What happens when a sommelier starts making wine?

We’ve been featured in The Evening Standard… read the full piece here

“Sommeliers used to pour wine in restaurants. Now, they’re out in the fields producing it, says Douglas Blyde”

“In Battersea, beneath two railway arches where trains rattle overhead, Sergio Verrillo runs Blackbook Winery with his wife, Lynsey. The space feels urban and improvised. Verrillo grew up in the United States with Italian and Hungarian parents who made wine at home. A career in music gave way to hospitality, which led him to Gordon Ramsay’s Maze and eventually to oenology studies at Plumpton College.

Today, he sources grapes within reach of London. Tamesis bacchus, grown organically at Forty Hall in Enfield, shows brightness and restraint. It feels like London wine in temperament. Direct, alert and refreshingly uninterested in pastoral romance (£26, blackbookwinery.com).”