Camel Valley

Bob Lindo was an RAF flying instructor when, in June 1986, his Jet Provost was caught in a mid-air collision over North Yorkshire. He ejected, broke his back in three places and left the service in 1988. He and Annie already owned a farm near Bodmin, bought in 1982 in Cornwall because, as Bob tells it, that was the cheapest place to buy one, and they kept sheep and cattle there. In 1989 they planted 8,000 vines on the slopes above the River Camel, by Bob's own account just for fun.

Bob did a vintage in Germany, both took viticulture courses, and Camel Valley went on to make what it calls Cornwall's first traditional-method sparkling wine. Their son Sam, a maths graduate, came home in 2002 and has made the wines since 2005, with a year at Kim Crawford in New Zealand along the way. The family's own vines, about 30,000 by 2019, supply roughly a third of the grapes; the rest come from growers across southern England on long-term contracts.

As Sam described the cellar in 2019, it is built for freshness: the grapes are crushed, the free run and the pressings are kept apart, and fermentation runs cold in steel, with almost no oak. The Darnibole vineyard, Bacchus on Devonian sandstone over slate, became the UK's first single-vineyard PDO in 2017, after an application Bob led with the University of Exeter. The business is still family-owned, and as Sam put it in 2019, they have neither borrowed nor taken on investors.