Just as well that Chirac is not President of France any more because his infamous bile about British gastronomy would certainly rocket dangerously when he reads this: a "gay, brisk and sparkling wine" was being drunk and enjoyed in this country 30 years before the French made sparkling wine, and 70 years before the oldest French Champagne house was established.

So say the archives of the Royal Society (kept since 1662), quoting Christopher Merret, a member and glass maker. His name has been inventively kept alive by the RidgeView Wine Estate on the Sussex Downs, who named its three varieties of sparkling wine "Merret" because regulations prevent them from using the word "champagne".

Another astonishing fact is that RidgeView’s history only goes back a mere dozen years. Its founder and managing director Michael Roberts, 61, was originally an accountant, who started a small computer software company in 1983, run by four people from their kitchen, which grew to seven offices with 450 employees and a £70 million turnover. He eventually found the courage to trade the world of IT for that of wine where "people are much nicer", he says.

A new beginning meant going to college in Plumpton, Sussex, which offers the only course of viticulture and oenology in England. He eventually bought land in south Sussex (now 30 acres and about to expand), after taking the best advice from people in Champagne. He started planting in 1994 (now 30,000 plants, to be multiplied) and, incredibly, produced and sold his first vintage of "Merret" as early as 1996.

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Now Roberts, his immediate family of five and numerous employees produce three different fermented sparkling wines each named after a district of London: Bloomsbury, Grosvenor and Fitzrovia - the last is a rosé that I found much better than the average rosé Champagne. The 2004 vintage is now on sale at Waitrose for £18.95.

Roberts wouldn’t want to - and couldn’t - call his product "Champagne" according to regulations, but you can’t tell the difference. Champagne is a very little further south, with a geological formation that significantly continues from south Sussex through the east of France to Champagne. The climate seems to favour south Sussex with mild winters and hot summers so that big Champagne houses are rumoured to be looking around for land in south Kent.

The grapes grown at the RidgeView Estate are exactly the same as those used in Champagne: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. All stages of production follow the rules of the Comité Interprofessionel du vin de Champagne, including the low degree to which the grapes are pressed, so that the whole process is completely the same as in Champagne.

I was hugely impressed when I went to see their winery with a capacity of 250,000 bottles (to be increased to 750,000), but currently maturing 126,000 bottles. Everything is glitteringly new and where possible electronically controlled, including the regular turning of the bottles traditionally stilted on racks. Two of RidgeView's advisors are working in Champagne, one of them in his family’s Champagne firm. Seven per cent of the wine is kept in old oak, added in time to the vintage wine, just as in Champagne. Still, labelling is done by hand to ensure that the wire twist lines up with the centre of the label.

At the British Academy of Gastronomes, which has 50 food-enthusiast members, we awarded the RidgeView Estate its Grand Prix of Gastronomy this year. It is a trophy, given annually to the person, company, or book which has done most to further the cause of British gastronomy in that year.

It took place at the end of a veritably exceptional dinner at the Dorchester in November, an occasion for the head Chef, Henry Brosi, to produce dishes with rare ingredients, one of which even I haven’t had before and is worth describing: Wagyu beef, a direct descendant of the legendary Kobe beef in Japan, is produced in only one farm in the whole of Europe, in north Wales, established by an ex investment banker. It has an uncanny tenderness, quite unnecessary to chew. Truly a godsend for the toothless!

© by Egon Ronay

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