Lost and Found
Tim Wildman MW spent years in Australia perfecting the art of making Pétillant Naturel (Pét-Nat) wine. Now he is back in the UK, searching for abandoned vineyards for an exciting new project....
I stumbled across Tim Wildman at the Real Wine Fair in Tobacco Dock earlier this year. I spotted a crowd of natural wine enthusiasts, around a table set with chilled magnums of beautiful, rose-quartz coloured fizz. I headed over to see what was happening.
[Full disclosure - I’m not a mad, natural wine obsessive. I go to natural wine fairs, I drink natural wine pairings in hipster restaurants. I have friends who are true devotees and I listen to them rave about and go dreamy-eyed over cloudy bottles with crazy names, as they mutter about “funk” (that’s Natural Wine Speak for stinky, locker-room bouquet) or “grip” (code for mouth-puckeringly unpleasant tannins/acidity).
I have had good bottles and bad bottles of natural wine, but the reality is that I am a terribly basic bitch when it comes to alcohol. I like a boring, cold climate chardonnay, that has had a nice, clean start in life, then maybe taken a little bath in a racy oak barrel. Or a blanc de blancs champagne, which is basically the above, but with some riddling.
However, I have recently developed an affection for pétillant naturel, or pét-nat wine, the granddaddy of champagne; the original gangster of bubbly. It is made by méthode ancestrale (also known as rurale, artisanale or gaillacoise), a technique first practised by 16th century monks in France, where the wine is bottled before the first fermentation is complete and then turns into bubbles while in the bottle.
Pét-nat wine, like the name suggests, is pétillant - lightly fizzy, with a brightness and vigour both in texture and flavour. It’s not a fancy drink and doesn’t pretend to be, but I have never had one that didn’t feel like huge fun.]
I waited patiently behind a group of fans, as Tim explained his new project - taking abandoned British vineyards, looking after them and turning neglected fruits into a fun, pink fizz. People signed up to volunteer at the vineyards and camp out under the stars. I let him fill my glass with lively pink bubbles.
The wine was really good, with a purity and strange sort of innocence about it. I imagined sharing a bottle on the top deck of a double decker bus with a group of friends - such was the jolly, youthful vibe it created. The reality is that I dislike buses and try never to go on them. And people who drink on buses tend to do so because they have an affliction, not out of joie de vivre. So you can see how this bonkers, fleeting fantasy shows just how infectiously fun this wine is.
For all his jollity and his carefree, sustainable, fizzy pop approach, Tim Wildman is not to be underestimated. He has an extraordinary gift for pre-empting a trend, for sensing just when the market needs something new. He is also a very well educated and accomplished wine professional, which when making unpredictable, volatile pét-nat, is an absolute necessity.
How did you first become interested in wine and how did that interest develop?
Lacking any musical ability, as a student I couldn’t join a band to get the girls, so instead I made wine from a Boots Home Kit and put the fermenting demijohns on my windowsill, which was right next to the path from the carpark. I worked out I could make a bottle for 19p. I made a lot of friends in my first term that way.
My whole career since has pretty much been based on the same principle, wine is just a conduit for meeting people, travel, keeping occupied. I guess it didn’t have to be wine, it could have been books, scuba diving, photography, any number of things. I guess I’ve always managed to keep the whole wine thing in perspective, it’s really just something that provides useful employment and brings people together in a positive way.
Can you give me a brief roundup of your career in wine so far?
I left Cardiff Uni in 1992 with a useless degree in English literature, immediately joined Oddbins in Bristol as a graduate trainee, because I thought wine, like reading, would be a fun thing to do. With a brief interval working in a winery in Catalunya from 95 to 97, I stayed at Oddbins until 2002, ending up in the Corporate department selling pallets of Absolut to Brighton nightclubs. Happy days.
I then moved to national sales for Cachet Wine, the Australian import arm of Yorkshire merchant House of Townend. While there I started the MW [Masters of Wine] program in 2004 and completed it in 2008. Hardest thing I’ve ever done. In 2007 I joined Les Caves de Pyrene as their Australian buyer. I learnt as much about wine working with Eric Narioo as I did doing my MW.
I became self employed in 2010, my first project being James Busby Travel, an initiative to take overseas wine buyers on networking trips to Australia, but trips that didn’t suck. In 2013 I bought a one way ticket to Adelaide and made the first vintage of Astro Bunny pét-nat in 2014. At that time only six people were making pét-nat in Australia, so despite not being a trained winemaker, I reckon I knew as much if not more about pét-nat, so I bought one tonne of fruit and made 600 bottles. Fast forward to 2022 and we’ve just crushed 35 tonnes which will make approximately 35,000 bottles, and Astro Bunny is Australia’s most recognised and successful pét-nat brand.
