Part 2:
Volunteers, vintages and winemaking
How do you recruit volunteers to help at vintage time for Lost in a Field?
Glad you asked! Alongside launching the wine project, I started a club called The Lost Vineyard Preservation Society, which people can join by signing up on our website. The name is, of course, a nod to The Kinks album, whichâbeing from the late â60s, also nods to the era when many of our oldest vineyards were planted. What struck me early on was the odd disconnect between most English wine brands and the one thing we have in abundance in the South of England, people! This new wave of English winemaking wasnât just borrowing the grape varieties and styles of Champagne, it was also adopting its corporate culture, which in the UK manifests as a red-trouser-wearing hedge fund manager, the vibe being polished, privileged, and exclusive.
Back in 2021, and still today, I felt there was a different story to tell, one of vineyards over brands, of dirty hands and muddy wellies over corporate gloss and branding. So, from the very beginning, we built into the DNA of Lost in a Field a strong connection to real people: the growers, our trade customers, and the final drinkers. Everyone is welcome to join us on this journey of discovery and vineyard rescue, whether thatâs by coming to harvest parties or helping out during the year. We coined the phrase Lost Under the Stars for our vineyard camping weekends. And we make them special, thereâs a pop-up camp kitchen, BBQ, fire pit, and yes, even the obligatory fairy lights. After a hard dayâs work in the vineyard, we all sit around the fire drinking magnums of Frolic pĂ©t-nat. Thereâs a real appetite for this kind of connection. Sure, there are plenty of downsides to growing grapes and making wine in this country, not least the cost, but one huge advantage is our proximity to a large market and our customers. Through The Lost Vineyard Preservation Society, weâre building a community of people who feel personally connected to the wine and the brand. And for a tiny producer like us, with no real marketing or advertising budget, that gives us a real edge over the bigger companies, because what they gain in scale, they lose in the personal touch. They canât do what we do: be small, be friendly, be welcoming, be inclusive. The clubâs logo is a Brown Betty teapot with a Union Jack lid and a swirl of vine leaves (not steam) rising from the spout. Itâs meant to fun, approachable, and conveying a strong sense of English tradition, like the vineyards and the wine.
How many tons of grapes did you harvest in 2023? And 24?
In 2023 we picked 3.6 tonnes from five vineyards in four different English counties, stretching from Herefordshire in the West to Kent in the East. Smaller vintages such as 2024, where we picked 1.6 tonnes, present additional difficulties as youâre nudging up close to what is logistically capable of being processed in a winery. Some years such as 2022, when we had a tiny crop of a couple of hundred kilos from one of our lost vineyards in the corner of a Devon orchard, I call in favours from friends who have basket presses capable of processing such small volumes (thanks to Balbina Leeming at Bsixtwelve that year). In 2024 the challenge was to get enough fruit to simply fill the press at the winery. In a year when the only two vineyards we could get fruit from were in Herefordshire and Kent, it meant that it was my job to arrange the picks on consecutive days so that that fruit could be brought into the winery over one weekend so we could fill a press load. This meant that I drove the harvest van a total of 1000 miles in a 72 hour period. The glamorous reality of small scale winemaking using heritage varieties from rare and spread out old vineyards.
Do you sort in the winery?
It’s not really practical to sort grapes when they arrive at the winery, due to the picks coming in at random times from multiple vineyards and in tiny quantities. Everything goes straight into one large tank for co-fermentation. Thatâs why we focus on sorting in the vineyard, during the pick itself. Itâs important to me to be present at every harvest, even if the pickers arenât my volunteers but friends and family of the grower. I have one simple rule for pickers: if you wouldnât put it in your mouth, donât put it in the bucket. I encourage people to use their snips to trim off green shoulders from under-ripe bunches, gently tap the bunch to spot hidden botrytis, and even pick off individual berries that look rotten or unhealthy. This kind of detailed picking can be slow, often taking 50% longer than a standard harvest, and sometimes I have to carry that extra cost when using paid pickers. But I try to make the experience enjoyable. I bring a small camp kitchen with tea, coffee, biscuits, and cake. So even if it takes all day to harvest just a tonne or two, people can still enjoy the experience.
Do you decide on the blend in advance, or do you see what Nature provides and work with that?
