Aubris

Aubris has no spectacle. It is chalk downland, planted in long shallow curves, with hedgerows where the slope is too steep to work and beech where the chalk gives out. People arrive expecting a landscape and find instead a working agricultural district that happens to be beautiful in the way a well-kept tool is beautiful.

There are eleven growers within walking distance of the house and one co-operative press that all of them use. The village keeps a single restaurant, which opens for lunch at one and closes when the last table leaves. We have never persuaded them to open for dinner and have stopped asking.

The vines

Our own eleven hectares surround the house on three sides. Four of those hectares are old plantings that were nearly grubbed up in the 1980s and were saved, more or less by accident, because the previous owner ran out of money before he ran out of vines. They now make the only wine we bottle under our own label, in quantities too small to sell beyond the house.

When to come

Late September for the harvest, when the whole district works and the house smells of fermenting fruit for three weeks. April and May for the green. January, if you want the fire, the cellar and nobody else at all.