A Biodynamic Approach

How did Tillingham come about?

My family were involved in farming – they’ve farmed for generations. When I was younger, I wasn’t aware I was a farmer, and I never thought I’d end up one. I studied Classics and English at university and went off to have a career. But after university, it wasn’t clear what I was going to do, so I travelled, and slowly became curious about wine and vineyards, and realised that there was a farming element of winemaking that felt really natural to me. I realised I could kind of have it all: the outdoors life, the creativity that comes with winemaking, that I could create something worthwhile and delicious, something you could actually taste the endeavour in.

What’s the Tillingham approach?

At the heart of Tillingham is a way of winemaking, and a way of farming, that is sympathetic to nature – the more you foster that, the more you can taste it in the wine, the more nutritious and more enjoyable it can be. I discovered the Tillingham estate five years ago. I was living nearby, and I’d heard about the landowner having a farm and wanting to plant vineyards. So I came over and met him and had a look. There are 70 acres here. It had been a farm for 800 years. But it was knackered, with old, derelict buildings. It was an opportunity. We took a lease on the land and buildings, and from that point on began to prepare the land, began to plant, refurbished and regenerated and repurposed the farm buildings so it could become a tourism venue. And then we started making our own wine. We bought grapes in 2017, but it takes three years from planting a vine to getting grapes. In that time we bought other people’s grapes and started experimenting.

What was the pitch to the landowner?

It was kind of like: “This is the land, we can put this many vines in, this is why, this is how…” Partly because planting vineyards to make wine is a very long-term venture, with a very slow payback, we said we’d turn the farm buildings into a hotel and a restaurant, elements that would raise cashflow sooner, but which would also fit with a holistic, field-to-fork vision I had of how the farm should operate. Now we have sheep on the land that we don’t have vines on. And those sheep end up being in the vines during the winter. And we eat them on the menu – they’re on offer in the restaurant. Elements from the restaurant and the winery, in turn, feed back into a composting system and into the fields. There are all of these complementary loops linking different parts of the business, zero-waste being a main part of the Tillingham idea – minimising the stuff we put on the vines, minimising the amount of cardboard brought into the business. We sequester carbon. We create habitats through regenerative agriculture. We’ve got an incredible chef who’s on the money in terms of making the most of the ingredients we’ve got here in a really approachable, simple way.

Are there a set of Tillingham values you always have in mind?

The most fundamental thing is authenticity. That’s what wine’s ultimately about. It’s about it having a sense of place. People say they can taste the Tillingham in our wines, which is a wanky thing to say, but I know what they mean. As soon as we start to change – as soon as you start to do things people want, rather than things you have to do – it makes me feel uneasy. That’s fundamental. I have a vision of how I want to make our wine and we stick to it. We’ve never made a wine to second-guess what people want, or to mimic a style that is fashionable. It’s the same with the food. We use the ingredients we have, whatever’s in season. It’s very reactive and intuitive rather than being prescriptive. We use what we’ve got and we celebrate it.

How much is authenticity related to simplicity?

The more you intervene, the more you can get in the way of that authenticity. So simplicity is paramount. In a lot of our winemaking, we try to use gravity, and our hands and feet and heart and labour, rather than machinery. I know some winemakers would say there’s an energy in wine, and that machinery disrupts that energy. I loosely subscribe to that. The more we eschew machinery and technology in the winemaking process, the more intact the wines remain.

When you make a wine, do you have a goal in mind?

We might make up to 25 different wines in year, which is borne out of having lots of different grape varieties in small amounts, and having lots of micro ferments in comparison to a bigger, more conventional winemaker. We have some styles we know we’re going to make, but what I want most is for the wines to be as pure as they can be, first of all. We don’t fiddle around, we don’t intervene, so they end up in the best condition they can be: clean, fruit forward, really drinkable and enjoyable wines. And we let them take their time. A lot of winemaking interventions are about control. That can be because of convenience, or it can be to manipulate the wine to get to an end result the winemaker wants rather than what feels natural. A lot of winemaking science is about trying to shortcut or tweak the process, to speed it up, to get more cash back quicker – those interventions are relied upon. We’ve decided to go the way we go, and our wines take as long as they take to find their way into bottle, and once they’re in bottle they’ll take as long as they take to be released.

Tell me a bit more about the farm you grew up on?