A bit of both. We know in advance the main varieties weâll build the wine on, a majority of Madeleine Angevine with Reichensteiner in a supporting role, along with any other aromatics that we feel will fit in and we have access to that year, which can include Huxelrebe, Schönburger or MĂŒller-Thurgau. Then thereâs the red we need to make the final wine pink, our preference being the Triomphe dâAlsace we get from an organic walled vineyard in Hampshire. Being a red fleshed teinturier variety you get more colour for your kilo, meaning we require less red fruit and avoid excessive tannin.
With so many different components in the wine and grapes being harvested at different times, how do you go about making it?
In a way, thatâs the easy bit, the best way to describe the Frolic pĂ©t-nat is that itâs a field blend of field blends! Within individual vineyards we have different varieties, mostly white but some red, what we pick all together and co-ferment together. But weâre doing that from different vineyards from different counties, all in the same vintage. Unlike a traditional blend where varieties or blocks are kept separate, then possibly blended after fermentation, we pick it all together and ferment it all together. Which is both exciting and nerve wracking in equal measure, because despite our best intuition and hunches leading up to harvest as to what we are picking, you never know what the result will be until you open that bottle in the Spring, what I call the annual squeaky bum moment!
Describe what happens to the grapes from reception at the winery to end of fermentation.
In a year when everything goes to plan, we pick the red Triomphe dâAlsace a week before we start picking the aromatic whites. The Triomphe is put in a small open fermenter, gently stomped then left for a week, after which itâs pressed and added to the main tank of whites. We do our best to sort in the vineyard and bring clean fruit into the vineyard, but in high disease pressure years weâll retain the option to add a small sulphur addition to the press tray. After that there are no additions or additives in the winery, we control everything using time and temperature. We use the intermission method for making pĂ©t-nat, as opposed to the interruption method, meaning that we keep a proportion of fresh juice aside that we freeze, then we ferment the main tank dry, during which time we drop and remove the tartrates and carry out multiple rackings to ensure the sediment in the bottle is a fine line of sand, not thick, muddy or rocky. In January or February, we thaw the frozen juice, add it to the tank, wait for the fermentation to start again, then bottle. Using this method weâre able to be precise about the level of sugar that the wine has going into bottle, which determines the final pressure, as well as making sure the wine is tartrate stable, tartrate crystals often being the major cause of gushing. Another significant advantage of the intermission method is that we donât have to disgorge, as weâve been able to control all those elements such as sediment, sugar, pressure and tartrates, which might lead to the necessity of disgorging.
What are the advantages (and disadvantages) of working naturally?
At the very first Real Wine Fair in Borough Market in 2011 (then the Natural Wine Fair) I remember Eric Narioo saying that the wines represented werenât good because they were natural, the winemakers were trying to make them good by working naturally. This gets to the very heart of the matter for me, if you work hard to eschew additives, adjustments and chemicals in the vineyard and winery you can create a wine that is alive and that your stomach recognises as being nutritious. Once your stomach gets involved in your drinking decisions thereâs no turning back. This is the goal of making wine naturally, to achieve a level of heightened deliciousness, charm and character that leapfrog conventional wine and open up new vistas of flavour, drinkability and pleasure. At least thatâs the aim! The disadvantages are self-evident, by giving up the control afforded by chemicals and technical props, you remove the safety net, and results can be unpredictable, sometimes undesirable, and at worst, undrinkable.
Pet Nats are designed to be drunk young normally. Would you agree or do you think that the wines benefit from some extra ageing?
Thereâs nuance here, you definitely want to be drinking your pĂ©t-nats young, they are not a wine style designed to age and improve, but my experience from over a decade of making pĂ©t-nat is that they usually start to come into their own about twelve months after the grapes were picked, then sit in an optimum drinking window for another 18 to 24 months. When very young they can still appear a little yeasty, a bit like what an unfinished wine tastes like from a barrel or tank in a winey, a character which fades quickly, but doesnât really dissipate until about six months after bottling. My advice is drink young, but a few monthsâ patience can pay off.
How has the Frolic Pet Nat been received in the wine critico-sphere?
