The Sugrue South Downs winery from the Bee Tree Vineyard. Anthony Rose

I first came across Dermot Sugrue after he had turned the abandoned turkey abattoir at Wiston Estate into one of the UK’s top winemaking facilities. He had already earned his stripes after Nyetimber’s then owners Andy and Nichola Hill took him on initially as assistant winemaker and then, within a year, as head winemaker.

You don’t work for Nyetimber without knowing what you’re doing and Dermot had a pretty shrewd idea of what he was doing. Before that, he had completed two vintages at Châteaux L’Eglise-Clinet and Léoville-Barton in Bordeaux before returning to the UK to help establish a new winery in East Anglia and enrol at Plumpton College.

Dermot had long held a healthy fascination with alcohol. As an Irish teenager of 15, he had made beer, he made country wine when he was 16 and then then bought concentrated grape juice from Hungary and made wine in his bedroom. He also made a sake and a raisin wine. His first job was working in an abattoir for 14 months and seemingly improbably, he relates the experience to making wine. How?

“In the sense that everyday you make a mess and at the end of the day you have to clean it up again.”

Fast forward a couple of decades and with his experience at Wiston Estate under his belt, it was time for Dermot to set himself free in 2022 and become his own boss. Which is why, on a sunny summer’s day, I found myself face to face with Dermot, his Croatian winemaker wife Ana and their two-year-old son Ronan, aka Ronnie, at their Bee Tree Vineyard in East Sussex.

Dermot was buzzing (pardon the pun) because an April report from Wine Lister, the fine wine consultancy agency, had listed Sugrue’s The Trouble With Dreams as England’s highest-rated sparkling wine, ahead of, among others, Hambledon, Hattingley Valley, Nyetimber and Gusbourne. He also shared the news that his export and on-trade label, Bee Tree itself, had done well in a Decanter tasting.

Sugrue South Downs had purchased its first vineyard – Bee Tree near Wivelsfield Green in East Sussex – in May 2023. “Only lunatics and hedge fund managers buy vineyards,” says Dermot, but this one was too good to resist. A 1.35 ha vineyard planted on clay and lower greensand soils in 2015, Bee Tree, which does actually have bees buzzing around hives along the perimeter fence, is a warm, protected site, comprising mainly pinot noir.

Owning Bee Tree Vineyard is a dream come true for Dermot after two decades of developing vineyards and making wines for others. It’s a process that has stood him in good stead because he knows where the bodies are buried, or at least where the grapes that he wants to make his wines are grown. The story began in 2005 when he met Harry and Pip Goring whose aim of planting a vineyard on Wiston Estate’s south-facing chalk soils coincided with his vision of making a sparkling wine in the mould of the champagnes of the Côte des Blancs he’d fallen in love with.

In the early years at Nyetimber he had spent time visiting Champagne and gravitated to chardonnay grown on chalk. In that year he did his first vintage with Jacquinot & Fils, the family domaine of his friend Jean-Manuel Jacquinot, who had been his winemaking mentor at Nyetimber. Oddly, he found himself more accepted in Champagne and when one day one of his friends said to him ‘you know why you are accepted in Champagne; it’s because you’re not English, but Irish’.

“I decided then that Sugrue would be a predominantly chardonnay wine, because I believe in a freshness, minerality, longevity and a saline, savoury nature you can get in the wines.”

Then came divine intervention in the form of Father Paul McMahon, the head monk in the monastic order of Catholic priests at Our Lady of England Priory in Storrington. Father Paul had had the idea of planting a vineyard where children could be invited to come and see what agriculture was about. On this site where chalk meets greensand on the edge of the South Downs National Park, Dermot planted two fields to one hectare of 60% chardonnay and 40% pinot noir.

Dermot Sugrue. Anthony Rose

In return for planting the vines and making wines for the priests, he was granted the right to take a percentage of the grapes to make his own wine. When the grapes were so good in 2008 that the birds scoffed the lot, Father Paul muttered stoically: ‘that’s the trouble with dreams’. It stayed with Dermot who decided to call his brand The Trouble With Dreams. When it was awarded top spot at the Decanter World Wine Awards, he realised he had something special on his hands.

