I met with Sam and Ben from Everflhyt Vineyard as they mark 10 years since planting their first vines in Sussex. We covered everything from how sparkling wine is made (in the simplest terms) to frost-fighting with candles, family life on the land, and why English wine is having a real moment.

 

 

To kick off the interview, can you tell us about your new product, Wylde?

We wanted to create a product aimed at a portion of the market that our topmost premium range wasn’t addressing. The regular price point of English sparkling wines reflects its quality and all the immense hard work that goes into making it. But we feel strongly about getting English sparkling wine into more people’s hands, because we know how special it is and we want to be able to share it as widely as possible. So Wylde was developed as a way of lowering the price point without lowering the quality.

 

What is your five year old explanation for how sparkling wine is made?

You grow the grapes on the vine. You pick the grapes. The grapes get taken to the winery where they’re pressed. Then the juice comes out. You put the juice into a tank or a barrel, and then you add the magic ingredient: yeast. This turns the sugar in the juice into alcohol (and this is what what makes mummy and daddy very happy). Then you leave it for four years(!) so the flavours get stronger and tastier. Then after waiting all those years you transfer it into bottles for the fizz to develop, and this means waiting another two years. So by the time you take your first sip of sparkling wine its already seven years old!

 

What is the story behind the name Everflyht?

Well understandably if you were starting up an English wine business making sparkling wine you’d feel obliged to make it feel as close to champagne as possible, because that was the brand category that you were going into. But as time has gone on the English wine industry has evolved into its own drinks category. And so rather than go with the traditional champagne label and branding, all that flowery ornate stuff, we wanted to create a brand that felt really contemporary. But we wanted it to have connection to Sussex too, rather than something abstract and out of context. So Everflyht refers to the six V’s which make up the feather on our logo which represent the six Martlet birds that are on the Sussex flag. The Martlets are meant to engender adventurousness, industry and perseverance, everything you need in wine making. But whenever they were drawn they were never drawn with feet. Maybe because they were always moving too quickly. So it’s said they were always in ever-flight. Hence, Everflyht.

 

 

Tell us about the Ellis family story and how you came to be on this land.

We were on a family holiday in Thailand when the Icelandic volcano – whose name no one can pronounce – erupted. We were told our flight back home was cancelled and we were expecting them to see it had been rescheduled to next week, but we were told it would actually be at least nine to ten weeks. Our children were all under ten at the time and we had already been away for three weeks and we both had jobs we needed to get back to. But they were serious – there were no flights. So we stayed for another week, until Sam had a bright idea and asked that as the dust was only over Europe, couldn’t we just fly the other way? And they said yes. Not quite sure why they didn’t tell us that before. But regardless we went from Thailand to Singapore to Perth in Australia. We were only meant to stay in Perth for three days just as a layover but we all absolutely loved it, and we ended up staying for three weeks. We went up and down the Margaret River visiting all the vineyards and there was a moment where Sam was sipping some Australia fizz, I was enjoying a nice Pinot noir and the girls were running up and down the vines and everyone was just so happy. And I turned to Sam and said “we could do this.”And she, somewhat foolishly, said yes. When we finally got home we found this land within two weeks and everything fell into place.

 

What does it mean to be a family business?

We have three girls, currently 23, 20 and 18. During the pandemic we kept everything in house and tried to do everything ourselves, so all of us were out there day and night doing all the many, many different jobs for a full season. After that, the girls turned to us and said never again. But recently I met an Italian woman who was 28 and she was also one of three daughters living on a vineyard, and they all went away to university to seek their own fortunes, because they didn’t want anything to do with it either. But all three of them have since come back now. So essentially, never say never. Saying that, all our girls have worked behind the bar and done the meet and greets, and our eldest Georgia does a fabulous job with all our social media. We know we can lean on them when we need and we always pull together as a family when whenever we’re in a pinch.

 

What is your favourite part of the job, and your least favourite part?

I hate frost watch. It’s an absolute killer. When the vines start budding they’re very delicate and any gardener or farmer will know that frost is a baby plant’s worst enemy, so you have to protect them. But we have a lot of young vine buds to protect. Even though they can withstand a good amount of cold, there comes a point where they can’t. So we have an app that keeps a constant reading on the temperature, and if it drops down below the lowest threshold, around -3 degrees, then you have to go and get the bougies. Bougies is French for candle and that’s what they are, big candles. You have to lay them out every ten yards all along the vines, along every single row, and then you light them with a blowtorch. I burnt my eyebrow off doing it once. We have about 800 so it takes a long time to light them all, and obviously it’s coldest at night time so usually you’re setting them up in the dark and cold, but once they’re lit it looks like something out of Game of Thrones. Last year we had the Telegraph come to film it, and in the aerial shot you can see hundreds of bright flames glowing through the vines; it’s undeniably beautiful even if it is incredibly annoying.

As for our favourite bit, apart from the drinking of course, is springtime. In spring, when all the buds burst and all the leaves come out, for just a month, the whole vineyard goes this truly amazing electric green. We call it a green haze. It’s such a stark contrast from winter, and you just stand there and look across and all you can see is a wave of green everywhere you look. It’s so stunning that we’ve never been able to do it justice in a photograph.

