Dermot Sugrue of Sugrue South Downs wine producers based in West Sussex told David Hennessy about their recent success in a prestigious wine awards.
A boutique wine producer in West Sussex led by Limerick man Dermot Sugrue has announced itself as being among the elite.
Sugrue South Downs’ The Trouble with Dreams 2009 has become the first English sparkling wine magnum to be crowned as one of the top 50 wines in the world at the Decanter World Wine Awards 2025.
The white sparkling wine from Sussex took a Best in Show medal, something champagne has never achieved in the 1.5L bottle format (the equivalent of two standard 750ml bottles).
Dermot Sugrue, founder and winemaker at Sugrue, told The Irish World: “It feels great.
“It’s absolutely brilliant when you put so much time and energy and effort and investment into making a wine.
“You can do some quick math in your head about managing a vineyard throughout the growing season of 2009 and then making the wine in the winery, bottling the wine, because the quality of the grapes from the vineyard was so good, choosing to bottle that wine in magnum because I had the confidence that the vintage was a superlative vintage that would age extremely well in Magnum for a very long time.
“If you want to pursue a strategy like that, then bottling in Magnum rather than normal bottles, is a great strategy.
“And then tasting and assessing that wine over the next 12 years before deciding the point at which we disgorge the wine, the final stage before the wine is ready to go to market and be released: The riddling and disgorging.
“Deciding to disgorge them at the end of ‘22 once they’ve had 12 years in bottle and then deciding to keep them in the cellar again for another two years.
“The roll up of that investment over those 15 odd years, 16 years now actually is money that’s just a sunken cost in that batch of wine and then to have it recognised for the quality that it inherently and self-evidently displayed to the judges who all tasted it blind not just against all other English sparkling wines in the competition but for the first time ever, because it was in a magnum, they’ve put it in a category comparing it to magnums of champagne and other traditional method sparking wines made in countries from all over the world and it’s come top of that category as well, scored the highest points of that blind tasting as well.
“That’s an extraordinary return on that investment and I’m talking about emotional and energy, not to mention financial.”
The wine is made from a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes.
The 2009 vintage’s 600 bottles are sold out but were selling for £185 with sales limited to one magnum per customer.
“There’s been kind of a false narrative over the years that the reputation of English sparkling wine has been rising all the time.
“People have it in their head that English sparkling wine regularly beats champagnes in blind tastings.
“Well, what do you mean by blind tastings?
“Is it a group of people, a wine club or something doing it? Or is it a rigorous, internationally recognised wine competition that employs the highest level judges that you can have and has a whole range of champagne?
“It’s unusual for a major competition like Decanter to actually pit English sparkling wine against sparkling wines from all over the world and if you look at the list of champagnes, you’re talking about the luminaries of the champagne world.
“You’re talking about Moet.
“You’re talking about Perrier Jouet.
“You’re talking about Champagne Mumm.
“You’re talking about the biggest Grand Marques in the competition.
“So once people said, ‘Oh, it regularly beats champagne’.
“Well, actually now in very, very controlled professional circumstances, our English wine, our The Trouble with Dreams has beaten champagnes and some of those champagnes were close to 500 quid for the actual magnum retail price so we’ve burst through what was a little bit of a false narrative by actually doing it for real.
“I’ve been doing this in England now for 23 years, absolutely focused on sparkling wine.
“I started my career in Bordeaux by doing vintages there so I’ve worked at a very high level before focusing entirely on English sparkling wine.
“I kind of brought those standards from my early training into my project, Sugrue South Downs and it shows you when you have the quality potential in terms of the vineyards and wine making expertise and specializing of what we can actually achieve here in England, it is absolutely remarkable.”
Dermot says the win demonstrates the “ageability” of their wines.
“When you’re making wines of this kind of ambition and aspiration, they get better with age but you need the correct ingredients in that wine in the first place to be able to age it for a period of time.
“Because most wines these days are designed to be drunk within two hours of them being purchased in the supermarket. That’s what most wines are.
“Once you go to the realm of fine wines, then you’re talking about there’s a potential for those wines to just gain and gain in quality over time and become something quite extraordinary once they’re 10 years old, 15 years old, 20 years old, and that’s what the best wines in the world do.
“That’s why the Barton wines are as acclaimed as they are, that’s why the greatest champagnes are as acclaimed as they are, and we’re very much following the same kind of model and philosophy in trying to achieve that.”
So how did a lad from Kilmallock, Co. Limerick end up here making sparkling wine?
“I fell in love with wine and wine making when I was 16 years of age making wine more or less in my bedroom at home in Kilmallock, it was the passion that excited me.
“Somebody gave me a book by Hugh Johnson when I was 16 years of age and that absolutely transformed my life and gave me the lifelong love of wine and wine making that I have to this day.
“And how lucky am I, as a 51 year old, to still be doing what I wanted to do when I was 16, 17 years of age doing my leaving cert- My inter cert let alone Leaving Cert?
“I’m incredibly privileged to be able to have made a career out of it and an increasingly successful career out of it.”
Your time in Bordeaux must have been inspiring and formative, was it?
“It was hugely.
“When I first worked in Bordeaux, I was working in Pomerol.
“I’d been given an introduction to the Barton family.
“I went and had lunch with them and it was an amazing experience because they showed such interest in my enthusiasm and my passion.
“They invited me back to do the vintage at Château Léoville Barton.
“You can remember the depth of your passions when you’re a teenager and in your 20s and 30s: Your capacity for work and your capacity to actually dive into the world that compels you most is huge.