In 2015 I established WineTutor.tv, the website for Master of Wine students. I returned to the UK in 2018, the Australian wine business, Wildman Wine, being at a scale where I could run it from a distance. In 2021 I made my first English wine, Lost in a Field “Frolic” pét-nat a project that I’ve put all my thirty years of experience into. At some point I would like to take a holiday.
What do you find special about natural wine?
It took me a while to get my head around natural wine, I’d been working for Les Caves de Pyrene for a year and I was struggling to understand these cloudy, sometimes funky wines.
My epiphany moment was a bottle of Sebastian Riffault Sancerre. It was cold winter’s night, I’d got back to my flat where I was living in Clapham North at the time and was starving hungry. I put some pasta on, and looked for something to drink. There was nothing in the house except a bottle of that weird, cloudy Sancerre in the fridge, so with misgivings, I pulled the cork. I’d pretty much finished the bottle before the pasta finished cooking. I practically ate the bottle. I think the fact that I was really hungry was important. My stomach recognised something alive and nutritious in the wine. Once your gut gets involved you will forever see the world as a binary division of wines that your stomach wants to drink versus the rest, and there’s no going back.
What qualities do you need in a varietal to make a good pét nat?
With the English wine I had to have a starting point. As a wine maker you need to be aiming for something, even if you don’t hit it. My model was one of the Australian wines I make, Astro Bunny, the secret of which is 25% old vine Zibibbo, which provides aromatics. This led me to start looking at the German hybrids and crosses in the UK, and after tasting as many as we could get hold of, myself and Daniel Ham at Offbeat Wines in Wiltshire (where I make the wine) decided to focus on Schönburger, Madeleine Angevine and Reichensteiner.
Tell me how you came up with the idea for Lost in a Field?
It started as a hunt for the grape varieties that I had a hunch would make a tasty, aromatic, pink pét-nat, and everything else followed from there
Where are your vineyards? How did you find them? Do you have plans to add any more?
All over the place! In the end we took fruit from eight different vineyards from seven different English and Welsh counties. I started off with a list of 200 vineyards that had, at some point in the last fifty years, been planted with one of the three varieties we were targeting, Schönburger, Madeleine Angevine and Reichensteiner. From those 200, I found just two that would sell me commercial quantities of grapes (ie. more than half a tonne), three that would sell me some red grapes (to make the wine pink) and we also came across a dozen lost or abandoned vineyards. Of those lost vineyards, four were too dead and diseased, another five had issues with ownership, and we ended up working with three vineyards, in Hampshire, Devon and Powys, that we are helping the owners bring back to life. I’d love to find some more Madeleine Angevine, but its like rocking horse poop.
What are the benefits of your project in terms of sustainability and preserving heritage?
The heritage grape varieties we’re focusing on were looked down upon, or seen as underdog varieties, for a long time. The truth is the style of wine they were made into just needed updating, and they are perfect for fruity, aromatic pét-nat. Many of these varieties were planted in the very early days of the British wine industry, in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and as such represent the true old vine history of our country. Back then the pioneering winemakers were all hobbyists and amateurs, very much working on a Burgundian vigneron model, the vineyard was on their property, as was their small winery. This is an approach that we feel is worth bringing back and championing, as a contrast to the large scale, Champagne styles and corporate business models that have come to dominate the modern landscape.
How should we drink it? Tasting/pairing notes?
Fridge cold, at a park, beach or music festival.
How has 2021 Frolic pét-nat been received?
The wine was officially launched on July 1st and all the bottles have been sold in nineteen days. We were quite taken aback by that! I’d also bottled 400 magnums, and they should last into August. So I’ll say its been pretty well received.
What have you enjoyed most about this project?
Getting my hands dirty in the vineyard and winery, it takes me back to the early days of the Astro Bunny project where I did everything myself. Also getting back out to the UK trade and seeing how exciting and vibrant the natural wine scene is in the UK right now. There are so many shops and bars that have opened since lockdown, often run by owners in their early to mid twenties, who grew up with natural wine. That is very exciting.
What plans do you have for the future?
Our main restriction on growth is the scarcity of the heritage varieties, so for 2022 we’re just planning on doing the same volume as 2021, three tonnes of fruit to make around 2000 bottles, and if we can find more vineyards we’ll look to grow volumes in 2023.
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