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| Trouble brewing: process tanks and pallets of wine bottles at Brookers Farm, September 2021... |
As Cuxton and Luddesdown residents recently found out, a big chunk of their ancient and historic parishes have now been unilaterally renamed the “Silverhand Estate”. It’s a name that means nothing locally, one that appears to have been plucked out of the air by some computer game-fixated marketing wonk working for our local mega-vineyard and wannabe tourist-trap operator, MDCV/Vineyard Farms.
It seems that Vineyard Farms/MDCV Ltd. are now trying to position the Silverhand Estate brand in the market place, via a deal with Marks and Spencer that sees the launch of M&S’s own “Bramble Hill” brand of sparkling wine.
"Bramble Hill" sadly just seems to be another made-up marketing name (unless it's a passing nod to Bramble HALL Farm in Oakenden Road). Other local wineries, such as Meopham Valley, seem proud to advertise their links with the local community, as can be seen in their branding. But then, of course, MDCV/VF seem to be much less keen on the concept of community involvement...
As the May 23rd edition of the Daily Express tells us (as part of the blurb for its “Deal of the Day”):
“Most English wines are made via the traditional method where their bubbles are produced during a second fermentation in the bottle it’s sold in, similar to champagne and Cava.
However, Bramble Hill has its bubbles made in a pressurised tank and then bottled so that it’s extra dry. (It’s called the “Charmat Method ”…)
It’s made in the
Sue Daniels, winemaker
for M&S said: “We know families across the country will be looking for the
perfect way to raise a toast to the Queen on her Platinum Jubilee, and what
better way than with a great-value fizz with all the delicious floral aromas of
the British countryside. And at a fraction of the price of other English
sparkling wines, it really is
So basically, it’s inauthentic fizz labelled with an inauthentic brand name made on an equally inauthentically-named estate. (Update: Even the Sun - whose wine buff's picture weirdly seems to show her as having a head a quarter the size of her body in an epic PhotoShop fail...) rates it as pretty average stuff...)
Still, it may be inauthentic fizz: but at least it’s M&S inauthentic fizz…
The “Bramble Hill” name conjures up a vision of a bucolic, old-fashioned family-run operation, but the old farm sheds down at Court and Brookers Farm in Luddesdown are now buzzing with industrial-scale activity. They have sprouted an impressive array of steel tanks and pipework, in addition to the original fermentation vessels (ones that Vineyard Farms somehow missed getting planning permission for...).
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| Court and Brookers Farm, Luddesdown, May 2022... |
It seems unlikely that the grapes or grape juice for the manufacture of this mass-market brew come from Vineyard Farms’ Ironfist (sorry, Silverhand) estate. From what I've seen, they are still at least a year or so away from any significant harvest and indeed, have only just started training some of their vines onto their supports.
Given that the Goldfinger (sorry, Silverhand) estate is currently a grape-free zone, the banks of food-grade nitrogen and carbon dioxide cylinders at Brookers farmyard suggest that production of “Bramble Hill” in the “Kent Countryside” at Luddesdown is limited to simply bringing grape juice on to site, fermenting it, gassing it up and then bottling it.
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| Blowing bubbles: food grade (purple) nitrogen bottles and carbon dioxide bottles (black). |
This process could be done anywhere, (and probably done much better elsewhere) given the poor access into Luddesdown via the little country lane that is
This manufacturing process also seems to be at odds with the argument Vineyard Farms puts forward in its Shrimplin-authored planning statement in an attempt to justify that their proposed massive underground wine factory simply HAS to be constructed on green belt AONB land, because (so they claim) transportation of grapes off-site (even for a few miles) would adversely affect the quality of the product.
Yet they seem to have no problem with buying in stored grape juice from Lord knows where to make their Bramble Hill fizz.
So for your projected four million bottles a year of own-brand output, why not press your grapes on site and then ship the juice offsite to a local industrial estate? You’ve shown you can make wine like that, because you’re doing it now it (unless you’re admitting that Bramble Hill is just poor quality plonk, of course). From a logistics and infrastructure perspective, it’s a no-brainer.
But of course, we all know that it’s the tourist trade
Vineyard Farms really wants, with the glamour and cachet of a £30m Lord Foster
design hoping to attract 350,000 yuppie DFL punters every year to what will become the
The manufacturing side is secondary to all of that.
The Vineyard Farms’ boast about its plan to “kick-start a wine revolution” in the British wine market appears to boil down to simply flooding said market with mass-produced fizzy plonk like “Bramble Hill.” It’s a boast that now looks trivial, other-worldly and out of touch with the day-to-day economics of its original target customers.
The world has suddenly and drastically changed, but Vineyard
Farms (or whatever they want to call themselves) are still living in the happy
days of a pre-Covid/Brexit/Ukraine invasion past, a past in which the
In a country where food shortages are now a real threat, it seems crazy to put 1200 acres of good quality agricultural land under vines, let alone under concrete or 200,000 cubic meters of chalk spoil to make a rich person's tourist trap out of a precious green belt AONB.
But when did “crazy” ever stop the billionaire oligarchs who actually run this country from doing exactly as they please, no matter what the consequences for the rest of us…?
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