Denbies is a wine estate near Dorking with lots of facilities and lots of space, not least for the parking of cars. And like many rural industries - not to mention garden centres - they make the most of it. One wonders what proportion of their income actually comes from selling wine, but that I have yet to investigate. Would I be able to deduce this from accounts filed at Companies House? Accounts which I often find hard to read.
So given the risks around urban activities just presently, last week we thought we would take tea at their hatch. This being an arrangement whereby you can buy your tea and cakes and so on at the hatch and then consume them at the chairs and tables provided. Complete with tapes marking out the one-way system.
A hatch which is now closed under the latest regulations? Or do they escape, being outdoors?
Served by a pert young miss, perhaps on furlough from her regular work in some club or bar, but pleasant enough. Tea, something called rhubarb and custard cake plus a glass of something called Surrey Gold, a nod to the place being a wine estate.
The cake being florid in appearance, sweet and entirely eatable, very much the sort of thing I associate with Coughlans of reference 3 and their outlet at Horton Retail. An outlet I used to use occasionally when I made more use of Horton Lane than I do now. Wine much better than I was expecting - with my expectations of English wine being low. Not the right climate for booze you know.
BH paid a visit to the tastefully fitted out shop and I took the opportunity to buy three bottles of Surrey Gold, at about the same price as the Villa Maria sauvignon blanc I used to buy from Majestic.
From there to the farm shop adjacent where they had a splendid display of all kinds of tomatoes, occupying both sides of a brand new market barrow. I thought about, but decided against, scoring it as a fake, which seemed a little unkind.
The tomato people - Nutbourne Nursery in Pulborough - don't seem to have a web site but they do have plenty of glass. The tomatoes might actually be grown there, not bought in from some wholesale tomato operation out of Nine Elms. In our case, two very large tomatoes, the sort of thing we used to buy in the days when we used to camp in France. At about £2.22 a pop, BH not best pleased, it coming out of her account.
Out to check that the plastic cows were still in place, which they were. Last noticed at reference 2.
I took a walk down one of the rows of grapes to see what there was to see. With the answer being not very much. You didn't seem to get a huge amount of grape given the number of vines and the amount of space taken. But BH told me afterwards that it was an early harvest, already half picked, so perhaps my row had had a preliminary picking.
On the way home, puzzled by what looked like a lot of dead trees on the sides of Box Hill. Not very big, but surely not box trees, fallen prey to blight or caterpillars? Has the lack of rain done for some of these trees on chalk? Chalk drying out a lot fast than the clay we are on here at Epsom. Neither Bing nor Google turn anything up, so perhaps a return visit is indicated.
The following day I set to to make a French style stew with onion, tomato and saucisson sec, this last being from Sainsbury's. Tomatoes were rather odd inside, reminding me of the inside of kidneys.
A couple of hours later, I was very pleased with the result, quite different from regular, supermarket tomatoes. Well worth the extra. With tinned tomatoes being somewhere else again - tinned tomatoes being one of my pet aversions. Never cook with them.
Rounded out with a green salad, taken without oil or vinegar. Proper English salad.
One portion of stew left over, now frozen against some future ready-meal need.
PS 1: in the event, Bing turned up the Denbies records at Companies House in next to no time. From which it seems that they became a private limited company in 2019, which perhaps means that their accounts remain private. But there are a couple of documents relating to charges on the estate arising from loans or loan facilities from HSBC. And apart from the comings and goings of various important people, that is about it.
PS 2: their web site reveals that Surrey Gold is 'a blend of Müller-Thurgau, Ortega and Bacchus, this has a herbal, fruity, citric quality, with lovely fresh elderflower aromas. Fresh, clean'. None of this sauvignon blanc carry on. While I can spend a good deal more on something called Brokes Botrytis Ortega 2016, 'made from a specially-selected parcel of Ortega, this Vineyard Select wine is a deep golden colour with notes of vanilla...'. Maybe.
Reference 1: https://www.denbies.co.uk/.
Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/pit-stop.html. Our last visit was just about a year ago. Perhaps they get themselves into the media around the time of the grape harvest and we pick up on that.
Reference 3: http://www.coughlansbakery.co.uk/.
Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=coughlans. The record of my use of same. Cakes inspected but bread bought.
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