As good as this vineyard was, the worst ever summer of 2012—officially the coldest, wettest and darkest since 1912—spurred Dermot on to find a new source of fruit to complement the vineyard at Storrington Priory. In 2013, Dermot met Alice Renton, who, with her late husband, had planted 2.2 ha in Offham, between Plumpton and Lewes in the South Downs of East Sussex. The Mount Harry vineyard is planted on pure chalk with a shallow clay topsoil and no flints, running almost directly south-east on a significant slope.

The two agreed to work together and Dermot took over the management of Mount Harry, where, in 2013, he made the first release of Cuvée Dr Brendan O’Regan, a multi-vintage cuvée only made in exceptional years, later described by Hugh Johnson as ‘Honestly, England’s best’. A zero-dosage cuvée named ZODO followed in 2014, described by Neal Martin as ‘a killer English sparkling wine’.

In 2022 Dermot left Wiston Estate and the opportunity came up to lease the 7.35 ha Coldharbour vineyard in East Sussex from which he had already been making wine since 2011. Planted on chalk and owned by the Hunt family, the vines run north-south in a bowl-like amphitheatre. Having won a number of awards at the Wine GB Awards with it, Dermot calls it his second ‘grand cru’. The year before that he was joined by his wife Ana, herself an accomplished winemaker in her own right, having worked in such diverse countries as Peru, New Zealand, Germany, Austria and in the USA’s Napa Valley before lecturing in winemaking at Plumpton College.

Sugrue South Downs turned a corner after Dermot met Robin Hutson OBE, one of the UK’s leading hoteliers and the man behind Hotel du Vin and The PIG Hotel, who had noticed that many of the English bottles appearing on his wine lists were made by Dermot. Dermot helped Robin plant the 0.75 ha Alpaca Block for Robin, completing the complicated web of vineyards that now sees him drawing his source material from two vineyards in East Sussex, two vineyards in West Sussex as well as Bee Tree Vineyard.

Robin’s subsequent investment and support enabled Dermot and Ana to make Sugrue South Downs a full time pursuit and to purchase a small vineyard, lease another, build a winery, have a baby, and nearly break themselves during the 2023 vintage.

Next door to the Bee Tree vineyard, the new winery is kitted out with equipment almost all of which Dermot proudly tells you was bought, lock, stock, and literally, barrel, second hand via various purchases made from his deep knowledge of the wine industry.

Previously a tractor barn, with a terrace that opens on to the vineyard, it sits on the site of the original workshop of celebrated British railways engineer John Saxby, the father of modern points and signal systems used on train lines today. There are also a couple of fancy iron barbecue installations ready for Sugrue Sundays. The aim is to bring The Pig Hotel chefs and celebrities such as Mark Hix and Angela Hartnett to cook up a storm for groups of customers.

After picking into small baskets, the grapes are pressed in a 4-tonne Vaslin pneumatic press. He likes to ferment in older demi-muids of 600 litres and barriques as well as stainless steel, avoiding malolactic fermentation where possible in order to retain freshness. A mobile bottler comes from Champagne for the second fermentation bottling and disgorgement.

His main brand, The Trouble With Dreams, is fermented half in larger oak barrels, spends nine months in barrel before blending and tirage, and spends four to five years on the lees. It’s marginally chardonnay dominated. His approach to reserve wines is to build up a stock of reserves, whether as a perpetual reserve or different years kept separately.

“The addition of reserve makes a massive difference. I store the wine knowing when to deploy it if necessary, so, for instance, The Trouble With Dreams was bolstered with a proportion of 2022 and 2023.”

Now that his vineyard sources have grown from 3.5 ha to 11 ha, Dermot is looking to make some 50-60,000 bottles a year in the Sugrue South Downs range. No longer an outsider, he says ‘I’m now reminded that I’m a fundamental part of the English wine industry’.

The growth in size has meant bringing in a new marketing director, Callum Edge, whose job is to try to increase direct-to-consumer sales—currently at 20%—to 50%. With his array of top quality vineyard sources, a new vineyard and winery he can call his own and his talented winemaking wife as his partner in wine and crime, Dermot Sugrue is set fair for achieving his ultimate goal in which there should be no trouble with dreams whatsoever.