A new year: a blank page. After two years many are glad to see behind us, an endemic optimism fills the air.

This is a quiet time on the farm, the wines slumber and reluctantly bubble onwards, transforming from opaque, zippy juveniles into adolescents, giving better indication of their potential at maturity. During this time, we turn our energies towards the vineyards. Making measured, painstakingly considered and often frosty steps through the vines. With every cut we are shaping the future forms of not just the vines, but of the fruit that they will proffer forth. After one month of pruning, we are a little over halfway through our task. Not a race, but the end always in sight as the sap will inevitably rise and buds will swell, another vintage to chaperone and nurture. Frost is the first threat looming as spring comes around.

As we quietly and patiently make our progress out in the fields, the restaurant and hotel have recently reopened. Our team returned, refreshed and renewed after a welcome break over the holidays, positivity and the warmth of hospitality fill the air. I am pleased to report that the rooms and restaurant are buzzing on the weekends. We are now open six days a week: tranquil Tuesdays through to bustling yet pastoral Sundays. The farm has been flattered in recent days with pinky purple sunrises and the Tillingham valley brimming with icy mist, we look forward to sharing it with you.

BW

Hi everyone, Eloise here!

Usually you can find me serving food and drinks in our busy restaurant, but since the summer I’ve also been working to implement sustainable practices across the business.

As a regenerative, biodynamic vineyard and farm, respecting the environment is hugely important to all of us at Tillingham and as a result I’ve been working to ensure that this respect is continued throughout the restaurant and kitchen. Reducing our impact on the planet has never been more important, so I have been looking for ways that we can do this across the business, some of which I wanted to detail in this journal…

COMPOST:

In addition to composting our winery waste (grapes etc), we are now composting all of our fruit and veg scraps from the kitchen along with the tea and coffee grounds from the bar. These will go onto the heap in our walled garden to be used to enrich the soil for next year’s harvest!

REFILLING:

We pledged to reduce our single-use plastic use by 2022, so with the help of our wonderful suppliers, most of our deliveries are now coming in reusable crates and containers. Coldblow Coffee are sending us coffee beans in refillable tubs, and Hook & Son now deliver our milk in refillable glass bottles.

REUSING:

Whilst some packaging is unavoidable, we have been finding creative ways to reuse them. Plastic olive tubs have now become storage in the kitchen, whilst our empty wine bottles are being repurposed for candles and flowers. In the restaurant, bar and kitchen, we are recycling anything we can’t compost or reuse, aiming to send minimal waste to landfill.

CREATING:

We are now making many of our refreshments in-house, including seasonal cordials, herbal teas from the garden, and homemade oat milk and apple juice, all of which eliminate the need for single-use plastic! Watch this space in 2022 for kombuchas, pickles and cocktails too…

Reducing plastic and waste in hospitality is by no means an easy feat, and we are still working to reduce single-use plastic for good in the kitchen and bar. This means saying goodbye to clingfilm, j-cloths and plastic cleaning-product containers. 

Finally, I thought it would be nice to share a festive zero-waste recipe with you all!

This one is a great way to use up leftover citrus peels, from squeezed lemons to clementine peels, everything can be chucked in!

• citrus rinds, weighed
• caster sugar, equal to weight of citrus
• optional aromatics – rosemary, bay or cinnamon are all lovely additions

Stir together your equal quantities of citrus and sugar, adding herbs or spices if you fancy, and pop into a large glass jar. 

Leave overnight on the side. When you return, the sugar will have extracted the citrus essential oils, leaving you with a delicious fragrant syrup. 

Strain through some muslin and pour into a clean bottle. 

Stored in the fridge, this will keep for at least 2 months.

You can drink this like a cordial with sparkling water or add it to a cocktail of your choice!

All the best, 

Elo x

It’s been an entire year since my last journal post: not for a shortage of things to write about, but perhaps a combination of the hamster wheel of life never seeming to slow down and it always seeming as if the next milestone is the next big thing to talk about.

As a farm, 2021 got off to a pretty crappy start, with an icy tinge in the air. We lit anti-frost candles (above), attempting to avert the worst of the damage. Twenty six frost events over six weeks delayed the season and affected yield too, unscathed we were not. Flowering was so so, but another major setback came with the onset of a wet summer, combined with warm temperatures: the perfect conditions for Downy Mildew (below), which also took its toll. Now we are in the last throws of harvest still, a month later than usual. The fruit coming into the winery has been clean, but yield and ripeness at lower levels than I would wish for. We will make good wines (and more cider than a normal year), but sparkling wines will feature more heavily and less red wine than usual.

