On graduation, I went out to Napa Valley in California to do a harvest. I had a three-month contract as a laboratory assistant for Cuvaison Estate Wines. I arrived to be told that the oenologist had left the week before and that I was now the oenologist as harvest was starting that day, and there was no way they could replace him in time.

With 1,000 tonnes of fruit arriving over the next few weeks, 12 different winemakers working within the custom crush facility, 3,000 barrels in the caves and more than 50 different wines being made each year, it was a daunting prospect. As a new graduate, I had only a few vintages experience within English sparkling wineries, and my grape-picking in New Zealand was no preparation for lab work on that scale.

Luckily, I had no real concept of what a task it was, and I took each day as it came. It turned out I was rather good at the juggling and organisation required – and being in the lab proved to offer a unique insight into all the wines and winemakers working out of the winery.

I got to monitor each ferment every day, taste, discuss and question every decision made. The guys on the cellar floor working ‘on the tools’ and feeling like they were doing the real winemaking did not get half the education I gained whilst doing the ‘women’s work’ in the lab. I was the first woman to have ever worked in that winery, and once harvest was over, I was asked if I would stay on full-time to run the lab. I extended my visa for as long as possible and remained in Napa for two years until I was obliged to leave, heading to Australia to do a cool-climate vintage in Tasmania.

The most important lesson I learned in California, and one that was reinforced by my experience in Tasmania, was that organisation, logistics and cleanliness are the foundations of good winemaking. Without all those elements being on point, you risk all the hard work that has gone into growing the grapes.

As well-run and efficient as Cuvaison was in Napa, the winery I worked at in Tasmania was the polar opposite. It was much bigger, expanding fast and with a management team more interested in saving money than making quality wine, and my experiences in each place couldn’t have been more different. Mistakes and accidents happened that just would not have been possible in my previous job. So much time was wasted due to the lack of organisation, and the winery was one of the dirtiest I have ever worked in.

This was, in some ways, an even more valuable learning experience. How not to do things is equally valuable to know as to how to do the same thing correctly.

Had my experience in Tasmania been better, I may have stayed in Australia – my visa was for five years – but after three months of miserable work, I just wanted to get home and re-group. So I returned to the UK with the idea I would go back to Australia and start again in a different region. This was late 2008, and English wine had moved on even in those few years that I’d been away, Nyetimber, Ridgeview and Chapel Down, the pioneers, had been joined by Gusbourne, Wiston and others looking to make the highest quality sparkling wines.

I realised that I would prefer to be part of this burgeoning domestic industry where there were so many opportunities that just wouldn’t be open to me in a much bigger, more established wine industry like in Australia.

I set up Custom Crush UK Ltd, a wine analysis laboratory and consultancy, from a farm in my home village in the South Downs. I had never imagined I would end up so close to home. Through this, I was introduced to Simon Robinson, the owner of what is now Hattingley Valley Wines. He asked me if I would build him a winery, and I rather naively (or maybe, cockily) said ‘Yes’.

Like in Napa, I had no real concept of what I was getting myself into, but we took every day at a time, and my experiences in California and Tasmania came together to help me design the best winery possible. Fourteen years on, the winery is still one of the best-equipped, most spacious and smartest-looking wineries in the UK. It was very apparent from my first visit to the Hattingley home vineyard that the site was not big enough, nor would yield enough to provide me with a full-time job, so I started to take on contract winemaking clients and encouraged Simon to grow the winery to accommodate far more than he would produce.

This decision allowed the winery to grow faster than ever anticipated, and Hattingley started making numerous wines for vineyards in Hampshire and further afield. This led to purchasing fruit from various vineyard sites, allowing me to make a much wider range and larger volume of wine. Hattingley remains one of the largest wineries in the UK and, since 2015, has been one of the largest exporters of English wine - whilst still making numerous wines for clients. Wines emerging from the Hattingley stable have won more awards than any other winery in the UK over the years.

Some of the wines made by me over the years at Hattingley are Raimes Sparkling, Cottonworth, The Grange, Heppington, Roebuck, Alder Ridge, All Angels, Minerva Sparkling, High Clandon, Kingwood Estate, Blackdown Ridge, Court Garden, Winding Wood.

In early 2022 I made the difficult decision to leave Hattingley. Although the wines and the winery felt like mine, they weren’t. They belonged to the Robinson family, and I decided that if I was to continue to work so hard, it needed to be for myself. So I decided to take my hard-earned reputation and knowledge and set up a consultancy to help others in this exciting and growing industry.