As he says himself, Bob Lindo isn’t very good at watching others work. “We put
this in ourselves,” he says as we bump along a narrow Cornish lane. The
woodland? “The road,” he clarifies. “Three people and me did it with
44 loads of concrete.”
By the time we swing through the gate of Camel Valley vineyard – all black at
this time of year, gnarled sticks planted in rows on the blissfully sunny
slopes that rise up from the River Camel – I’m beginning to think that any
woman married to Bob, a former RAF pilot, would want to be very careful
about what challenges she allowed to cross his path.
Bob and his wife Annie planted the first vines here in 1989 when the phrase
“English wine” was still an oxymoron and The Good Life had been on repeats
for a decade.
Their wines now take on rivals from all over the world – and win. Their son,
Sam, who has now officially stepped into his dad’s winemaker shoes, is just
back from collecting a trophy in Verona, where the Camel Valley Pinot Noir
Rose 2008 (now sold out sadly, though there is plenty of the delicate,
wild-strawberry-scented 2009) had been awarded best international sparkling
rosé in the Bollicine del Mondo contest.
Camel Valley is so garlanded – Sam has been British winemaker of the year for
two out of the past four – that their trophy cabinet filled up long ago and
now overflows across the top of the kitchen cupboards in an unruly cascade
of framed certificates.
The strange thing is that when Bob and Annie originally bought this farm they
weren’t looking for a place to grow grapes at all.
“I always said that I didn’t want to become an RAF person with a handlebar
moustache,” Bob says. “Annie and I both had vaguely farming-related
backgrounds so we decided we’d buy a small farm in Cornwall.”
They did that in 1982, when Bob was 33, expecting to have to wait another five
years before he could leave the RAF. Then the accident happened.
“We were tail-chasing in the sky above Helmsley in North Yorkshire,” Bob says.
“That’s when the other chap’s doing loop-the-loops and so on, and you stick
on his tail, about 100 yards away – no distance when you’re flying at
600-700mph.
“Instead of just missing him we went smack, and my tail was knocked off. I was
a squadron commander at the time and had a student sitting beside me. I told
him to eject. He said: 'Pardon?’ I’d always promised Annie I’d never be
found dead in an aeroplane so I ejected. He got the message.”
The force of the propulsion, “basically a big rocket comes up your backside”,
broke his spine. “I was in screaming agony, but I counted three parachutes
so I knew everyone was alive.
“I became an instant convert to religion on the way down. That lasted until I
hit the ground – hard because an emergency parachute isn’t like the ones you
use for fun.”
That was the end of his RAF career; and Bob was still in pretty bad shape when
he and Annie moved, rather earlier than intended, to Cornwall, where they
already had 80 cattle and 300 sheep.
“I couldn’t stand, sit, do anything. But the electric fence had come down so I
crawled around on my side mending it. That was the beginning of me doing
things.”
As he slogged towards a full recovery Bob noticed what a sun-trap the farm was
– “Go up to Bodmin Moor a few miles away and it’s arctic.” That was when he
decided to try making wine. The first vines to go in were obscure
cold-climate varieties such as Triomphe d’Alsace and Léon Millot.
Times have changed; the Lindos now concentrate on bacchus (like an English
take on sauvignon blanc, it has refreshing clean lines); they make a super
cow-parsley and hedgerow-scented fizz called Cornwall Brut from seyval blanc
and reichensteiner, and have been very successful with pinot noir, which Bob
seems to have planted largely through a competitive desire to get on the
international wine map.
Camel Valley is founded on graft. “There are no investors, no heritage money,
no bank loans: every single thing has been built on the sale of a bottle of
wine,” Bob says.
But my favourite thing about Bob’s vision is that he thinks English wine
should be tasted on its own terms: “We’ve never been champagne looky-likeys.
They make millions of bottles a year and they don’t want another few
thousand from Cornwall. We should be separate, distinctive.”
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