Back to Nature's basics

Jo Rodgers talks to small business owners in her adopted home county of East Sussex and beyond, about how the land around them has inspired their work

- Jo Rodgers

PETER HALL warned me about the drive to Breaky Bottom vineyard in rural East Sussex. ‘Don’t worry if you get lost,’ he said over the telephone the week before. ‘It’s fine; we’ll just assume you’ll be late.’

I was late. In a hollow of the South Downs National Park, combed by Champagne-style vines, a flint farmhouse is flanked by a vegetable garden, a pond full of tadpoles and 35 nest boxes for barn, tawny and little owls. The first vines here were planted in 1974, after Mr Hall saw an advertisement for Seyval Blanc in a gardening magazine, and they’re still there, beneath fields with a hobby flock of Suffolk-Mule sheep, separated from the English Channel by a few undulating green hills. The wine writer Oz Clarke has called it the most beautiful vineyard in Britain.

Breaky Bottom produces between zero and 15,000 bottles a year: zero because, sometimes, an entire crop is lost to flooding, caused by soil erosion and hedge removal on neighbouring farms, or is eaten by pheasants released for commercial shoots. ‘I’m not against pheasants,’ explains Mr Hall, ‘or shooting for the pot, but we do have a responsibility to the land.’ The winemaker and his artist wife, Christina, allow the growth of tall grasses in their pastures, which act as a shelter for the rodents that feed the owls. The sheep are let loose to graze in the vineyards before first growth, enriching the soil with their manure.