Camel Valley Vineyard

The story of Camel Valley is, more than most English wine stories, a story about stubbornness. When Bob and Annie Lindo planted their south-facing slopes above the Camel River in 1989, the received wisdom of English viticulture was that Cornwall was too wet, too mild, too Atlantic. Bob's response — which he did not trouble to articulate, simply demonstrating — was to find a valley that the Atlantic couldn't reach, to plant varieties suited to the maritime climate, to work the vines with the attention that makes marginal sites perform beyond their apparent potential, and to make wine that was good enough to make the establishment's objections look foolish.

The Cornwall Brut is the outcome of that stubbornness. Made from Pinot Noir and Seyval Blanc rather than the Champagne trio, with a character that is distinctively Cornish — richer and rounder than chalk-based English sparkling, with more strawberry fruit and less mineral austerity — it has won the UK's most prestigious sparkling wine trophy at the International Wine Challenge multiple times. It is now served at Buckingham Palace garden parties, a fact that still seems to delight Bob and Annie with the same surprised pleasure it did when they first heard it.

Sam Lindo, who has taken over winemaking from his parents with the confidence of someone who has spent his whole life among these vines, has maintained the estate's quality without making it serious in the wrong way. The tasting room retains the warmth of a family operation; the wines are discussed with genuine enthusiasm rather than the reverent hush of an estate that has started believing its own mythology.

The Darnibole Bacchus deserves special mention. Named after the valley field where the grapes grow, it is the English Bacchus against which all others are measured: aromatic and generous, with a pithy herbaceous quality and citrus precision that makes it immediately recognisable as something that could only have grown here, in this valley, in this mild Cornish air. It pairs with Cornish seafood with an inevitability that feels designed.