GUTTER & STARS: LOOKING UP


Margaret Rand visits journalist-turned-winemaker Chris Wilson, who is making fine English still wines from a tiny cellar in a Cambridge windmill


octagonal yards. Yes, the winery is octagonal. It’s in the basement of a windmill; the ceiling is 6ft (2m) high, give or take a bit, and the walls slope gently inward. When it was a working mill, the basement, says Chris Wilson—who is winemaker, viticultural consultant, head of marketing and indeed everything else at G&S—“it was basically a dampproof course for the rest of the mill. It was too damp down here to store documents, though a descendent of William French, who built it, says he used to store wine here in the 1980s.” There are four floors above this, but they’re let to somebody else; so, Wilson rattles around in this brick octagon with minimal plumbing, some daylight, and no heating or air-con whatever. It’s a rather wonderful place. And the wines have names like The Dark End of the Street or Love Steals Us from Loneliness. The names are taken from music or literature: A Handful of Dust is obvious, but most are aimed at, shall we say, a different demographic from me. Or at least different tastes in music. Wine is a performance art, is it not? First-growth châteaux


I


far prefer you to taste, by appointment, at their châteaux— where you can be flattered by the grandeur and the sense of occasion—than be handed an anonymous glass at a blind tasting in a dreary room where the wine might or might not outperform its neighbors. And if you can’t have the theater inherent in porticoes and turrets and rows and rows of immaculate barrels, the octagonal basement of a 19th-century windmill is not a bad alternative. It certainly beats the out-of- town industrial unit that was the alternative when Wilson decided to set up an urban winery.


The first thing you need when you have a winery is grapes. At first Wilson went looking for them; now growers come to him. But he doesn’t want a purely transactional relationship. Growers can have their name on the label, and they work together on viticulture and picking


Opposite: Chris Wilson, not only the founder but “winemaker, viticultural consultant, head of marketing and indeed everything else at G&S.”


t is,” I said to my friend Clare, with whom I had a coffee after visiting Gutter & Stars, “about from here to that wall.” She burst out laughing; I was quite close to the wall. “It” is Gutter & Stars’ urban winery, all 38 square yards (32 sq m) of it—though they should probably be


A bijou winery in a windmill Why did he, though? That’s another story. There he was, on the sports desk at the Daily Mirror, and he moved to lifestyle stuff—and that was what “flicked the switch of interest in wine,” he says. He did some WSET exams and then a three-year BSc at Plumpton; then he moved to Cambridge and had a family and wrote about wine. But he wanted to create something tangible. In 2018–19, he started to look for a site to make wine. He looked at industrial units, but they are mostly on the far edges of cities, and he wanted to be inside. Cambridge is a small city where everybody cycles or walks; it’s flat, and windy. Which is why a windmill was built here in 1847. He looked at it, and in the lockdown of 2020 the landlord called him and said he was redeveloping the whole site and the windmill would be ready at the end of September: Take it now or never. “It was time to take a risk,” says Wilson. It’s small, certainly, but it’s big enough for some barrels (all secondhand bar one), a couple of tiny steel tanks, a tiny egg-shaped plastic fermenter, and some bottles. There is a four-head bottling machine that fills 10–15 bottles per minute, so about 900 in a morning; a pump the size of a small terrier, for moving wine from barrel to barrel; and steps down through a door just wide enough to admit a barrel lengthways. They have to go in and go out empty, because of the weight. It’s bijou, and it brings people in. Wilson doesn’t offer


regular tasting hours and doesn’t want to have a shop, but you can visit by appointment—and people do. But the first thing you need when you have a winery is grapes. Wilson’s studies at Plumpton had provided contacts, and


Duncan McNeill—who knows more about growing grapes in England, and especially eastern England, than most people— told him to talk to Missing Gate vineyard in Essex. It had its first crop but had no buyers yet. Missing Gate is in Essex’s Crouch Valley, a tiny region making a name for still wines; McNeill had advised on planting there. And that was Wilson’s first wine. He still buys their grapes. More followed. At first Wilson went looking for grapes; now growers come to him. But he doesn’t want a purely transactional relationship. Growers can have their name on the label, and they work together on viticulture and picking, and Wilson supplies bins and collects the grapes, largely to avoid having growers show up at his (tiny) door at the wrong moment.


Ambition, honesty, and no showing off His winemaking style is pretty classic: used barriques for fermentation, except for that brace of tiny steel tanks, the plastic egg, and an open-topped plastic fermenter; aging in oak. There’s


THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025 | 161


All photography courtesy of Gutter & Stars


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170  |  Page 171  |  Page 172  |  Page 173  |  Page 174  |  Page 175  |  Page 176  |  Page 177  |  Page 178  |  Page 179  |  Page 180  |  Page 181  |  Page 182  |  Page 183  |  Page 184  |  Page 185  |  Page 186  |  Page 187  |  Page 188  |  Page 189  |  Page 190  |  Page 191  |  Page 192  |  Page 193  |  Page 194  |  Page 195  |  Page 196  |  Page 197  |  Page 198  |  Page 199  |  Page 200  |  Page 201  |  Page 202  |  Page 203  |  Page 204  |  Page 205  |  Page 206  |  Page 207  |  Page 208  |  Page 209  |  Page 210  |  Page 211  |  Page 212  |  Page 213  |  Page 214  |  Page 215  |  Page 216  |  Page 217  |  Page 218  |  Page 219  |  Page 220