Andrew Kay enjoys Brighton & Hove Food Festival’s Sussex Wine Dinner at Hotel du Vin

With Sussex winemakers producing such fine vintages these days, especially when it comes to fizz, it is no wonder that the rest of the wine world is sitting up and taking notice. Great wines it would seem are all about terroir and Sussex lies on a circle of chalky soil that runs along the coast and heads back to Rance and to Champagne. When you look at the geography, it makes total sense.

This summer the weather has not been good to the grapes and the harvest is predicted to be low, but there is little doubt that the makers will still produce admirable wines. The festival’s gala dinner was a celebration of those wines, but let’s take a look at the food first. Hotel du Vin remains one of our more favoured places to dine; simple bistro fare, usually, but done with style and with a wine list that has some great choices. Only the week before, they won the Make Your Case event in a field of eight wines. We started with smoked salmon blinis, towering blinis to be precise, and very good they were too.

Our first course was a cheese parcel, crisp outside and meltingly delicious and strong inside. It came with the most delicious baby plum tomatoes, each one skinned and delicately dressed. Simplicity here won the day, and plates were cleared. Our main course was an elaborate trio of pork, roast loin, belly and a croquette of shredded meat in a crisp breadcrumb shell. With it, a fabulous gratin dauphinoise and a fine apple puree. I loved it all, there was clarity between the separate cuts of meat and a great meat reduction served on the side. There were also bowls of vegetables; nice enough I suppose, but they did look a little like banquetting fare. I shouldn’t grumble – they were, after all, well cooked.
Our next treat was a trio of Sussex cheeses supplied by David from La Cave au Fromage. What a great place that is, and he certainly knows his stuff. Flower Marie was as ever quite delicious. The Lord of the Hundreds worked well with a quince cheese (membrillo by any other name), but the coupling of a hefty camembert-style soft cheese with truffled honey was sublime. If you have never tried the honey, truffle and cheese trick then I urge you to do so.

“Sussex has already achieved international acclaim for wine production”

Dessert was a pear poached in red wine and cleverly stuffed with a rich chocolate mousse. On the side, vanilla icecream and syrup. It was the perfect end to an extremely good, and I have to say generous, meal. So on to the wines. With our canapés the very delicious Victoria from Ridgeview, as pretty a pink sparkler as you could wish for, and winemaker Charlie Holand from the Ridgeview Estate, gave a brief history of how it is made.

Simon Woodhead from Stopham then told us a little about his wine and about the estate before Mardi Roberts, again from Ridgeview, told us about our second sparkling wine of the evening. Stuart Barfor delivered our final wine chat about his extraordinary sparkling red from the historic Bolney Estate. It was a fascinating evening, the wines causing much debate around the tables. Sussex has already achieved international acclaim for wine production and wines of real quality: by 2015 the county is looking at producing a total of five million bottles of Sussex wines. Ridgeview are already exporting 20 per cent of what they produce, as well as supplying the Royal Household. Bolney Estate will make between 80,000 and 100,000 bottles this year from their 39 acre estate, that was mentioned in the domesday book, and Stopham are one of the first estates to experiment with popular still wine grape varieties like pinot blanc.

In addition to a fine meal and fine wines, I took the opportunity to exercise my new hobby for chugging; not chugging down wine but ‘charity mugging’. The previous Friday I prompted a very generous audience at the Make Your Case event to dig deep for the privilege of seeing (the very game) Simon Broad from wine merchants Ten Green Bottles take his shirt off, and £338 did the trick. And at Hotel du Vin we wrestled a further £185 from a very generous room of guests, already paying for the privilege of being there.

The Brighton & Hove Food & Drink Festival is now a Community Interest Company – in a sense a charity – but the directors and committee are agreed that we can raise charity money for other causes. This year our chosen charity is Rockinghorse and we have already raised in excess of £1,500 for them. Ryan Heal, the new Chief Executive, was at the dinner and is delighted that we have chosen to work with them this year to raise much needed funds. So if over the next months you see me rattling a tin, then dig deep.

Hotel du Vin & Bistro, Ship Street, Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1AD,01273 718588, www.hotelduvin.com, www.brightonfoodfestival.com