feature / Albion Awakes / Hambledon Vineyard
“We were the fi rst of the top brands to get into Non-Vintage. We never did Vintage,” said Kellett. The spectacular 2018 will, however, be released as a Vintage Blanc des Blancs, in magnums and Jéroboams. “It will be the pinnacle. We’ll make it every fi ve or seven years.” There’ll also be a Blanc de Meunier and a Blanc des Blancs NV Classic Cuvée, maybe in 2023 and 2024
The food will be light, using the produce of a kitchen garden, less complex than the Manoir cooking, and serving, Kellett hopes, a lot of people. He’s expecting tens of thousands of visitors each year. “We’re coming from the point of view of never wanting a chef to having to embrace it all. We could have contracted it out, but the whole point is selling the wine.” Total investment so far? Kellett adds it up in his head.
“If you include buying the place, it’s probably just over £20 million; between 20 million and 25 million. A lot more than I thought it would be.” He had to refinance in a hurry a little while ago, after an investor pulled out, which was a bit hairy. His earlier divorce sounds as if it was expensive, too. There have been times, one might infer, when money has been short. He was, as I’ve mentioned, in investment banking. “I left
because—here are so many levels of answers. I’d worked in the food industry first and qualified as an accountant; I’d been general manager of a yogurt factory. I was 28 or 29 when I went into the City. I studied food and drink companies. It was a big thing then—raw material companies and what they cost, and from there to the selling price. So, I was really into gross margins, all the details that public companies never tell you. What most City analysts do is take a press release, look at the sales growth, talk to the CEO, and build a spreadsheet. But because I’d been in food and drink companies, it was easy to get to know things they didn’t know. They’d never been near a food company. We were very much for the long term.
“Then hedge funds arrived. They think in weeks, whereas
Nestlé, for example, thinks in decades. The more grip they had on the City, the less important I was. I might be right, but it would take eight years to see. The chattering classes ended up deciding the share price.”
With his skills no longer so important, he decided to go back to making something, “instead of talking about other people making things. And a company I had designed, and a product I’d designed, is more gratifying than talking about Unilever’s share price.” Nevertheless, “in any period less than a decade, or a few
decades, it’s much less financially rewarding doing this. I was getting seven figures, and this has cost me a fortune. But the value I’m creating for the family here is multiples greater.” Maintaining control is inevitably difficult once investors are involved. In 2010, he had about 40. Then he bought some out in 2018 and reckons there are about 20 now. Raising capital for the visitor center and the like has upped the number a bit. “We own our stake through a family trust, with a view to creating intergenerationality.” His children are 28, 25, and 20 from his first marriage; the second brood are infants. “My youngest daughter has a niece four months older than her.”
Beauty, rarity, reliability Let’s talk about the wines. One of Kellett’s focuses (he has many, as you might have noticed) is how wine is treated in the winery. He won’t use pumps except a very gentle peristaltic pump to get the wines to the blending tanks, because pumping means torsion, and torsion breaks the polymer chains and affects mouthfeel. Electricity has an affect on wine’s chemical structure, too, so he’s greatly reduced the impact of electricity on the juice. And he bought massively expensive Coquard PAI presses after going to Champagne to taste the juice from different ones. “The clarity of the vins clairs is the limiting factor in precision. If you have extraneous matter in the juice, the wine will be much less energetic. So, we press as gently as man knows how.” And the settling system—by gravity to chilled tank, over 24 hours—“is the most advanced settling system the world knows. That’s a bold statement to make, and I’m not at the point of shouting about it, because I don’t want to be braggish.” Jestin is in charge of the winemaking. “He’s humble, generous, fine. He’s like a Franciscan or a Benedictine monk. Anyhow…” Anyhow, indeed. There is a Première Cuvée and a Classic
Cuvée. “We were the first of the top brands to get into Non- Vintage. We never did Vintage. We took the first two years and didn’t bottle them, putting them all into reserves. It was painful financially, but Vintage Champagne is better not because of the aging but because you get a great year every three years or so.” The spectacular 2018 will, however, be released as a Vintage— their first ever. “Blanc des blancs grown on chalk: a pièce de résistance.” It will be released in magnums and Jéroboams. The aim is to give Classic Cuvée three years on the lees after six months in tank, and they might get that up to four years’ lees. The big expansion of the vineyard came in 2018, so with more wine coming on-stream, they might “stretch the cellar a bit.” It’s tense, finely focused through every layer of depth, very pure and taut, with a whisper of bitterness on the finish. It has 4.5g/l of dosage; the dosage trials have been thorough, with three
152 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023
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