 

Can you tell us about your regenerative viticulture approach and how it’s shaped the way you’ve designed your vineyard?

So Luke our GM is massively involved in this aspect of Everflyht. When we first hired him it was something we agreed was very important. We always wanted to create a vineyard that not just for the vines, but is meant for everyone and everything that shares the space. It’s not just a space for growing vines, its the home of all the creatures above and below ground. In that line of thinking we got more into soil, learning how to take care of the soil so it’s as healthy as possible. We use a cover crop system, so we alternate every other row and every two years we grow a different crop that contains specific nutrients like nitrogen that the soil may be deficient in. We let that grow for a year, and then cut it back and leave it on the ground to decompose back into the earth, pouring all those nutrients back into the soil for vines to be planted into next year. It’s great for the bugs and the birds and we know this is a sign that the vines will be far more healthy and full of life.

The idea is that the more closely you pay attention to the whole environment rather than just the vines, the easier it is to spot why a vine might be struggling, and rather than just chucking chemicals on it you can adjust things naturally, and skip the nasty side effects of artificial chemicals. We’ve also planted lots of new trees which act as wind brakes and have made the biodiversity explode. In the summer the air is full of butterflies and bees. And we have lots of bats now which is great because they eat the bad bugs and not the good bugs, which is another incredible example of how this regenerative approach makes a natural holistic sort of sense. And rather than negatively effecting the overall output and productivity, the vines are so much more healthy and robust that it’s a huge return on investment. It may take longer to establish things with this approach, but this means the vines end up being much stronger. After so long doing this we now know that we’re not just producers, we’re stewards of this land. Things just work when you work with nature rather than against it.

 

A high quality, locally made, family owned product is highly valuable in a world of cheap convenience and AI automation. What does it mean to you to that you are now part of a small group of humans keeping an old human tradition alive?

It means an awful lot. As we’ve progressed more with our winemaking we’ve embraced more of the older traditions. We’ve got some amazing old French oak barrels that are pretty ancient. They’ve been reused several times for Burgundy and Bordeaux, and we love that we can allow them to serve another lifetime. And we’ve also got these clay amphora, basically giant clay pots, and that’s how the Georgians used to ferment their wine, in these clay pots buried under the ground. And now we get to use them and it gives a completely different flavour profile to the wine. All these subtle influences are infused into the wine and it’s amazing how much you can taste the difference it makes. It feels incredible to be bringing these parts of the past into our modern practices, and we learn from the past in order to improve for the future.

 

There’s an unavoidable question of climate change tucked within everything you’ve built here, because growing grapes here wasn’t possible a generation ago. In the process of starting an English vineyard what have you learned about adaptability and taking opportunities?

You’re absolutely right that what we’re able to produce now we would never have been able to do before. The local climate in England has indeed got warmer, but that’s not the only thing making all this possible, there are two other factors. The first is the science has come a long way. Nowadays viticulturalists are able to graft roots that are more adapted to our particular cooler climate onto pre-existing vines. So whereas before we were limited to only a handful of grape varieties that could grow in England, now we’re growing a much larger variety of vines because we can clone them and graft them onto other vines. The other factor is the quality of people. Over the last few decades the growing industry here has attracted talent from all over the world, people that are dedicated to making the best possible wine are seeing how England is one of the new hot spots where this is now possible.

Honestly, there’s not much we can do about climate change personally, but it’s our sincere hope that our regenerative practices are hopefully making things better, not worse. In a way, even though this opportunity was given to us by climate change, now we’re using it to explore ways to fight it.

 

We know the work can be gruelling and tough, but are there any funny stories from your time here in the vineyard?

When we were first digging all the drainage channels we discovered in quite a dramatic way that previous historical owners on the land had put clay pipes underground for drainage. While digging we accidentally cracked one of the pipes with a plough, and because this hundreds of year old pipe had been blocked for so long the water pressure had built up so much that the pressure exploded out of the crack and hundreds of year old muddy water sludge started gushing out of the ground and Luke actually fell in and got stuck and had to be rescued by clinging onto the arm of a digger. Sorry Luke, hope you don’t mind us giggling at your expense!

 

Do you eat some of the grapes before they’re made into wine?

Of course! You have to. To get a reading for how far along the grapes are in their sweetness. You’re popping them in your mouth all the time as you’re walking along. A lot of them will still be quite tart though. And you certainly won’t run out. We worked out one year that we had a rough estimate of 35 million individual grapes out there. 

 

What do you hope for the future between Babble and Everflyht?

We’re just so excited to see people drinking and enjoying Wylde this summer. We can already picture everyone drinking out on the terrace in the sun, and it’s just such a special feeling knowing that this delicious drink wasn’t shipped over from another country but literally grown and made basically in your backyard. Other than that we’re as proud as ever to be partnered with such a wonderful local venue and we look forward to growing together, one local business supporting another.