As Gusbourne marks the anniversary of its 20th vintage, we speak with Jon Pollard, our Vineyard Manager and employee “No.1”, about planting the first vines, working with founder Andrew Weeber and what comes next.
Rewind more than two decades, to 2004, and Gusbourne looked very different. There was no winery, no tasting room and no blueprint to follow for what English wine could become. Instead, there were open fields in Appledore, a great deal of ambition and everything still to learn about this particular slice of Kent.
Jon Pollard has been part of Gusbourne almost since day one. He helped plant the first vineyard at Butness, oversaw the early harvests and has watched the estate grow from a handful of Kentish fields into one of England’s leading wine producers.
As we reflect on 20 vintages, we asked Jon to look back on the early years, the lessons learned and what it means to farm vines whose roots now run deep.
So, going back to the very beginning as employee "No.1", how did the job at Gusbourne come about?
When I was studying at Plumpton [the viticultural college], this job at Gusbourne was circulated around all the students’ emails. I went for interview and that’s when I first met Andrew — and got the job.
Did it feel risky, joining a new English wine venture at that time?
It just seemed exciting. I was 27, no kids, no mortgage. I can’t remember any sort of trepidation about it. Even back then, there was a little bit of media coverage about English vineyards, viticulture and wine. It felt as though we were onto something; a growing industry. And I really trusted Andrew and his instincts.
What do you remember about first meeting Andrew Weeber?
He took me on a whirlwind tour of all the sites that he was planning on planting, which essentially were Butness, Cherry Garden and Boot Hill. Even back then, he was talking about eventually establishing a winery and a tourism element as well.
Being South African, he was very much looking at the wine tourist trail in Stellenbosch and areas like that in South Africa. This was the sort of thing he felt we needed to have at Gusbourne in the future.
It was all very Field of Dreams. He was very confident but without being arrogant, and his confidence seeped into everyone else who came across him. That sense that we were doing the right thing, and that this was going to work.
Tell us about the vineyards. When did the first vines go into the ground?
The vines were planted in early May 2004, with Andrew in charge. We planted most of Butness just before I started full-time. The vines came from France, from a couple of different nurseries.
In those early years, Mike Roberts, the founder of Ridgeview, was a great source of advice, helping Andrew get started.
All the trellising came from a German company which used Austrian metalwork. Andrew was very much “a details man” on things like this, and he loved dealing with the Germans. When Andrew was a young boy in South Africa, his mum and dad sent him to a German-speaking school because it was the best school in the area. So, whenever he could, he dealt with Germans rather than French.
How do you actually go about planting a vineyard?
First you have to prepare the soil; cultivate it to get a relatively fine tilth, so the soil flows back around the vine roots and the vines have good contact with the soil.
Then for the planting, we’ve always used a specific machine with a team that come in to help. Back then, they were laser-guided and mounted on the back of a tractor. You measured out 2.5 metres from your last row at the top and 2.5 metres from your last row at the bottom and you put a laser between them to guide the tractor. In later years, we moved to GPS, which is more accurate.
The machine has a very narrow ploughshare in the middle of it, which opens up a slit in the soil. There are two guys sitting on the back of the machine and they’re placing vines in these mechanical arms on a wheel. Every time one comes round — click — they put another vine in. Then it releases the vine into the gap in the soil before strong firming wheels push the soil back together.
What were the early years like after the vines went in?
It suddenly all felt very real! I decorated the office — a rented Portakabin down at the haulage yard where we had a bit of lock-up space for machinery. And we had an agency team come in that Andrew and myself supervised, putting the shelters and guards onto the vines.
And then, we waited. There was a bit of heel-kicking until the vines had started to grow. We did a bit of shoot selection, selecting the strongest shoots to carry on growing to potentially form your trunk. Then at last these vines started to stick their heads out of the guards. That’s when we started looking after them in earnest.
After that first year, once we started on Cherry Garden, it was full on all the time. And it still is…
Which vineyards were planted first?
