Oatley Vineyard, English Wine from Somerset

About Winery and Wines

We spent a year searching southern England for a really good vineyard site and finally found it in Jane's home county of Somerset...more about the vineyard's geography . Our two varieties of vine, Kernling and Madeleine Angevine, are trained to suit their growth habits and the vineyard terroir.... read more >> We try to minimise our environmental impact. Read more. Our qualifications for growing grapes? Well, we met over a biochemistry bench at Oxford University in the 1960’s and we both managed to spare enough time from socialising to end up with honours degrees in chemistry. But more general careers followed, Iain in international computing and Jane in public sector management science. Generic skills that do come in handy even in a small enterprise. We had an allotment and enjoyed growing things, and a longstanding interest in drinking wine. And at 40 we wanted a change. So we read and researched, and yes, English wine it would be. But there was no Plumpton oenology course in those days, so we read what we could find and talked to other English wine growers. Once we had found our site in Somerset, we were lucky to have had advice from some of the grand old men and women of the English wine industry based close to us, Colin Gillespie of Wootton Vineyard who made our early wines, Jim Dowling of Pilton Manor, Martin Cursham of Staplecombe who also made some of our small-scale wines in the early days and Gillian Pearkes of Yearlstone in Devon. Gillian supplied the stock for our Madeleine Angevine grapes. Sadly only one of those vineyards is still trading. We learned as we went along. A key moment was a visit by international guru Richard Smart to the SWVA in the 1990s. His talk at local Cannington College revolutionised our canopy management approach, to increase the sunlight our grapes were getting and increase our yields. ì