An English Vineyard Diary: July

After months of debilitating self-isolation, school bubbles have finally burst and, with lock-down now formally ended, the Champagne bubbles are flowing. By Nicholas Coates, the co-founder, with Christian Seely, of English sparkling wine producer Coates & Seely.

‘Bubble’.

It’s a curious word.

We share it with the Swedish ‘bubbla’, the Danish and Norwegian ‘boble’ and the Dutch ‘bubbel’.

It first entered Middle English as a ‘burble’, but eventually popped up – as burbles tend to do – in modern English as a ‘bubble’ (in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’).

Cast as an image of hollowness, and then later of ephemerality and later still of excess (viz the ‘South Sea Bubble’), the hapless bubble has nevertheless also had its admirers along the way.

Remember Keats’ intoxicating ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’? Or Shelley’s ‘bubbles on a river sparkling, bursting, borne away’?

Each an image of joy and fragility.

And in Cockney, a ‘bubble’ means a ‘laugh’ (rhyming, as it does, with ‘bubble bath’).

Today the bubble’s imagery has once again – dare we even say it – mutated, and we have for many months found ourselves, irritatingly, stuck in one.

To a greater or lesser extent we probably always have been, although this is surely the first time we have been ordered there by decree?

But with our children now finally released from their own self-isolation, we can see that such grotesque legal overreach is itself a mere bubble – here today, gone tomorrow – pricked by the immunising needle of modern science.

Of course we are, at Coates & Seely, purveyors of bubbles ourselves, and over the years have developed our own observations on the subject.

Bubbles, we have observed, are best consumed.

Not chased, or pricked, or invested in, still less retreated into.

They should be consumed: ideally, in extremely generous quantities of tiny, eddying spirals that tease the palate with a natural and spontaneous thrill.

Consumption should be frequent, too, so that the bubbles’ natural evanescence is counter-balanced with regular replenishment.

This is very good for the spirit (and for sales).

Our forbears discovered this long ago and Churchill’s words on the sterling properties of fizz still resonate down the decades:

“In victory, deserved, in defeat, needed!”

Famous epidemiologists will no doubt seek one day to understand the effects of self-isolation on a distressed people; and the great business schools of the world will produce seminal case studies on the retail implications of pandemics.

If our own experience is anything to go by, they’d do well, when they do, to heed the Great Man’s words…

Sales of Champagne and English sparkling wine have soared as people have taken solace from the most edifying of all forms of bubble, in mitigation of the malicious effects of another.

So, as we finally retreat from our bubbles – celebrating, as well we might, the return of our traditional freedoms – let us raise a glass to liberty, to our doctors and nurses, and to all who have resisted submission, and treat ourselves to some bubbles.

They will raise the spirit and calm the soul.

For the Good Health of us all!

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An English Vineyard Diary: June