Henry Jeffreys

The short story of the unlikeliest vineyard the world
By Henry Jeffreys
August 21 2023
If you’re asked to imagine a great vineyard, you might think of the stony terraces of the Douro valley, the chalk hills of Côte des Blancs in Champagne or perhaps the black volcanic soil of Santorini. What you almost certainly aren’t thinking of is a pile of rubble in an industrial estate near Reading. And yet for a few years such unpromising terroir produced not just one of England’s finest wines but one o...

It’s a truism about newspapers that if you really know about a subject, then most news stories on that particular subject will be wrong, miss the point or be strangely slanted. It doesn’t always hold true but it happens enough to make me ask ‘what’s really going on here’ when reading the news.
One such story happened this month about the 2023 English wine vintage. There was a headline in The Times entitled “English winemakers say cheers to a soggy summer.” The article was full of quotes from ...

You’d be amazed how often we get asked whether whisky or other spirits like gin, vodka, and rum contain gluten by our customers. Just to confuse things there are certain brands that advertise themselves as gluten free (though they shouldn’t, as we’ll see), whereas most don’t.
So does whisky contain gluten?
The very simple answer is no, almost certainly not. Gluten is a protein produced when processing certain grains which can all be used in the production of whisky: wheat, rye, and barley tho...

This article is taken from the June 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
We inherited a few things from my aunt when she died in 2015: a framed sketch of Marianne in her 1970s prime, a seemingly haunted Bose stereo that began playing “So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen when we plugged it in, and two old-fashioned A4 notebooks from the National Blank Book Company of Holyoke, Massachusetts.
It was years before ...

Henry Jeffreys on the tyros who made English wine world class
When I was approached in 2021 to write a book about English wine, I honestly wasn’t keen. It’s not that I don’t like it, I’ve long enjoyed sparkling wines from Ridgeview, Balfour, Gusbourne, and others, but I just didn’t think there was much of a story there.
From the outside it looked as if most producers followed a similar pattern — some chap made a packet in the City and sunk a few spare millions into a vineyard in Hampshire, Ke...

Last summer I conducted an extremely scientific test to ascertain which were the best rosé wines currently available in Britain. This involved getting dozens of samples, from supermarket own labels to some quite smart wines from Provence. Then I invited the neighbours round and we drank them in the garden.
The winner wasn’t a celeb-endorsed yacht rosé, instead it came from a small estate called Château la Canorgue in Luberon, a part of the Southern Rhone famed, if famed is the right word, for...

No, you’re not going insane, it is Monday today but for various reasons mainly about attempting to toilet train our youngest daughter, Sunday Drinking has been delayed. But at least for readers in Britain, it’s a public holiday today so it feels like a Sunday even if it’s technically a Monday.
Right, I’m glad we got that one out of the way. Today’s drinking is, inevitably, coronation-themed ahead of next Saturday’s event. It’s an event you can’t ignore, our local supermarket has a special ais...

The most deliciously bitchy book reviews are those by another author with a book forthcoming on the same subject. There’s only room for, say, one history of gender-bending in the Eastern Roman empire and it’s very important that the reviewer makes it clear which book is definitive. The vintage example of this is Valerie Grove’s review of Graham Lord’s unauthorised biography of John Mortimer in the Literary Review which was written just before her own official book, A Voyage Round John Mortime...

You may not have noticed it but rosé wines have been getting lighter and lighter in recent years. I was in Greece a few years ago with winemaker Yiannis Paraskevopoulos from Gaia Estate which produces two roses one light and one dark. He was raging against the trend for pale wines: “sales of dark rosé are plunging, salesman keeping asking me for lighter wines”, he said.
Keith Floyd and Jonathan Pedley MW with some deliciously dark Provencal rosé
Everyone is aping the Provencal style like Mira...

At most parties, the choice is between red or white wine. You might get champagne if you’re very lucky, prosecco if you’re not. It makes me think back nostalgically to the spread my parents used to put on. My father would line up bottles of gin, whisky, brandy, and vermouth on the kitchen counter. He’d even get the Drambuie out, though I don’t remember there being any takers. Everyone had their particular drink: my aunt would have a Martini and tonic, my grandfather drank brandy and soda, and...

Before I get into this week’s drink, a quick update on my new book Vines in a Cold Climate: the people behind the English wine revolution. Publication date is 3 August and it’s now available for pre-order. At the moment we’re trying to solicit blurbs from well-known people so if anyone can think of someone who is a) very famous and influential b) might have the time and interest to read a book about English wine let me know.
Right, that’s enough book pluggage, on with Sunday Drinking! This we...

Next week on the 24th May it’s the 47th anniversary of one of the biggest events in wine, one of the few times that a wine tasting has made headlines across the world. It is of course the Judgement of Paris. For those who don’t know this was a tasting in 1976 organised by the late Steven Spurrier where he lined up a panel of French judges to taste blind a flight of top reds from Bordeaux and whites from Burgundy against their equivalents from California. And the Yanks only went and bloody won...

I’m in a particularly good mood at the moment as I’ve just had a quote in for my forthcoming book from Russell Norman:
“Captivating, impeccably researched and endlessly entertaining. Henry Jeffreys embraces his subject like a scholar but with wry humour and a novelist’s knack for storytelling. It’s the best book on wine I have read.”
Phew! For readers who don’t know that name he’s a restaurant industry stalwart, the man behind Polpo and now Brutto in Farringdon, and sometime TV presenter. But...