On the grapevine

Sophie Farrah meets the Tooting collective producing vineyard-quality quaff from grapes grown in the city’s gardens and allotments

A relaxing summer sojourn is always a great opportunity to dream up ideas, hatch plans for the future and then, if you’re anything like me, forget all about them as soon as you get home. But it was whilst en vacances in one of France’s famous wine-making regions that Tooting resident Richard Sharp had a brainwave, and his idea actually came to fruition – quite literally. 

“We were there in September and we saw the grape harvests, and I noticed that so many people were involved with the wine-making process – even the kids. So it made me wonder if we could make something as a community at home,” Richard explains. 

“When I got back I started to notice vines near me. I had a vine in my garden that we’d planted simply because it looked nice, and I saw a couple of other houses had them too. One evening I was chatting to my neighbour Paul and we wondered – ‘could we make a good wine in London?’”

With the seed firmly planted, Richard and Paul set about finding as many other local vine owners as they could by putting up posters in and around Tooting. They received around 12 phone calls from people willing to donate grapes that had been grown in gardens, allotments, behind supermarkets and even alongside railway tracks.

“We went around collecting the grapes and then we had to find a winery to take them, but every one I rung said ‘don’t be ridiculous!’ and put the phone down!”

Eventually Richard struck gold with the then relatively unknown Bolney Wine Estate in Sussex, who agreed to take a look at their first batch back in September 2009. 

“We took a tiny amount of grapes down there and produced a few bottles of wine, but it wasn’t particularly good…” Richard admits.

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“The winery told me that we’d probably need about half of ton of grapes to make a decent wine, so Paul and I put a website together and started to spread the word.”

News travelled quickly and today The Urban Wine Company, as it is known, has an impressive 600 members. It’s annual harvest produces up to 1500 bottles of Château Tooting – a dry, and by all accounts, delicious rosé. Once a year in September Richard, Paul and their team host an Urban Wine Harvest, where vine owners are invited to bring along their grapes in exchange for a delicious bottle of plonk (or two…) later down the line. Membership costs £15, which covers the cost of the harvest venue, the crates, transport, storage and so on.

“There’s a 92-year-old who comes every year, and a couple from Stoke Newington who come on the tube with their bucket of grapes. There are people from Brixton, some from Essex – it’s a real representation of London and beyond, so inside every bottle of Château Tooting there are bits of Tooting, bits of Kingston, Streatham, Richmond and Ealing,” Richard enthuses.

‘A lot of people said it will never work, but I’ve always seen London as a series of villages and I wanted to explore how you make the most of what’s around you when you’re living in an urban space.”

The process itself, Richard explains, is “kind of like strawberry picking”. Members harvest their grapes wherever they might be growing and bring them along to harvest day, which is when the all-important weighing takes place; the weight of your grapes determines how many bottles of wine you can buy, priced at £8 a bottle, which covers the cost of the winemaking process, the bottling and the labelling. 

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“People understand that it’s very labour intensive,” explains Richard.“Yes you can buy a bottle of wine from the supermarket for a fiver, but this is different. The scale is much smaller.”

As Richard explains the process, my eyes fix upon an old vine that has been growing at the bottom of my garden long before I ever got here; it’s wild and unruly and never seems to produce more than a handful of grapes, but Richard is quick to reassure me that this isn’t a problem. 

“Officially you need two kilos of grapes to make one bottle of wine…but if you don’t have that much and you just want to be involved, then get in touch. To be honest, if someone came with one single grape and said that they just really want to join in, they can.” 

“You don’t even have to have a vine of your own – you might know a neighbour who is happy for you to harvest their grapes. There’s a guy from Richmond who has a Pinot Noir vine in his garden and he is madly keen on getting the best possible grapes to us – they are immaculate. We get other people who leave their vines to go crazy and they also come with really great grapes. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know the variety, so it’s a real mixture.”

Once the grapes are weighed and safely secured in the back of the hire van, Richard and Paul drive them up to Halfpenny Green Vineyards – an award-winning winery in Staffordshire, and one of the largest vineyards in England. 

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“We meet owners Clive and Ben and we pass the grapes to them. They put them in their machinery and do all their alchemy, and then we go back just after Christmas for a tasting,” Richard explains. 

“Sometimes we’ll try it and we might think it’s too dry so they’ll adjust it slightly, but this year Château Tooting tastes beautiful – it’s got a really good raspberry tone to it. It’s light, fruity, not too sweet – it’s quite dry for rosé. They’ve done an exceptionally good job.”

Once the wine is good to go, it’s bottled up and returned to London where it is adorned with a stylish label and distributed amongst the members. As the number of grape growers has swelled over the years so has the number of bottles produced and quite often there is a surplus; members get first dibs, before the remainder is sold on to local businesses. Pop in to Unwined in Tooting Market, Lambert’s in Balham, or Tooting’s Tota or The Little Taperia and you can enjoy a glass of chilled Château Tooting yourself.

“I’ve lived in Tooting for 15 years now and it’s very different these days - it’s really happening! There are so many great restaurants, bars, pubs, pop-ups and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down either. It’s just brilliant to see Château Tooting in some of these really cool places,” says Richard proudly. 

“Next we’d like to try a white, a red and we’d definitely like to go for a fizz. We’re confident that we can do that now. Watch this space!”

• The Urban Wine Harvest is on Saturday 30 September, 8am-12 noon at 2a Stormont Road, Battersea, SW11 5EN. For more information (including vine advice) or to sign up visit urbanwineco.co.uk

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