It is not a slow morning for winemaker Adrian Pike and his partner and Westwell co-founder Galia Durant. In fact, it is silly season. Late autumn means harvest at their vineyard in Kent, and it is always the most demanding time of year. They respond to weather conditions day-to-day, hour-by-hour, gauging the very best moment for picking their grapes, which range from the classic trio of Champagne varieties – chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier – to ortega, a German grape well-suited to the British climate.
But this year has been a particularly tricky one, with over six weeks of near-constant rain. In the final months of growing, Adrian tells me, he needs plenty of sun, dry warmth, to boost ripeness. He keeps an eye on his phone – a hotline to the team at the winery. “It’s all very sensitive just now,” Galia explains drily, “especially if, like us, you’re fermenting with wild yeasts. There’s often some urgent science going on!”
Urgent science it may be, but in a world in which people are sometimes divided into scientists and artists, Adrian and Galia definitely fall into the latter camp. They are relentlessly, restlessly creative. Both worked in music before; Adrian co-founded cult label Moshi Moshi, which was responsible for scoring much of my twenties, releasing records by the likes of Florence and the Machine, Hot Chip and Kate Nash. Galia, meanwhile, was one half of Psapp, a pop duo that invented ‘toytronica’ – a sub-genre of electronica made using toys and found objects – and the artists behind the opening credits on Grey’s Anatomy. The couple met through music – a world that was, for them, quite literally ‘the food of love’. So why, then, did they leave it?
“I stopped listening to music,” Adrian says, “I’d been absorbed in it for twenty years and then something just switched off – I wasn’t going to gigs, or listening to music at home, really.” He had always been fascinated by wine, plaiting opportunities to taste into his music career, “I used to go to a music festival in Cannes and I’d drive down there in a Citroen 2CV, stopping in Burgundy, the Rhone or Provence to check out different winemakers.” Wine became the thing that really moved him. “Adrian cried while drinking some sherry the other day,” Galia cuts in, smiling, “and he’s not a crier”. Adrian shakes his head slowly, closes his eyes. “It was an astonishing wine. So intense. A really old, dry, oloroso, all figs and Christmas. I don’t know why people don’t drink more sherry.”
A turning point was a tasting in north London with winemaker Jim Clenenden of cult Californian winery, Au Bon Climat. Very few people turned up, so Adrian spent the evening drinking wine with Clenenden, grilling him on his life and process. Soon after, he signed up for a course in viticulture and oenology at Plumpton College. At the time, the couple were living in London’s Turnpike Lane where their two daughters, Jeanie and Wren, now 15 and 12, had been born. Galia, too, grew up in London and had never left.
“I didn’t know you could leave London!” she laughs, “It was an abstract idea to me!” But knowing they wanted to make wine, they upped sticks to Lewes – a town which they describe variously as “mannered”, “medieval”, “eccentric” and “feral”, full of dynamic tensions – in the hope of finding a vineyard to start tending nearby. Within two days, Galia asked Adrian why they hadn’t done it sooner. Now they live in a detached 1960s house, which Galia describes as “chalet-style” on the edge of town; open-plan, flooded with natural light, inside which their past and present collide: wine boxes and label artwork alongside an upright piano and library of vinyl.
The vineyard they eventually found was in a whole other county; Westwell is a stone’s throw from Ashford, and over an hour and a half from their home in the south Downs. Much of the Pike family’s life is spent en route to or from the winery in what would seem like a slightly mad enterprise if they didn’t love both Lewes and Westwell as much as they do. Like their music that came before, Adrian and Galia’s wines are highly original, energetic expressions of the people, place and time that make them. They are works of art – as are the labels, which Galia designs herself, often featuring the minute details of the vineyard, like her drawn interpretation of Westwell’s soil photographed under microscope. These are labels which go big on artwork and light on branding, which they both acknowledge to have been a risk. “As a new brand we didn’t feature our logo very visibly,” says Adrian, who thinks that boldness was inspired by having worked with album designs: “The key thing is an arresting image – if people pick up the record or the bottle, you’ve got them engaged.”
Like most, I got to know Westwell through their sparkling wines. They are perhaps best known for Pelegrim, a non-vintage English fizz. “We’re on the same seam line as Champagne,” says Adrian, “and a lot of English sparkling wine is made in that style. But the terroirs are very different. I wanted to explore how we could make something distinctly our own.” Using wild yeasts for the primary fermentation and a low-intervention approach throughout, Adrian makes a richer, rounder style of wine than most of his counterparts, with a higher proportion of red grapes.
Westwell also make some belting still wines, which include their first ever cuvee – a skin-contact, or orange, ortega, which was aged in amphora – and a 100% pinot meunier, probably the least celebrated of the Champagne grapes, which is usually seen as a backing singer to Chardonnay or Pinot Noir’s tendency to headline, “It grows really well here, and has an elegant, aromatic quality to it,” he tells me. This year, because the fruit hasn’t ripened as much as they’d like, Westwell will be making fewer still wines and more sparkling; Adrian is experimenting with col fondo, a style usually associated with Prosecco, where the wine experiences a second fermentation in bottle along with the lees (dead yeast cells), for a cloudy, funky finish.
Is Adrian at risk, I wonder, of wine fatigue – like when he lost his spark for music? The key with wine, he says, is to drink less and drink better. He has started to buy really old vintages of French wines from a specialist retailer – “often they’ll have damaged labels that collectors don’t want, so I recently had a bottle of 1970s Bordeaux for £30. History in a bottle of wine.” And he seems to be reconnecting with music. “Our kids getting into it has been a real lift,” says Adrian. “It’s made me want to play them the stuff I really loved – Aphex Twin, Ivor Cutler, Four Tet – and it’s bringing back all those old feelings.”
Sundays at the Pike residence are precious and determinedly slow. It is the only day of the week when all four of them are guaranteed to be at home. Wren plays football, but the morning is otherwise punctuated by coffee and breakfast, often made by the girls – at the moment they have a thing for American pancakes and various apple concoctions. Jeanie needs little excuse to stay in her pyjamas all day, although usually the family will go for a big dog walk. Galia introduces me to Inky, their dachshund-bichon cross, who was the result of 2016: “Brexit happened, then Trump got voted in. We thought ‘we need a puppy’, so along came Inky. She’s not helped with world politics but she is very joy-inducing.” Galia says Sundays are also often the day when she’ll work on some label artwork – and argue with Adrian about it – while Adrian loves “slobbing”; “we’re big potterers,” he says. And then there’s invariably a roast, and inevitably wine – “usually something we’ve made, that needs more time in bottle and has no label, called something like T12 PN/PM,” Adrian smiles. He tells me that his dark pink sparkling wines go particularly well with roast chicken. Galia concurs. “Having a glass of delicious wine with a great plate of food is such a sensory delight. I never want it to end.”
Galia wears the TOAST Sketched Check Cotton Pyjama Top and Sketched Check Cotton Pyjama Trousers. Adrian wears the TOAST Soft Organic Cord Relaxed Shirt and Soft Organic Cord Lounge Trousers.
Words by Mina Holland.
Photography by Marco Kesseler.
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