Butness was first. Then Cherry Garden and Pond Field in 2005. Boot Hill was 2006 and 2007, so there are two different years’ plantings in Boot Hill.
Andrew planted Butness with Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier so that as soon as we had our first harvest we could make a Blanc de Blancs and a Brut Reserve. Those planting proportions were repeated in Cherry Garden and Boot Hill 2006. Then in Boot Hill 2007, we just did Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
Butness is quite a uniform site with regards to slope and, from a frost point of view, airflow is pretty uniform across the southern boundary. The soil changes from heavier clay at the top of the slope to more amenable clay at the south of the block.
When we planted, our main consideration was that the Chardonnay should be together, all the Pinot Noir should be together and all the Pinot Meunier should be together. It was all a learning curve: how you plant and care for the vines.
The clonal selection within Butness is quite varied. There are five different clones of Chardonnay on two different rootstocks. It’s a mixture of Burgundian clones and some heavier-yielding sparkling clones, and similar on the Pinot Noir.
We thought it was a good, diverse mix, which would hopefully translate into some form of complexity in the final product. It was also a useful tool to see how those different clones performed.
How much of it was planning, and how much was learning as you went?
There was loads of luck, but there was plenty of thought and advice behind the decisions we made. We gave things a go based on what felt right to us. There was a lot of “suck it and see” — a phrase that came from Andrew in the early years.
Interestingly, Andrew chose Butness to plant first, followed by Cherry Garden, followed by Boot Hill. I think we felt that as Boot Hill was higher, more exposed and probably more difficult to manage. But actually, from a quality point of view, Boot Hill is probably the star of the show.
What do you remember about the first harvest?
There was a small amount of fruit in 2005, but the first proper harvest was in 2006. We cropped 30 tonnes from Butness, which is about five tonnes a hectare. Nowadays, with the knowledge I have now, I probably wouldn’t have cropped it so high. Back then, we were learning all the time.
The fruit went over to Ridgeview, who were making the wines for us. I think we got about 10,000 bottles in total from the 2006 vintage.
When did things begin to change?
I think the big shift was establishing the winery and Charlie [Holland, former Head Winemaker] coming on board. This was great from my point of view because I had a colleague to brainstorm stuff with and work things out with.
We made lots of changes; we moved harvest away from the small picking crates, the ones you can carry that hold about 14 kilos, to the big boxes we use now. That made everything much easier in the vineyard and allowed more flexibility with how we brought fruit in. It also made it easier to pick clone by clone.
It wasn’t really until Charlie came on board that we started separating clones and really seeing what they were bringing to the party.
Were there particular vintages that changed the way you worked?
There’s something in every vintage. Vintage 2010 was an eye-opener from a yield point of view. We’d left a lot fruit on and it was a really late vintage. We were harvesting from the middle of October onwards.
Although the fruit ripened, the vines struggled because of the amount of fruit. That was a big learning curve. We saw how the vines that naturally had less fruit on them fared better than the vines that were overloaded. From that point onwards, we knew we had to be mindful of fruit loads and the need to reduce them if necessary.
I started taking a more active role in knowing what yield was on the vines, doing flower counts and trying to estimate crop loads. I’ve got data from about 2010 that I still use now, for things like average bunch weights.
In 2011, we made still Chardonnay for the first time, so that was a bit of a game changer: realising we could make a really decent still Chardonnay in a corner of Kent. That was really cool to achieve.
Then 2012 was a really poor weather year, which resulted in poor flowering and a low yield. Some things you can mitigate, but there was nothing we could do about 2012’s weather. We simply had to respond to the conditions in front of us.
The most recent vintage that really stands out was 2024: a very difficult year in terms of the amount of fruit we lost, especially in Sussex. That was a big learning curve.
In the winery, we felt like 2014 was a watershed vintage. Was it the same for you?
It’s interesting. Charlie’s influence on the winemaking side of things means we talk about 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 as these hot years, fruit-forward styles. Because they’re earlier vintages, they allow the winemakers to play around with things, leave fruit on the vines for a little bit longer and all of that.
