Things have changed a bit since the 15th century, and today the Old Kent Road is probably best known as the cheapest property in the UK version of Monopoly. Lined by industrial estates, superstores, post-war housing estates and often clogged with four lanes of traffic, a Monopoly-based travel guide, Bowl of Chalk, recommends avoiding it entirely and visiting nearby Borough Market instead.
Not really the sort of place where you’d expect to find low-intervention wine production but it’s where the much-celebrated Leisure Wine has decided to call home. The project has been created by Samuel Jackson Garbutt, a distiller at East London Liquor Company alongside Samuel Travers, head of gin production at the Port of Leith distillery in Edinburgh and Vangeli Moschopoulos, who, having worked in various aspects of the drinks industry now works in creative advertising – all three with no prior wine experience to speak of.
“There were things that we needed that the Old Kent Road had,” explains Moschopoulos. “One was reasonable rent which in London is very hard to get, with wine it’s a year at least before you have anything ready to sell. We needed a yard, if you’re unloading a tonne of grapes, you need somewhere to do it. There’s a lot here that helps but obviously, it’s not like we have a farm in Surrey.
“But we had a pop-up cocktail bar years and years ago, even before we all got into distilling and brewing and were talking for ages about doing something, maybe beer, maybe a spirit, but we soon realised the only thing we were really drinking in our own time was wine.”
In its earliest version, Leisure Wine’s home was a barn on a friend’s farm. Totally open to the elements, it was where the first grapes, were crushed by foot and sat on skins for a week, tannins tempered by the cold Lothian climate.
Wine isn’t a forgiving medium to the inexperienced. The raw ingredients are orders of magnitude more expensive than beer or spirits and you only get one shot each year.
“There’s a lot that can go wrong with the wine that you’re not in control of,” explains Jackson Garbutt. “You only get one chance every year, you have September and October for the harvest and then if you screw it up, or your equipment breaks you’re done.”
“But that’s what is exciting to us about this,” says Moschopoulos. “You get the grapes, make a few decisions at the beginning and then everything from that point depends on the yeast, the fermentation, the temperature changes, we’re not trying to make many interventions. In gin, the production is very mechanised to a point, and this is so removed from that.”
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Leisure Wine’s first release dropped in October 2021. ‘I saw custard creams fall from the sky like lighting’ was made using Chardonnay grapes from Essex, driven overnight by the guys to their original temporary site outside of Edinburgh, three-quarters were pressed and spent seven days on skins, the rest underwent carbonic maceration. The wine itself is characterful, textured, rich, a promising debut that quickly became impossible to find as word of it spread among London’s natural wine community.
Their second round of releases will be a trio of as yet unnamed wines. The first a run of Sangiovese left on skins for two weeks, the second a smaller bottling of Sangiovese from the direct press, and finally a Nero di Troia. The grapes this time sourced from Puglia, hand-harvested, unwashed, and organic, and again bottles will be limited and in high demand.
Not to waste anything, the spent Sangiovese and Nero di Troia grapes have been reflushed to produce a light, slightly sparkling piquette that will be ready for release as soon as the weather invites it.
It was Moschopoulos who came up with the name, I saw custard creams fall from the sky like lighting, a bible quote muddled with the smell of custard creams that filled the room during fermentation. A combination of flamboyant grandeur and Ken Loachian Britishness, a bit like creating exciting, modern, low intervention wine in an industrial estate off the Old Kent Road.
