Wine Sebastian Morello visits the Sharpham winery in Devon and recommends a visit to St Mary’s Totnes

West Country wines

In the high medieval period, Europe experienced the effects of ‘global warming’, or perhaps it was ‘climate change’. In any case, the response of the English was not that of founding some new congregation of flagellants called, say, the Order of Friars Extinxion Rebellion. The newly conquered English looked up at the ever-intensifying sun and thought not of some imminent catastrophe and the population-control programmes that would allegedly save them from such a disaster. They did not panic and look for a Nordic child-sage to utter oracular allocutions about odd and novel penances. Instead, they thought of booze. They proceeded to implore their French masters, and the ecclesiastics these new rulers had planted, to teach them viticulture. The English must have known something already, as the 8th century St Alcuin of York had longed for the wines of England from his seat at the beer-sloshing court of Charlemagne. Be that as it may, the great English historian, Dom William of Malmesbury, tells us that by 1125 the hillsides of Gloucestershire were covered with vines producing wines that he insists were as good as any French stuff.

The French may not be quick to agree with Dom William’s assertion. Our neighbours across the Channel have had little choice, however, but to give up their seat to English wineries on a number of occasions over the past few years. Sparkling nectar from Albion has routinely shamed the celebrated fizz of Champagne in blind tastings. The jury is in: there are excellent English winemakers. At some point I will share my musings on the wonderful wines of Kent’s Chapel Down winery (yet another that has made the French grumble). This time, however, I wish to point the readers of this quarterly to the wines of Sharpham.

The area around Sharpham is of personal importance for me. At the age of fourteen, I was holidaying with my parents on the Devonshire coast, just a few miles from the winery. One day, we decided to drive to a nearby monastery where my father had once taken a private retreat. Buckfast Abbey church was the first Catholic church I ever visited. I was absolutely flabbergasted by its beauty. Five years later I was received into the Catholic Church on the south coast of India; I travelled back to my country with the naïve expectation that all English Catholic churches would look more or less like Buckfast’s church. Try to imagine my disappointment as I learned the horror story that is the history of Catholic ecclesiastical architecture of the last sixty years.

A few summers ago, I returned to south Devon to holiday with my parents, this time with my wife and daughter. We paid a visit to Buckfast Abbey to attend Holy Mass and venerate the hairshirt of St Thomas More (this was before the monks, very sadly, discontinued the Old Rite). Buckfast, of course, has a wine of its own, a strange caffeinated concoction which is something of a delicacy among modern-day Pictish berserkers.

Some days into our holiday, my father and I snuck off to Sharpham winery. The beautiful Sharpham estate, with the magnificent 18th century Sharpham House at the centre, is situated on a peninsula sloping down into the River Dart. The land is divided almost equally for Jersey cows and vines, with the latter on the south side enjoying a unique microclimate produced by the river and the incoming ocean breezes.

What are the cows for? I hear you ask. After a magnificent tour of the vineyards, we returned to the winery for a tasting at which each wine was paired with one of Sharpham’s delicious cheeses. These award-winning cheeses are made from the milk of those Jersey cows, living out their years alongside the grapes whose potion we so relished.

The Loire Valley’s special Madeleine Angevine grape, which thrives in cooler conditions, has found at Sharpham its perfect environment for flourishing. This grape brings forth a citrusy – but not tart – wine, with peach, apricot and vanilla hints remaining in a long finish. These wines are superb with locally caught crab.

For red, the options are limited. The pinot noir, frankly, needs work. The Beenleigh Reserve, on the other hand, is a near-perfect red, and is enhanced by any one of Sharpham’s cheeses. It remains the most award-winning English red wine, and is a classic claretlike blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Unfortunately, at £32 a bottle, one acquires a taste for it to one’s ruin. The sparkling rosé is not so expensive and is a fun, refreshing, and delicious drink for sharing among friends over an afternoon’s natter.

If our new overlords, who can teach us little – certainly not viticulture – ever fully lift this Orwellian nationwide house arrest, that we may once again enjoy such simple liberties as a holiday in Devon or a glass of wine with friends, I recommend a visit to this part of the country. Totnes’s redstone church, dedicated to St Mary and almost utterly untouched by the iconoclasts of the Reformation, has one of the most magnificent gothic roodscreens. A visit to this church, followed by prayers at the relic of St Thomas More (during which I suggest you pray for a return to Buckfast Abbey of the Mass he daily attended), concluded with a bottle of Sharpham’s sparkling rosé with loved ones – there you have a lovely day ahead of you.

Sharpham Estate, with its magnificent 18th century house