England-based winemaker Dermot Sugrue has always been fascinated by fermentation. Growing up in Kilmallock in Co Limerick, he started making beer in his bedroom when he was 15. “When I was 16 years of age the local archdeacon gave me a bottle of elderberry port and that’s what inspired me. I thought ‘I want to make this’.”
“The Rev Brian Snow also gave me a copy of Hugh Johnson’s wine book, first published in 1967. I could still recite entire paragraphs from that book because I devoured it as a 16-year-old, especially that opening paragraph when he talks about the difference between something that’s like lily white sap in the glass compared to some deep unctuous Tokai Aszú from the 18th century. It is remarkable that 30-odd years later Hugh Johnson, the person who wrote that book and inspired the window of wonder into wine for me as a teenager, has now invested in our business.”
English wine has enjoyed two decades of huge growth and success, with a record 16 million-plus bottles produced in 2025. With similar chalk soils to Champagne, and mostly using the same chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes, the best wines can compare favourably with Champagne, often beating them in blind tastings. Don’t expect them to be cheaper than Champagne, though. Most producers are at the boutique end and have high running costs.
Sugrue went to England in 1992 to study environmental science and ended up working two vintages (harvests) in Bordeaux, which got him really interested in wine. He joined Nyetimber, one of the very first English sparkling wine producers, and was quickly promoted to head winemaker.
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From there he did two things; in 2006 he planted a small vineyard at Storrington in west Sussex for the monastic Norbertine order of Catholic priests with Fr Paul McMahon. When the first vintage was eaten by birds, McMahon quipped, “That’s the trouble with dreams,” a title Sugrue has now given to one of his wines.
That same year, he joined the Goring family who own Wiston Estate, a long-established 6,500 acre farm on chalk soils in the South Downs. They wanted to plant a vineyard, initially to supply Nyetimber. Instead, Sugrue set up a contract winemaking facility, making wine for dozens of other producers as well as Wiston. “I think I calculated that I made over 300 individual cuvées and over 3,000,000 bottles, so this was really where I cut my winemaking teeth.” he says.
While working for Wiston, Sugrue was running his own small winery. In 2022, he began to work full time for Sugrue South Downs. It is now one of the most highly regarded producers in the UK, releasing a string of award-winning wines, each with an idiosyncratic name.
Sugrue Downs owns the small Bee Tree vineyard and buys grapes and leases vineyards all over the region. The company has turned an old tractor shed into a winery, which also hosts regular events. “It was just a very, very rudimentary tractor barn in a in a sea of mud basically, and we’ve gone to town on it,” says Sugrue.
Most of the tanks and equipment were bought second hand from wineries that were closing all over Europe. He travelled around the Continent buying up such machinery. “We’ve turned it into a great winemaking space but so we’ll receive all of our grapes here from our numerous vineyards that we’re now managing 100 per cent ourselves.”
Sugrue has lined up an enviable list of investors, including actor Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey and Paddington), chef Angela Hartnett, hotelier Robert Hutson, founder of the luxury Pig Hotels and Hotel du Vin group, and the aforementioned legendary wine writer, Johnson. The business holds regular intimate tastings and dinners for the public with chefs such as Mark Hix, Mitch Tonks and Hartnett.
And so to the wines; Sugrue is inventive in the names he gives to them. His primary wine is The Trouble With Dreams. Then there is Bonkers Zombie Robot Alien Monsters From the Future Ate My Brain (sur lie) and “Zodo”, Rosé Ex Machina, Rock Story, Cuvée Boz, and Cuvée Brendan O’Regan, named after his great-uncle, the visionary who invented duty-free. His wines tend to be racy and lean, with fine, elegant fruit and great depth.
“The Trouble with Dreams is the most important wine, our premier wine, the one we make every year,” he says. But he also certainly has fun making seriously good once-off wines. The O’Regan is sublime wine, rich, layered and complex with an amazing finish. It is currently being poured on British Airways in first class.
Sugrue’s next project is a red pinot noir. “It’s so exciting for me because I’m a frustrated red wine maker, hence my beginnings in Bordeaux, and now to be able to indulge my fantasies and passions for making what I think could be world class red wine in England, well, I never ever saw that coming.”
I tried the first vintage, which was excellent.
[ Did you know there are more than a dozen vineyards in Ireland?Opens in new window ]
“The first vintage of this, the 2022, was only four barriques, so 1,200 bottles. We released 1,000 bottles and we sold them all in three and a half hours online at £65 a pop,” he says.
The fruit comes from Crouch Valley in Essex, “the driest, warmest place in the UK by some distance”. he says. “Having made wine in England for 23 years now, in my view the South Downs chalk is the best place to make sparkling wine in the UK, but for making still wine irrefutably it’s Essex and specifically what they call this Dengie Peninsula between the rivers Crouch and Blackwater.”
His investors are important. Harnett’s Murano group and the Pig Hotels have their own cuvée of sparkling wine, allowing them to sell it by the glass. Hutson has become the chairman of Sugrue South Downs. “We get his wonderful, amazing experience – he is this unbelievably respected and experienced hospitality trailblazer who absolutely adores wine and adores what we’ve been doing,” says Sugrue.
He describes Johnson as “lovely, just very relaxed about life in general”.
“And he’s just so encyclopedic and really knowledgeable about so many things, effortlessly articulate and he has the ability to reduce complex things to just sort of simple little sentences but he also he writes so beautifully.”
Johnson’s involvement came about through his granddaughter. “About four or five years ago Hugh Johnson’s granddaughter was asked coming up to her 18th birthday what she would like to do for her 18th birthday. She said, ‘I’d like to visit Sugrue South Downs’, so we had a royal visit of three generations of the of the Johnson family, including author Kitty Johnson who’s wonderful. That kind of, I think, sealed the deal and Hugh proposed that he would like to invest so he became an investor as well.”
Sugrue is a rare mix of talented winemaker and entrepreneur. He is driven, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and talks incessantly. He knows each and every vineyard, its character, and he is also genuinely interested in your opinion of his wines. Today, he is recognised as one of the best sparkling winemakers in the UK, some would say the best, with a string of awards and high scores for his wines. King Charles is a fan and serves his wine at state dinners. His Croatian wife Ana Sugrue, also a very experienced winemaker, came to teach at nearby Plumpton College, where most English winemakers come to study. She now looks after sales. They have a son Ronan, named after his father. He is also an enthusiastic cyclist, having ridden for Kilmallock Cycling Club in his youth along with his two brothers.
Sugrue South Downs wines are available from Searsons in Monkstown, Co Dublin and Searsons.com; Jus de Vin, Portmarnock, Co Dublin; Sweeneys D3 in Dublin 3; Fíon Eile in Dublin 7; Avoca stores and Worldwide Wines in Waterford for €45-€100 a bottle.
