Richard Osman champions English wine

An unlikely supporting character in the latest instalment of the best-selling Thursday Murder Club series by author and TV personality Richard Osman is English Sparkling wine. Sarah Neish reports.

Author and TV personality Richard Osman has tapped into the growing popularity and commercial success of English wine in his latest novel.

The Last Devil To Die is the fourth in Osman’s fictional Thursday Murder Club series, soon to be released as a TV drama on Netflix, featuring an all-star cast including Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Sir Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie.

References to English wine are scattered throughout the book, which like its predecessors follows razor-sharp pensioners Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim on their increasingly outrageous detective exploits.

Osman appears to hold up English wine as an archetypal, respectable, clean-cut British business, and even hints that it could be a good route for criminals wanting to go straight and run a legitimate business. He dangles English wine as a scrubbed, squeaky clean carrot for one of his characters – drug dealer Mitch Maxwell – who has had enough of the dark underworld he inhabits following the theft of one of his heroin shipments.

“Luca is dead and the Afghans won’t trust him any more. Time to diversify. He’s been talking to the English sparkling wine people. There’s a plot of land in Sussex, in Ditchling, south-facing slope, chalky soil, the works,” a passage in the novel reads.

Better than Champagne

Maxwell runs his criminal enterprise from an industrial estate in Sussex, where the only above-board business is the winery and storage facility of ‘Bramber – The Finest English Sparkling Wine.’

The legitimate enterprise is housed next to a host of other criminal operations, some of which “churn out MDMA and passports”.

Osman’s character appears to be in awe of Bramber’s founders, and envies them for being “the only legitimate company in the whole compound.”

Maxwell explains: “The brother and sister who run it could not be more charming, and had given everyone a crate of their wine for Christmas. It was better than Champagne…”

Tellingly, Osman writes: “Mitch suspected there was good money to be made in English sparkling wine, and had thought about investing.”

Pivotal moment

The author, who also created and presented TV show Pointless, is savvy to weave English wine into his latest plot, as it taps into a pivotal moment for the category that will forever anchor The Last Devil To Die to a specific time and place.

Nicola Bates, CEO of trade body WineGB called 2023-2024 “our year of growth”, adding that the last 12 months “cements our position as the UK’s fastest growing agricultural sector.”

Sales of English Sparkling have risen 187% since 2018, and according to WineGB plantings hit a record milestone last year, surpassing 1,000 vineyards for the first time. There are now 1,030 vineyards operating in Great Britain, up 9.2% on the same time in 2022.

Official production figures show that 161,960.84 hectolitres of English and Welsh wine were made in 2023, the equivalent of 21.6 million bottles, 76% of which will be turned into sparkling, while 23% will become still wine.

As db has previously reported, it is not only wine experts that are dipping a toe into English wine. EuroMillions winner Adrian Bayford, who pocketed £148 million when he hit the jackpot in 2012, this year planted a vineyard on his Suffolk estate (mostly Meunier vines), leading to speculation that he plans to enter the world of English sparkling production.

Will there be a future for Mitch Maxwell in English wine? You’ll have to read the book to find out…

 

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