Ep. 1116 Fergus Elias & Lee Isaacs | Uncorked

Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. This episode has been brought to you by the wine to wine business forum twenty twenty two. This year will mark the ninth edition of the forum to be held on November 2022 in Verona, Italy. This year will be an exclusively in person edition. The main theme of the event will be all round wine communication. Tickets are on sale now. So for more information, please visit us at winetowine.net. Hello, everybody. My name is Polly Hammond, and you are listening to Uncorked, the Italian wine podcast series about all things marketing and communication. Join me each week for candid conversations with experts from within and beyond the wine world as we explore what it takes to build a profitable business in today's constantly shifting environment. This week, we're joined by the maker and the merchant, Fergus Elias and Lee Isaacs. As head winemaker at Husheath Estate in The UK, Fergus is one of the youngest head winemakers on the planet. No surprise, given that he's been working in English sparkling wine since he was big enough to walk. Lee, best known by many of us for his zany wedding guitar riffs, has spent over twenty years working in wine as a WSET educator, merchant, presenter, and brand ambassador. Today, we talk about Twitter friends and podcast, joy and delight, and deep knowledge and expertise. Let's get into it. Good morning, gentlemen. Ferguson Lee, I'm so excited to have you here today. Good morning. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You see, Fergus and I on a podcast this morning. We're all gonna talk over each other, and it's completely okay. So just go for it. First line finished each other sentences. Well, please go right ahead. I promise not to chop and change it so that doesn't happen. So, okay. We're having a little bit of a different style of podcast today. And and one reason for that is that the two of you are podcasters as of just a few weeks ago, but you also have a lot of presenting. You've got a lot of communication background. We were just talking before we officially hit record that this is going to God knows what tangents we're going to go off in. So before before we actually let our freak flags fly, let's do all of the appropriate posturing for a moment so that people are like, oh, maybe I really should listen to what they have to say. I'm gonna go in the order that you present across my screen. Fergus. Hello. Lovely, Fergus. Jamie Good has referred to you as one of the most accomplished winemakers in English wine today, and you are one of the youngest head winemakers on the planet. Well, that these are both incredibly generous statements. But, I I I am a head winemaker, and and and I'm And you are young. So, apparently, he's real. Not especially old, I suppose. No. I certainly feel it feel it now halfway through harvest. Yeah. And and so tell us what you do in your day to day life when you're not being irreverent with Lee. So I am head winemaker at Balfour Winery, which is a sort of medium sized winery based in Kent, in England. So we make, traditional method sparkling wines and some still wines. We're about sixty six thirty three sparkling still. And we make probably just under half a million bottles a year. And, yeah, that's that's my my my bread and butter is is is is making those wines and talk about those wines. And and, yeah, I ran into Lee, probably during lockdown. I think it was one of those ones one of those meetings via the Internet. And, yeah, we've been friends for a long time and then, well, not a long time, but a few years now. COVID feels like a long time. COVID has been a lifetime. It has hasn't it? And then, yeah, perhaps not that long ago, we decided that we quite liked talking, and we had moderately large egos and thought that we'd just do a podcast. And, you know, we We both had microphones. Yeah. We're like, screw it. We're in. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That that was basically how it started, and we're now two episodes into the maker and the merchant, which I regularly get the name wrong for. And, yeah, it's really good fun. But, yeah, that's that's that's sort of that's sort of me. Yeah. So a quick thing, Fergus. Not that we want to, you know, kind of ride on anybody's coattails, but you grew up in wine for, you know, one for one pretty big reason. And that is your father, you know, has a little bit of knowledge about making wine. Right? Yeah. He's made a few he's made a few buckles. My father was is a consultant winemaker. He was the head winemaker at Chapel Down, which is England's biggest winery. And, yeah, so he I grew up I literally grew up in the house next to Chapel Down. So that was that was a lot of fun. It meant I spent every sort of holiday you can imagine working in some description in in either a winery, a vineyard, or a or the shop once I was once I was 18, which is great fun. But it did completely put me off a career in wine for a year or so because Really? So you you had to come, like, full circle on this. I I really did. I sort of I I decided that I just I spent so many hours pruning in miserable conditions and so many days just standing on a discouraging line that I decided that I really wanted to do something else. So I studied ancient history at Liverpool University, and my plan was either become a pilot. And when that was all that was always a bit of a pipe dream, but if it if it if it didn't work out, the plan was to become a lawyer. God forbid. Yeah. I know. Burn all the lawyers. But they do make nice money. So I sort of thought I'd do that, but then I didn't. I got offered a job in wine. I finished my degree and took took took a position here as as a seller hand at at Balfour. And then, I would love Now you have now you have Jamie saying, you know, these lovely hyperbolic things about you. So clearly, it it was a good choice, but more importantly, you get to spend your days with Lee and his guitar and his very large wine brain that I'm not certain that people who first encounter Lee on social media might realize how deep the wine knowledge goes. So nice segue there. I'm gonna pass to Leigh and just say, you know, before we get to the stand up comedy and the guitars, Tell us a little bit about the twenty plus years that you have spent in wine. Well, that is far too kind and general. I I was worried how you're going to follow-up from Fergus with you know, you've got a quote from Jamie Goode. He's the most accomplished winemaker and go, how can I possibly introduce this this idiot that that hangs around with Fergus? Oh, I have the quote for you too, but it's not about you. Don't worry. We'll do that. Good. Yeah. I think probably legally, you wouldn't be allowed to use those quotes until the course is that the the, it's finalized in the courts. Now I, My quote. I mean Yeah. Yes. We can't have your quote at all. I, yes. I've been I've been around wine from a very young age. I had quite a continental style upbringing at at which point I'm always at pains to to try and explain who I really am. So who who I really am is a northern working class country boy. So, you know, I we we grew up I I grew up drinking. That's probably complete statement actually. I grew up drinking. I I was kind of exposed to wine from about the age of five. So my my parents would give me a a very small serve of usually white wine, allowing me to, like, literally touch the lips, and then that would have been topped up with water or lemonade. And as I got older, those ratios changed. And but the the wines we drank were very ordinary everyday wine, so they were the, I suppose, the the Casa de Aldebos and the yellow tails of of the day, generally. Although, occasionally, we would drink, you know, any a very extreme purchase would have been maybe a bottle of vintage, say, Verve Clico or or maybe Moet. So, you know, not not an especially hard to find champagne one that was prevalent. But, you know, we drank sort of fairly everyday stuff. But, anyway, I digress. I I just became really inter