People have said nice things about the wine. I donât send the wine to many journalists, and I definitely donât enter it into competitions. The same week we released the inaugural vintage in July 2022 Jancis Robinson devoted her entire FT Weekend Magazine wine column to the Lost in a Field project and the wine, which may have been a first for the maiden vintage of any wine, let alone a wine no one had ever heard of let alone tasted. I probably reached peak press at that moment and donât want to push my luck. I do think itâs important to have a third party description of the wine on the website, rather than me just blowing my own trumpet, so once a year I make a pilgrimage to visit Tamlyn Currin and we taste that yearâs release, often in her garden or over lunch, and with whichever friend or family member happens to have dropped in that day. Tam gets English wine, and she gets pĂ©t-nat and writes wonderfully evocative tasting notes, which is what tends to go on the website. Last year I took my last bottle of 2021 and shared the first ever – and last ever – vertical of 21, 22 and 23 for Tam, which was fascinating, not least to see how well the older wines were showing.
The UK Wine Scene
Tell us about the Brit-Nat tastings you have been organising and how this style of wine has grown.
For the last couple of years, Iâve put on an event to gather all the English and Welsh pĂ©t-nats together under one roof, and called it BRĂT-NAT. The first one was in 2022, and we had 37 wines from 25 producers, last year we had 53 wines from 35 producers, which is a pretty big increase, albeit off a small base. Up until now these events have been on a small scale, and trade only, but Iâm considering something more ambitious for 2026, perhaps with a consumer element, more like a BRĂT-NAT festival.
There are two main types of producers who are driving this growth. One is younger people, often without the cash or capital to buy a vineyard or build a winery, but they can afford to buy a couple of tonnes of grapes, some bottles and caps and start their winemaking journey with pĂ©t-nat. The cash flow from the quick release time doesnât harm either. The second category weâre seeing is new wineries, family owned, often on a farm or part of a larger property, where the owners are making more mainstream styles, traditional method sparkling and table wines, but are having a go at pĂ©t-nat to provide something different for their cellar door or online customers. This is an interesting subset, as itâs not coming from a strictly natural wine approach, itâs more curiosity as to experimentation with different wine styles. I expect to see growth in both categories, not least because in an increasingly crowded and competitive market, selling direct to customers is often the most viable business model.
Special mention must also be made of Marks & Spencer who submitted their 2023 pĂ©t-nat to last yearâs BRĂT-NAT event. This was not only M&Sâs first foray into English pĂ©t-nat, but their first pĂ©t-nat ever, from anywhere. They produced 9000 bottles of the 2023, which overnight made them the UKâs largest pĂ©t-nat producer, and Iâm reliably informed that they sold out in a matter of months and have followed up with a 2024. This success didnât go unnoticed by the buyers of other major UK retailers, and I expect some of them to bring out their own pĂ©t-nats, most likely from other countries than the UK, in the next year.
Not all the wines shown are technically pet nat? Can you describe the variations on that theme?
Thereâs some misunderstanding, even within the trade, as to the differences between the two main approaches, the interruption method and the intermission method. It helps to think about the two original inspirations, thereâs MĂ©thode Ancestral from France and Col Fondo from Italy. The former is a traditional interruption method, you interrupt the initial fermentation by bottling, which contrasts with traditional Col Fondo, where the dry base wine from the previous harvest has fresh juice added to it from the current harvest. The intermission method, which is the way the majority of English and Welsh pĂ©t-nat is made (in last yearâs BRĂT-NAT tasting there were 31 intermission and 19 interruption) was pioneered in South Australia by producers such as James Erskine at Jauma and Brendan Keys at BK Wines. It takes inspiration from both MĂ©thode Ancestral and Col Fondo methods but adapts the process so that it can be controlled in a warm environment where natural ferments run fast, and crucially, so that bottling can be moved out of the busy harvest period.
Thereâs a high correlation between producers using the interruption method and those that disgorge. Conversely, those using the intermission method rarely, if ever, have to disgorge. To get really geeky for a second, within the group of those who disgorge, I see two very different camps, those who intentionally disgorge, in other words it was their intention from the start to always disgorge, and those who have to remedially disgorge, often when something goes wrong, such as excessive sediment, tartrates, pressure, gushing or a combination thereof. And it is interruption method, remedially disgorged pĂ©t-nats that are often the least successful wines.
The easiest way to think about it is that pĂ©t-nat is the overall style, within which there are various methods used by winemakers to achieve that outcome, the main two being interruption and intermission. Although the truth is that there are as many nuances and variations on these methods as there are winemakers, and often the choice between the two is driven by resources and equipment in the winery as much as any other factor. For the consumer, recognising a wine in a clear sparkling-weight bottle, sealed with a crown cap, looking a little cloudy, and often with a colourful label, signals that itâs a pĂ©t-nat. More important than how it was made is whether itâs fruity, delicious, and wonât end up decorating their kitchen ceiling.