I come from a long line of farmers in the north east, south Yorkshire originally. My great grandfather expanded the family farms from Yorkshire down into Lincolnshire and Staffordshire and Cumbria, so that it became quite a big farming business, four farms at one stage. Those were the days when farming was extraordinarily lucrative – we’re talking the 1940s and 1950s, when you’ve got the advent of machinery and fertilisers and farmers being incentivised through policies to make as much food as possible. I was born into that world, but by then things had started to change. When I grew up we had livestock – pigs, cows, sheep, chickens on a domestic level – and it was pretty: rolling hills, woodlands, sugar beet and broadacre, lots of arable farming, in what was a little hamlet that over the years had seen whole communities engaged in farming. Up until quite recently, the number of people employed by the farm had dropped to two or three, and I found that upsetting. And when all of the Victorian farm buildings were flattened, and some steel-framed buildings took their place, I found the whole thing… I mourned it, I felt sad about it. That decline has driven me and informed what I do. There were 16 distinct fields at Tillingham in 1840. When I got here there were five. Back in the 1840s it would have employed so many people: in the orchards, in the gardens, with the livestock, the arable. It would have employed a large share of the village. And when I got here the buildings were derelict, there were five fields, no employment. Now we’re getting back to the 16 fields. We’ve got 50 employees. And we’re diversifying the farm. We’ve put orchards back in. We’ve got vines. We’ve got livestock. We’re reinstating wind breaks and hedges and creating that biodiversity. It feels like we’re doing the right thing.

How did you get from growing up on a farm to Classics?

I didn’t know what to do, and there was something about Classics that took my eye. I won a scholarship during my A-levels to go on an archaeological dig, which I did for two weeks and really loved, and that interest led me to Classics, which allowed me to do archeology at university. I did my dissertation about my family farm – I tracked its decline, basically, through records and archeology.

Your interest in how things used to be done, processes used hundreds of years ago, seems to fit with everything you do. The winemaking process you’re using is centuries old, isn’t it?

It is. Most other winemakers study chemistry and wine science, so winemaking becomes all about complicated machinery and interventions and stuff like that. I make wine in a way that’s thousands of years old. It’s informed by winemaking science. I understand it; I went back to university to study winemaking. But the science is only in the background, in case anything goes wrong. It informs what we do, but we don’t apply winemaking chemistry in a practical sense in a laboratory.

Do you see winemaking as an art rather than a science?

I think “craft” describes it quite well. I don’t think of myself as an artist. I feel much more like a farmer, and I’m turning my hand at taking the raw things we grow and transforming them. In a lot of cultures, this tradition of fermentation as a way of preserving something is very common. That’s all wine is, really. It just so happens you’re turning a fruit into something that is also a drug, the alcohol. You’ve got that added win.

Natural wine has become more popular in the mainstream recently. Why do you think that is?

It’s a hip thing now. I think it represents a growing environmental consciousness. Natural wine, if you want to define it, should really only come from grapes that are grown organically, biodynamically, naturally. I.e. no herbicides, no cultivation, no fungicides or pesticides that have any toxicity. So there’s the environmental sensitivity and nurturing you get from natural wine. And I think it’s antiestablishment in a way. It’s not made by “the man”. If you look at conventional winemakers, they’re kind of boring and tend to be white and male (though there are a lot of female winemakers in the world, which is quite interesting, because it’s agriculture, it’s farming…) So it ticks those boxes, too. A lot of people buy into the fashion of natural wine without knowing about wine. And that’s OK. Conventional wine drinkers, that sector of the industry, tends to be quite intimidating, there’s a lot of snobbery. I think the success of natural wine is a reaction to that – it’s way more accessible.

How has the movement affected you?

I struggle with it. Tillingham’s success is based on how hip and hot natural wine is. Our wine had a really rapid uptake across natural wine bars in London, in the east of London, in Hackney and Shoreditch. And as that movement has popped up in cities all over the UK, we can’t make enough of the stuff. We’re always sold out of everything we make. Which is great! But the problem I have is that there’s some natural wine that is faulty, or is just not very well made, and I don’t want to be held back by association. Some people won’t drink our wine because it’s “natural wine”. They think it’s going to be cloudy and weird. And we do make cloudy wines, which some people, the uninitiated, might find challenging. But we also make wines that aren’t cloudy – if you were served them blind, you might be fooled into thinking they were conventional. They have a brightness and finesse that is outside the more clunky, cloudy, more natty stuff.

You’ve never really presented yourself as just a natural winemaker. Tillingham is a bigger project. It’s about regenerating the land, the farming…

It is. I’ve never really paid it much thought. Everything’s happened more organically, more naturally, based on my read on things. I suppose there are times now when there is this tension between wanting to promote certain parts of the business – the hotel, the restaurant – at the same time as not wanting it to appear as though they are more important than other parts of the business. Customers who care more about the farming, or the winemaking, might become disenfranchised if we keep pushing Tillingham as a lifestyle destination.

How do you make sure it all works together?

I’m not sure! It’s a concern how we go about it. We’re still learning – it’s something I’m thinking about at the moment. Just keep doing what we’re doing, I suppose. Less is more. Always less is more.