Wineries hope to attract tourists with walking tour

FOUR wineries in and around Henley have teamed up to offer a walking tour which they hope will draw tourism.

Walk Works, a Chilterns-based walking group, has curated a one-day, 13.5km walking tour passing through four vineyards.

It starts at JoJo’s Vineyard in Russell’s Water, passing through the Stonor Valley Vineyard and Oaken Grove Vineyard in Fawley before finishing at Fairmile Vineyard in Henley.

Caroline Gratrix and Liz Bradbury, who run the walking group, prepared a route which also includes a lunch and wine tastings.

The first tour, on June 21, sold out within 10 days and another is being organised for July.

Miss Bradbury, 49, started the walking group with Miss Gratrix during the covid pandemic and said the wine tour was a way of exploring the Chilterns.

She said: “We have an abundance of vineyards in quite a small area and it felt like we weren’t getting people coming down to visit them.

“Caroline and I thought it was something to explore as we just love to find new places to centre our walks on to give a bit of extra value.”

Ian Beecher-Jones, who previously farmed sheep and cereals on his family farm in Worcestershire, planted JoJo’s Vineyard in 2019 with his wife Tessa, a scientist.

They planted 9,000 vines on two hectares and named the vineyard after the couple’s 13-year-old Australian Sheepdog.

The vineyard grows Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, Chardonnay, Seyval Blanc, Pinot Blanc, Bacchus and Pinot Précoce. Its first wine, a Bacchus-Seyval Blanc, was released in 2022.

Mr Beecher-Jones said that the walking tour, the first of its kind in the region, will help draw tourists away from more established regions further south in the country.

He said: “When you look at wine tourism, people think South London, Kent, Essex, Surrey, Sussex but, actually, going further north is no bad thing either.

“Around here, we’ve got half a dozen vineyards in a brilliant position because we’re a bit higher up in the Chilterns, we’re not down on the coast where you get humid conditions that are less favourable from a disease point of view.”

As climate change produces increasingly mild conditions in the UK, domestic wine production has flourished.

While changes in rainfall and temperature have strained harvests in traditional wine-growing regions in the south of Europe, the UK reached a milestone of 1,000 vineyards planted in 2023, a figure that has almost tripled over the past 20 years.

Mr Beecher-Jones said that competition has pushed vineyards to produce a better product. He said: “There’s 5,500 hectares of vines in the UK now so it’s the fastest growing agricultural crop in the country. It’s all really positive at the moment from growers, the quality of wine that’s being produced is getting better, the quality of the grapes grown is getting better, therefore you can produce better wine.

“When you look at the European wine scene at the moment, Bordeaux is struggling, southern European countries are struggling and that’s because of a lack of water and too much heat.

“Whereas it’s coming a bit further north and we’re gaining from it and you’ve got vineyards in Yorkshire – one of my favourite red wines, a Pinot Noir, is made in Yorkshire.

“There’s an element where I think we subconsciously push each other to do things better and the only people who benefit from that are the consumers and that’s really exciting.”

Jan Mirkowski, who opened Fairmile Vineyard with his wife Anthea in 2013, said that as conditions continue to change, he predicts his fruit will benefit from a longer growing season.

Last year, the vineyard’s classic cuvée scored more points at the Decanter World Wine Awards, a blind tasting, than established French houses such as Moët and Chandon, Veuve Clicquot and Tattinger.

Mr Mirkowski said: “We bought a bare, empty field full of grass and weeds in 2012 and planted it in 2013. We planted the same three varieties that go into French champagne – we’ve got Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay.

“We particularly wanted a steep, south-facing slope and you can see how it acts like a solar farm, attracting what miserable sunlight we get in this country.

“It’s visibly getting warmer, we had no snow at all over winter. Every farmer hopes for the longest possible growing season and that’s what this is giving us.

“It’s such a satisfying feeling when the ground is still dry, to get the crop in, see it off to the winery, while there are still long hours of daylight. That’s a fabulous thing to do.”

Mr Mirkowski, a former environmental and sustainability advisor in telecommunications, said that being one of the easiest wine regions to reach from London, he hoped the walking tour would help raise the region’s profile on the national scale.

He said: “We’re going to see how it goes and I’m sure we may well end up tweaking the formula and improving the offering. We are talking about making it a regular offering maybe once a month, if there is a demand for it.”