my first vineyard dispatch on 14 Aug 2008 [three weeks before our dramatic site redesign even - JR]. I have bud-rubbed, trained, trellised, machete-d, harvested,...

‘It would be endless to mention how many good judges of wine were deceived by my wine, and thought it superior to the best champagne they ever drank.’ So says the Honourable –...

See also Richard's views on why English wine is not Champagne . The notes below were taken at the awards ceremony for the annual English and Welsh Wine of the Year Competition,...

Viticulture is a growth business. At this time of year especially, the plants are shooting up like junkies. With 50 hyperactive acres to attend to, the main task now is to control the canopy by...

It has been six weeks since my last visit to Gusbourne Estate, so I wondered how different it would be down there. The people, at least, hadn’t changed: I was picked up at Appledore Station by...

I spent my day in the Gusbourne vineyard this week performing what essentially amounts to an Enhanced Interrogation Technique for vines. Having had their limbs tied down and having been forced...

The worst job I ever had was on a municipal landfill near Bedford. It was literally rubbish. What had once been a stone quarry became so overfilled that a mountain of garbage was steadily rising...

I was back amidst the vines this week after an enforced four week hiatus. The enforcement was entirely beyond my control: each time I tried to go I was thwarted by an act of God. First...

As the bright winter sun rose over Appledore this week, a sheen of hoarfrost was slowly unveiled, twinkling across the Kentish côtes like glittery spray-paint. The countryside was thoroughly...

My day in the vineyard this week felt like a grey-scale rendered version of reality. A heavy slate sky had leached all the colour from the fields and enshrouded the near distance with thick mist....

Few sights can be more classically bucolic, surely, than a handful of shotgun cartridges kept for safekeeping in a case of local bitter, as pictured here. It is a splendidly heedless image, and...