More generally, have you noticed improvements in farming practice in UK vineyards?
Apart from some small pockets of innovation, such as Davenport in East Sussex (organic), Ancre Hill in Monmouthshire (biodynamic), and Woodfine in Buckinghamshire (regenerative), the general situation leaves a lot of room for improvement. The biggest impediment holding back English wine is not weather and climate, although that plays its part, is viticulture. Traditional method sparkling accounts for over 75% of all wine produced in England and Wales, and while thatâs less than a few years ago, it is still the dominant style, and vineyard practices, and vineyard culture, is still more aligned with the requirements for making sparkling wine than table wine. This includes growing for high yields, acceptance of low sugar levels, and probably most significantly, a culture that wonât pay the price of dramatically lowering yields to obtain higher quality. An example of this is that itâs rare to see green harvesting in UK vineyards (the dropping of fruit mid-summer to reduce yield and increase quality). We saw the effects of this in 2023, when the season was set up for a bumper crop, almost no one dropped fruit, and the country ended up with a record harvest of over 21 million bottles (the previous record in 2018 of 16 million) with grapes which had sugars that were so low that they were deemed only suitable for sparkling base. I expect that the commercial motivation to diversify away from traditional method sparkling, as stocks build up and the market tightens, will see greater interest in table wine, and improved viticultural practices will have to follow. Producers such as Danbury Ridge in Essex point the way forward in taking table wine production seriously.
Compared to if you were making a traditional method of sparkling wine, do you think the style and quality of grapes selected should be different for making quality pet nats? (riper, more aromatic?)
Personally, I like to use aromatic varieties for pĂ©t-nat, both for my wines in England and Australia. A bit like skin contact, orange wines, working in a low / no sulphur environment can increase the oxidative characteristics, and having aromatic varieties adds some treble to that bass. Mostly though, I think pĂ©t-nats are the best example of fun wine not fine wine, made to be drink in the here and now, with little pretension or ceremony, and if youâre making fun wine then aromatic varieties, in my opinion, ramp up the fun element.
Grapes for pĂ©t-nat donât necessarily need to be riper than for traditional method sparkling, but thereâs a key difference. Unlike with traditional method, where long lees ageing, multi-vintage blending and reserve wine can help smooth out the rough edges of less-than-ripe years, pĂ©t-nat is made from a single vintage and released young, so the grapes must be fully flavour-ripe, as thereâs nowhere to hide. This ripeness must be balanced with another important factor: to avoid common pitfalls of low- or no-sulphur winemaking, such as mousiness, itâs crucial to have low pH in both the juice and the wine. Thereâs a correlation between lower potential alcohol, earlier harvested, higher-acid grapes, and achieving that desirable low pH. So they have to be ripe, just not too ripe!
What are the challenges of making wine in the UK (besides weather). Are grapes expensive compared to other countries?
The primary challenge is cost, followed by a lack of industry infrastructure. To put it in perspective, in Australia, I can purchase organic certified grapes for the equivalent of ÂŁ500 per tonne. In the UK, I pay between ÂŁ1,500 and ÂŁ2,000 per tonne for my heritage varieties, while Chardonnay for sparkling can cost around ÂŁ2,500 and Pinot Noir ÂŁ3,000 or more. While these are not direct comparisons, they give a sense of the price disparity. For pĂ©t-nat, the grapes are the biggest input cost. The second largest cost is glass bottles. In Australia, lightweight sparkling glass costs the equivalent of ÂŁ440 per 1,000 bottles, while in the UK, it’s closer to ÂŁ650, significantly more expensive. The higher cost extends to all your other dry goods as well.
A significant issue is the lack of industry infrastructure, especially compared to major wine-producing countries like France, Italy, or Australia. This results in fewer small to medium-sized wineries, fewer contract wineries, and less opportunity for newcomers to enter the industry on a small scale. I expect to see growth in this area, as there is real potential for someone to set up a custom crush facility for small-batch winemakers. Maybe even in an urban winery setting, Iâm just saying – watch this space!
*
Interested in finding out more about the Lost in a Field wines? Contact us directly:
shop@lescaves.co.uk |  sales@lescaves.co.uk | 01483 538820