FAMILY ROOTS
In 1995, Mike and Christine Roberts planted their first vines at Ditchling Common, on a conviction almost nobody shared. Mike, an accountant turned software entrepreneur who had gone back to college to learn winemaking, had spotted what others missed: the chalk beneath the South Downs is the same seam that runs under Champagne, a hundred kilometres south. So while the rest of the country planted German varieties, they planted Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, and committed to the traditional method.
They were proved right, and quickly. Our first release won English Wine of the Year in 2000, and Ridgeview has since been poured at Buckingham Palace state banquets, at Downing Street and for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
But they built something larger than a winery. Ridgeview became the place new growers came for advice, and Mike gave it freely — a quietly paternal figure in an industry that scarcely existed when he began. He was awarded an MBE for services to English wine in 2011 and died in 2014. Christine was beside him for every year of it; asked once what mattered in the end, his answer was a single line: his wife.