Toast a Cheltenham winner with Ricci vineyard

The Jockey Club, the largest commercial organisation in British horseracing, has appointed specialist wine importer Hallgarten & Novum Wines as its Official Wine Supplier on a four-year sole-supply deal. As part of the partnership, at next week’s Cheltenham Festival racegoers will be able to enjoy the wines of Yotes Court, which is run by leading racehorse owner Susannah Ricci, at outlets across the racecourse. Ricci has seen her famous pink and green silks carried to success at The Cheltenham Festival on no less than 22 occasions, with such great names as Annie Power, Faugheen, Douvan and Lossiemouth among the winners.

Over the last decade, Ricci has also spent a significant amount of her time developing Yotes Court Vineyard at her home in the Kent countryside, which has rapidly established itself as one of England’s most exciting new wine producers.

Expressing her delight with this new listing, Ricci said: “Cheltenham is just the best. It is so important to racing fans and to the whole Jumps racing industry, in particular in Britain and Ireland. It’s been such a privilege to have enjoyed the level of success we have had there. Every year you go there, you hope that you might have a winner but you never take it for granted.

“The Festival is such an exciting place to be, with the roar before the first race on Tuesday – it’s all just so emotional.

“For me, as someone growing grapes and producing wine in England, to now have this link with the racecourse is just unreal. I just feel so lucky as it has been a dream for me to have our racing wine available at Cheltenham. For it to have actually happened this year is really exciting.”

Explaining how the decision to become a wine producer came about, Ricci said: “It was a happy accident really, although from the moment we started making wine, I’ve wanted to get it on to the racecourses.

“We moved down from London to Kent when I was pregnant in 2000. I was previously working in financial IT project management in the City. We bought a house and I had a baby and I didn’t go back to paid work after that.

“In 2014, the farm next door came up for sale. I didn’t really want to buy a farm but the farmer needed to get out. Farming is not my background but as he needed to get out he was very persuasive. I took some advice and was told that if you can buy land, particularly land on your boundary, it was a good thing to do. So, I bought the farm and then had to decide what to do with it.

“The farm had previously been used for growing strawberries and raspberries in polytunnels, as well as apples and apricots. It was all a bit rundown and as I had no experience in growing fruit, I took some advice and was told that around 75 per cent of the land was ideal for growing grapes.

“So, I sort of sleepwalked into it and it just kind of happened. It has been amazing and such an incredible journey to go from someone who knew nothing to now understanding how you grow a grape. When we first had a harvest, it was really something to see these grapes ripening in front of my eyes.

“Because I knew nothing about the wine industry when we first started, if you are going to put in 100,000 vines you need to know you can get rid of the product. Therefore, we initially had a contract with another producer to supply them and around 60 per cent of our production still goes to English sparkling winemakers.”

As a small producer, Yotes Court is squarely focused on the quality of the wine it produces.

Ricci continued: “From working in project management, you know you have to employ the best people. I employed a very good consultant in Stephen Skelton, who is a recognised authority on vineyards and English wine. He helped me clear the ground, plant the vines and recruit a really talented viticulturalist from New Zealand, Tony Purdie, who manages the vineyard and grows the grapes for me.

“Quality is very important to us. When you are growing grapes on the very boundary of where that is possible, you have to be on it all the time. It is an expensive product as it is so labour intensive to produce. We focus on quality because we can’t focus on quantity.”

Quality is intrinsically linked with sustainability for Yotes Court and something which Ricci is very proud to promote.

She continued: “Sustainability is also very important to us too. Tony was very involved in setting up a sustainability scheme in New Zealand before he came over and transferred his skills to the UK, where he has been very involved in the Sustainable Wines of Great Britain programme. We are one of the few producers certified Gold under that programme. The key is soil health and maintaining it – not tilling it and going over it all the time with tractors.”

While the English wine industry has undergone huge growth in recent years, it is still relatively in a state of infancy. However, this is something which Ricci believes also offers tremendous opportunities. 

She said: “Another big thing for us is innovation in terms of how we manage the land and the vines, as well as the grapes we grow and the wine that we produce. Because we are a new industry and an English vineyard, we are able to innovate as we are not constrained by history and restrictive rules.”

A unique aspect of Yotes Court is in the naming of its wines, with names including such famous racing terms as “Starter’s Orders” and “Best Turned Out” as well as in honour of some of her and husband Rich’s famous racehorses.

Ricci continued: “Years ago, there was an auction held by the Irish Injured Jockeys Fund and I bought a life size blank fibreglass horse with the intention of painting it with our racing colours – pink with green spots. I bought it and got it painted, which coincided with the time I bought the vineyard. We it popped in a little paddock that was by a barn. We now have picnic benches by it and people can now sit there and look at the vines – with a pink spotty horse looking at them!

“When we started producing our own wines, it was our link with racing that we decided to use as our USP to make us different. When we started off with just still wines, we named them after riding terms – if we produce another still wine, we might struggle to think of a new name!

“For our sparkling wines, we decided to use the names of horses that have been really good for us. You have got to be careful - Chacun Pour Soi, Benie Des Dieux, Livelovelaugh and Let’s Dance are all great names for a wine. But then you have names like Monkfish, which is never going to work, and Gaelic Warrior, which is too close to garlic! Champagne Fever would have been amazing but that would not be possible under regulations as the French would not allow it. We still have names like Faugheen, Annie Power and Lossiemouth, in the back pocket for a wine from an exceptional vintage.”

Something else which Yotes Court is able to offer is the opportunity to visit the vineyard and get up close to see where and how the wine is produced,

Ricci said: “For people who like wine, you can’t necessarily easily go to Australia, New Zealand or Argentina to go and visit where it is produced. But for us, we are only an hour out of London and are able to offer vineyard tours and tastings. The vineyard itself is very beautiful and it offers a great day out.

“We also have a comprehensive website where people can buy our wine (yotescourt.co.uk) and find out more about us. Our wines are also available at a number of bars, restaurants and farm shops in London and the South East of England.

“We are part of Wine Garden of England, which is a grouping of nine vineyards in Kent. They invited us to join last year as they recognised the quality of our wine and the quality of our tourism experience and felt we were a good fit to join them. That helped to really put us on the map as without it we were just another small ambitious vineyard. To be alongside the likes of Chapel Down, Gusbourne and Balfour really helped to elevate us.”

In conclusion, Ricci is excited and honoured to be involved in an industry that is really thriving and achieving recognition at the highest level.

She concluded: “There is an increasing interest in English wine and it has been very encouraging to see the number of people reaching out to us to ask us about our products.

“The English wine industry has been really professionalised over the last few years and we are now using the land in the right way – you have to be careful where you plant a vine and how you manage it. You also have to choose the right grape variety. If you get those things right, you can make a good wine as you have got a good base product.

“English wine is certainly no longer the joke it once was – it’s a premium product that people are interested in and enjoying. It was very gratifying at a recent tasting session attended by a French sommelier, an Italian sommelier and a Lord of the Realm to see how blown away they were by the taste and by the quality of our wine.

“In particular, the sommeliers praised how representative the wines were of the respective grape variety but at the same time how unique they were – for example our Chardonay is a very distinctive English Chardonay, which is delicious.”