Danbury Ridge making its mark (2024)

The deepest Essex few explore

Where steepest thatch is sunk in flowers

And out of elm and sycamore

Rise flinty fifteenth-century towers.

From ‘Essex’ by John Betjeman

“On the Dengie, it’s all too easy to feel yourself cut off from the wider world of production,” said John Atkinson MW, Danbury Ridge’s consultant, when I went to meet him recently in Essex.

I am English born and bred, but I concede that I had never heard of the Dengie (pronounced as in Benjie) Peninsula until this visit. But then I hadn’t had any particular reason to visit until the name Danbury Ridge started appearing in lights recently. In the burgeoning English wine scene, in which sparkling wine is widely heralded as the Holy Grail, Danbury Ridge is, counter-intuitively, making waves with its still wines made from chardonnay and pinot noir.

“Four of these soils align with Pomerol, hence our motto: soils like Bordeaux, grapes like Burgundy.” – John Atkinson MW

Lying between the Blackwater and Crouch estuaries, both of which are tidal rivers, the Dengie Peninsula is a sheltered, estuarised area where sunshine hours are high. London has about 1600 hours a year, while the Dengie is blessed with some 1800 to 1850 sunshine hours and around 550 mm of rainfall, which makes it one of the driest parts of the country. It’s also very bright and not a million miles, metaphorically speaking, from Alsace. With over 1100 growing degree days, there are similarities too with Central Otago in New Zealand and Tasmania’s Tamar Valley.

“The Dengie Peninsula: best climate but the worst soils’ used to be the saying,” according to John Atkinson, “because people listened to marketing hype and there was a lack of understanding.”

50 million years ago, the Crouch Valley was under the London Clay Sea, its chalk seabed yet to be raised to today’s rural landscapes of farmland, escarpments, marshes, and coastal areas beloved of twitchers. The climate is maritime with an east wind blow-drying the Crouch Valley’s vineyards.

There are five soil types at Danbury Ridge: deep gravel, sandy clay, calcareous marl, and south-facing slopes of illite and smectite clay. According to John Atkinson,

“Four of these soils align with Pomerol, hence our motto: soils like Bordeaux, grapes like Burgundy.”

Nice motto to have. Clay is cold and takes its time to warm up, so there’s a long growing season in which budburst tends to be late, but once the clay warms up, the vines shoot forward. The clays promote good ripening, which continues till harvest in September.

The first of Danbury Ridge’s vineyards contains 10m of sand and gravel. The second vineyard is 2.5m compact sandy clay. Both are free-draining. The third vineyard is 62% clay once you get down to 40cm.

“In the case of a wet harvest, you would always take the clay,” says Atkinson.

With soils of smectited clay, Danbury’s new 6.5ha vineyard at Canewdon, found by Atkinson, will be planted next year. As he explains:

“There are lots of different clays with smectite the most precious because it has more shrink-swell potential.”

What does that mean? In essence,

“The availability of water is beneficially regulated by its subsoil—neither too much nor too little. A slow percolation of water into the clays over time keeps the vine sufficiently stressed so as to promote ripening.”

The main drawbacks are a lack of potassium, which keeps the acids high, and humidity, which requires occasional spraying against downy mildew.

On a visit in early summer, I met Janine Hurley, who runs the estate with her sister Sophie. Their parents, Mike and Heather Bunker, began life in Southend-on-Sea, spending four years in Hong Kong,before putting on the ruby slippers and returning back to Essex and buying the estate. She explained that the family’s background was not in viticulture, but that they had always been keen growers of their own fruit and vegetables on land they had bought north of Southend near Danbury village. The family’s decision to plant vines was initiated by a friend who was involved in the wine industry. During a dog walk around the estate in 2012, she commented that because of its aspect, climate and free-draining properties, the land might well be suitable for planting vineyards.

A feasibility study carried out in 2013 confirmed their friend’s view. The upshot was that what is now the Octagon Block, with just over 5ha of pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot meunier, was planted in 2014.

At the time, they had no aspirations other than to be grape growers and to sell the fruit to Liam Idzikowski, who was working at Lyme Bay in Devon, and is now Danbury Ridge’s winemaker. A graduate of Plumpton College (2011), Idzikowski, one-time amateur jockey, cut his teeth at Langham in Dorset, after stints at Brokenwood and Tyrrell’s in Australia and Williams Selyem in California.

“It wasn’t until Liam sent us some of the 2016 wines made from our first harvest that we became excited about the vineyard’s potential,” says Janine Hurley.

“We were surprised by the quality of the wines and wanted to explore what could be achieved if we were in control of the whole process, from grape to glass.”

In 2016, the chardonnay had been destined for sparkling wine but it turned out to be too ripe, not something you can say about most English chardonnay. The pinot noir was meant for rosé but it was also too ripe and too high in quality. “The grapes here are really expressive,” says Janine.

After producing 16 to 17,000 bottles each of pinot noir and chardonnay last year, they are aiming to produce a total of 10,000 cases when at full production.

The Bunkers started building the winery in 2018 and while the potential for still wines had become clear (clones are mostly selected for producing still wines with some crossover in both pinot noir and chardonnay), the plan is to make both still and sparkling wines. So far however, they have found that they can consistently produce premium still wines in every vintage, which has been something of a surprise as they didn’t appreciate how good the climate and geology would be for grapevines.

In 2018 they produced their first still wines under the Danbury Ridge label and in 2019 the state-of-the-art winery was completed. After producing 16 to 17,000 bottles each of pinot noir and chardonnay last year, they are aiming to produce a total of 10,000 cases when at full production.

The oldest wineries here are New Hall Wine Estate founded in 1969 and Galleywood Vineyard—now just two among 25 growers in the Crouch Valley, which, close to reaching 1,000 acres (just over 400 ha of vineyard, is rapidly becoming a firm a fixture on the English still wine map.

Stockists

• Danbury Ridge Chardonnay: NYWines of Cambridge, Grape Britannia, Old Bridge, The Finest Bubble, Padstow Wine Co, Hedonism, Swig, Handford Wines, L’Art du Vin
• Danbury Ridge Pinot Noir: Old Bridge, Swig, NYWines of Cambridge, Cambridge Wine Merchants, Grape Britannia, The Finest Bubble, Hennings Wine, Handford Wines, L’Art du Vin, Hedonism

Click here to visit the Danbury Ridge Wines website.

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