In a way, the vintages the winemakers love, like 2014 or 2016, are the ones I recall less because they were easy. The fruit was clean. We had great weather. We harvested relatively early, in September, and we could pick and choose the days when we brought in the fruit.
The ones that stick in my memory are 2010, 2013, 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2024, because they were more challenging.
How has your approach in the vineyard changed over 20 harvests?
I've learned so much over the years. Two decades ago, it was just: let’s do everything to keep the vines as healthy and as nutrient-rich as possible.
There are things to do with canopy management that we didn’t do in the early years that we do now. A few years into Gusbourne’s journey, we started doing things like head thinning. That was probably around 2010, 2011, 2012. That has massive payback for the vine that year, but also for future years as well. You’re setting up the architecture of the vine, making sure that area isn’t congested.
Leaf removal has also changed, in terms of fine-tuning the timing and how we do it. We might do it with machinery on the sparkling vines, but in areas we potentially keep for still wine, we’d probably do all of those things by hand because it can have a knock-on effect on the integrity of the fruit. If you do it by hand, you’ve got fewer problems with fruit damage later in the season. You fine-tune things as you go along.
Where do your new ideas come from now?
There’s a decent wine-growing community within the UK. There are vineyard managers I’ll talk to reasonably frequently if they’re trying anything new.
There’s a lot more to draw on now than there used to be in the early years, with podcasts, seminars and the regenerative side of things, whether that’s regenerative agriculture or regenerative viticulture. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve read around and listened to with regards to regen, which is where there’s a lot of interesting debate and focus within the industry at the moment.
Whenever we go to France, we seem to manage to find a vineyard to walk around and my children are never that impressed by that as a day out. It might be that we’re doing something else, but then: “Oh, there’s a vineyard here. Let me just stop here and have a quick look.”
How are Gusbourne’s oldest vines holding up?
Every two or three years, I do a dead vine count across the estate. I walk four lines and I’m scanning and checking. If there are any gaps, I’ll count them.
Those gaps have increased slightly in some of the older vineyards and some of the younger vineyards, which are still 10-plus years old. But generally speaking, even in those older established vineyards like Butness, Cherry Garden and Boot Hill, the vines are still really healthy. It’s just the odd vine that has succumbed to something over time.
Generally speaking, even our oldest vines are still producing what we would expect them to produce. There are no signs, in Butness for instance, of a decline in vigour generally.
I’m still saying between 30 and 40 years for the productive lifespan of a vineyard. I’d like it to go as close to 40 as possible, but we’ll have to wait and see. We need another 18 years to figure that out.
What would you still like to test or try?
New technology, like using drones to produce a yield estimate by scanning the vineyards and essentially being able to identify and count bunches.
Another thing I’ve been banging on about for years is LiDAR. You can mount it on a tractor and it scans the foliage, fruit, canes, posts and wires. It builds up this picture of the vineyard. You could use that to figure out how dense your canopy is, then at pre-pruning time you could produce a vigour map of your vineyard.
So this bay is green, that bay is red on the map. Green means it’s really vigorous, prune that to 12 buds. Red means it’s really low vigour, prune that to four buds. That would be really useful, so we could try to iron out some of the variation in vigour across the vineyard.
The continual pursuit of improving organic matter through the use of cover crops would be good, but it’s very difficult on this soil. I’d like to do more composting. We’ve got a whole estate here. We’ve got 9.2 hectares of woodland, we’ve got hedgerows. I’d like to take some of that organic matter, chip it, compost it with other things and provide our own compost.
The beauty of composting is that you’re creating biology in the compost pile and then spreading that biology in your field.
After 20 harvests, does Gusbourne still feel like a learning curve?
Yes. Every vintage we learn. The phrase from Andrew in the early years was “suck it and see.” That’s still true, really.
You can plan, you can measure, you can collect more data and you can know more than you did before. But you’re still farming vines in a particular piece of Kent, with a particular weather system, in a country where the industry itself is still relatively young. That’s the interesting bit.
You try things, you learn from them, you fine-tune them. Then another year comes along and teaches you something else.
