Coming from a career in the oil and gas industry, Mike Wagstaff took a bet on English wine at exactly the right moment when he bought Greyfriars in Surrey in 2010

How did you first get into the wine industry?

I haven’t been in wine all my life. I spent most of my career in the oil and gas industry until, in 2009, I was made redundant during the financial crisis. At that point, I had to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and, since I don’t play golf or have any other expensive hobbies, I became interested in English wine, which was just on the cusp of becoming a professional industry.

You took over Greyfriars in 2010. What’s changed in the industry since then?

A lot has changed. Back then, you only had a handful of established producers: Chapel Down, Gusbourne and Camel Valley, where I had the first wine that really excited me about English sparkling. Since then, there’s been so much investment – not just money but also expertise, where we’ve learnt how to make wine in England. People like to say it’s the same as Champagne because we’ve got similar geology and the same varieties, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

As well as sparkling, you’ve started focusing on still English wine. Why?

Affordability has always been an issue with English sparkling. Our most expensive sparkling is £39, which is great but ridiculous. So still wine gives people a more
affordable option. The other reason we started making it is because still wine makes
up 90% of the total wine market, and I didn’t want to deliberately ignore a segment of
the market.

How does climate change impact this?

The impact of global climate change means you get a warmer vintage more often than not, which is good for still wine, though it also means that the variation in quality between good and bad vintages is more extreme. This is the same reason that trying to produce a red wine in this country is very hard. I would almost say that this is not a business; it’s more like buying a lottery ticket. For still wines, we have some Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc. All of our valuable Pinot Noir goes into sparkling.
are there any other changes at Greyfriars you’d like to share?

We’ve just replanted around 2,000 vines because the original vines were from 1989 and they weren’t producing enough juice for us to press into wine. We put off the decision for about five years and last year we did it. It was a bigger project than I thought because you’re basically trying to pull up 40-year-old trees. So, that took weeks and weeks, and now we’ve replanted with a mix of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, which hopefully, in five to 10 years’ time, will be the source of our prestige cuvées.