Beyond the agriculture, the side of the business that currently sustains us financially and which I can best describe as ‘tourism’, has done so so well this year. Coming out of the blocks at a million miles an hour back in April, it’s been relentless: ‘2021 The Year of the Staycation’. A bit part cameo from our two new bell tents received welcome reviews, the curtain has fallen now on those until the May 2022 sequel. The entire team here, numbering over forty now, have had scant time off and continued to deliver, heroes all. We are currently expanding and opening more nights of the week, rooms open on Sunday’s from next week and we’re extending the food offer too, with pizza inside the bar for the winter and a set menu coming in on Friday lunches. Some of our beloved Mangalitsa pigs are soon to be heading off to you know where, to return celebrated on our menu, as fresh meat or in a few months time, delicious charcuterie.

The bulk of the harvest is now in. The steady, calming rhythm of fermentations tick along in the winery, where I sit now. When I last wrote, back in May, fledging green shoots were unfurling in the vineyards and we were beginning to adjust to the new normal of what has proven to be a most abnormal year.

This vintage has seen our very first grapes from our still establishing vineyards. The three years of hard work and nerve racking experimental, biodynamic practices have paid off. Despite an early touch of frost, a dry summer and a bit of thievery by the birds, the crop has been beautiful, and we have the making of three very special wines. All field blends (multiple varieties picked and fermented together) with an aromatic white, a red wine made from predominantly Pinot Meunier, and a pale, pretty red made from both red and white varieties.

The three wines above will be the first Tillingham estate wines, and as such, to differentiate them from the négociant wines that we make (and will continue to make) from grapes grown by others, they will have a totally new identity: new labels basically. Expected spring 2021 onwards.

Since we reopened our restaurant and rooms back in August, we have been inundated with visitors and this has helped enormously in clawing back the lost revenue that resulted from the lockdown. We still have a long way to go to get back on track, but with fingers crossed and the continued support of our customers the outlook could be a lot worse.

The quality of the food and service is more than I could have dreamed of when we started this project three years ago. The team we have assembled, in such a short space of time, are quite remarkable, relocating in the most part, to this sleepy corner of East Sussex. As we get into our third month since reopening, in addition to our dinner service we are expanding the food offer, with a very exciting lunch menu on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday from the 23rd of this month. The very successful Pizza operation closes next Sunday (the 18^th of October) to reopen when spring returns.

Who knows what lays ahead, between now and then. All I know is what great solace, comfort even, we can draw from the natural world that surrounds us. If we immerse, invest and connect ourselves with that, then the better we will be for it. If not, there will always be wine.

BW

This is the third season for our 10,000 vines, planted in the summer of 2018, all being well we will have our very first grapes this autumn. We had bud burst in the early varietals at the beginning of April and as I look out the window now, the fragile green shoots of Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Ortega in our Saw Pit block are being jostled about by a blustery south westerly breeze. The oaks and chestnut that predominate in the surrounding woodlands are greening up, the ewes and lambs enjoying their lustrous green pastures.

We are busy in the winery, especially on the wet days, blending and preparing the wines for bottling. We’ll be bottling two to three days a week from now, until well into the summer. New releases are imminent, our first ever Piquette and ATHINGMILL, both a lot of fun to drink, will be released in the coming weeks.

The closure of our rooms and restaurant as a result of the current pandemic have been a huge blow to the business. We were busy and looking forward to a busy spring/summer season, the impact on our overall cashflow is devastating. It’s also been sad to see the place empty and also to have to furlough our wonderful employees. The place is looking beautiful and we’ll be ready when we’re allowed to reopen. We are taking bookings via the website and also selling vouchers which can be redeemed anytime over the next 12 months. It goes without saying that we need as much help from our followers as ever if we are to weather this storm.

The silver lining to having to close our burgeoning tourism business is that it has allowed me to focus much more on the farming aspect here. My interest in wine is very much tied to farming, it’s where I came from, and it was in a field in Burgundy twenty years ago, that I decided, somewhat naively, that farming grapevines was to be my future.

Regenerative farming is a relatively hot topic, I didn’t know it until recently, but this term absolutely nails what it is I have been working towards and inspired by since first being introduced to Biodynamics many moons ago. When people have asked me about our approach here, I’ve struggled to explain it easily, saying that it is an amalgamation of practices etc. In essence, regenerative agriculture is about repairing and rebuilding the soil and the wider farmed environment, in the knowledge that it is all connected, that there are both symbiotic and subtle connections between plants and animals on all levels. It isn’t just a way of farming though, it is also a way of life, about balance and respect. Far from the finished article we are just at the beginning of our journey, I just hope that with all the support we are lucky to have in the world it’s a one we will be able to continue for the foreseeable.

BW