“They saw that and that gave me a huge impetus to really pursue it as my life’s work.”
Weren’t your family guzzling the wine you had made while watching Italia ’90. Was it inspiring to see Jack’s team and cyclists of that era put Ireland on a new world stage? Haven’t you emulated that in your own way?
“I’ve always been very ambitious and I knew that I was going to carve a special niche for myself, not necessarily doing this.
“But those inspirational Irishmen doing extraordinary things abroad is very, very much part of my compulsion and my ambition and my desire to be the best that I can be at my chosen field.
“I’m very, very proud to be flying the flag here in England and being at the very cutting edge of what is arguably the most exciting new frontier in global wine making with English sparkling wine.”
English sparkling wine has come a long way..
“Because of the continued effect of global warming and climate change, we have this opportunity in England now to make world class wine, that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
“So England has arrived.
“For so long it’s been about ‘English wine versus champagne’.
“No, it’s now English wine and champagne as the leaders in quality of sparkling wine.
“Champagne has been doing it for hundreds of years and I have huge admiration and respect for Champagne.
“I’ve always been incredibly well received by the winemaking community in Champagne and one of them said to me one day, ‘Do you know why we like you so much over here, Dermot?’
“And I was like, ‘Well, go on, tell me’.
“He said, ‘Because you’re not English’.
“So a little bit of the outsider effect is no bad thing at all.”
What does this success do for Sugrue South Downs as you look ahead to the future? Does it change anything?
“It does because up until a few years ago, I spent a huge amount of my time making wine for other people, for other brands, for other English wine companies.
“It was the reason why I’ve developed so much experience and expertise over the years, making wines for so many people.
“I’m the winemaker behind many, many different brands of English wine that have been celebrated and won major competitions over the years.
“But since 2022 myself and my wife Ana Sugrue- She’s a highly qualified winemaker herself- decided, ‘Right, we’re going to focus on our own project, Sugrue South Downs’.
“I started that project way back in 2006, then I planted the vineyard in 2009 when I made that first wine, the first vintage of The Trouble with Dreams but focused all of my energy on Sugrue South Downs and, necessarily, take on investment into the company in order to be able to go it alone and establish our own wine really.
“That takes a lot of investment.
“You have to pump money into a project like this and then wait an awful long time to get that money back in and hopefully realise the return on your investment.
“So the spotlight of attention that getting success like Decanter awards this year, the spotlight that it puts on our business allows for our brand to grow in recognition to be associated with excellence more and more and, of course, to get sales because you only survive on the sales of your wine and we’re competing in a very kind of rarefied luxury product category with high end sparkling wines and we’re competing against the best in the business at marketing that high end luxury sparkling wine the champagnes, the Grand Marque and all the others who compete in that sphere.
“It’s a very congested marketplace and it’s very, very difficult to succeed in when you’re very, very new to it like we are.
“We’ve only been doing it for 20 years.
“But one of the remarkable things is that that in 1990 I read that book when I was 16 years of age and to think now that two years ago, Hugh Johnson himself has invested in Sugrue South Downs.
“He became an investor so impressed is he with the quality of the wines that we’re producing here.
“It’s unbelievable.
“It’s an unbelievable coming of full circle from being an inspired 16 year old to where we are now, to have somebody like Hugh OBE, the biggest selling wine author in the world, absolute expert in his field to do that, o give that endorsement by investing personally into our project, is remarkable.”
So what’s next?
“We’re already a very established brand in the UK and in export markets.
“We export to 12 different countries.
“Scandinavia is huge for us.
“Norway, Sweden, Denmark, but then continental Europe, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland.
“These are all export markets for us.
“The Far East, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, the United States.
“And Ireland.
“The Irish market is brilliant for us.
“We’ve just started working with Tindal wine.
“Harriet Tindal, master of wine.
“They also supply the trade restaurants and hotels throughout Ireland and we’re working with them as well.
“So all of our wines are available in Ireland through Tindal wines.
“It’s hugely important for me because I’m still very much a proud Irishman.
“My family still live there.
“I go back and forth all the time.
“I’ve been there in December, I’ve been there in February, I’ve been in there in April, I’ll be back there in August.
“And to be able to support our export market in Ireland is a massively important thing.
“Consolidation of where we are is fundamentally important.
“We’ve gone through a lot of growth just in the last three years.
“There are limits to growth, or at least you need to set limits to growth in order to grow well.
“Again, that requires patience and choosing the right strategy so we’re not looking at increasing our vineyards or our production in any massive way.
“We’re really looking to just continue to do things as well, do things better when we can, and remain a boutique producer because you can only achieve this kind of quality when you’re small and when you’re nimble and when you have a small team that’s dedicated to the work in the vineyards and in the winery.
“If you grow too much, then you can lose sight of what it is that makes wine great.
“We started a project making a white wine and a red wine and we released our first white wine under the Sugrue brand last year just before Christmas.
“Jancis Robinson, one of the most widely respected critics in the world and certainly the leading female wine critic, called the wine ‘a new chapter in English wine’.
“And the white wine, which is available in Ireland and in the UK, actually sold out that it was so successful.
“It’s called Bonkers.
“Bonkers Zombie Robot Alien Monsters from the Future Ate My Brain (Sur Lie), to give it the full title.
“Really, really serious wine but with an appropriately ridiculous label to show that we’ve got a sense of humour.”
The Trouble With Dreams is so called because the previous year should have been the first but the grapes were devoured by birds.
“It represents the ongoing challenges that you have in starting a project like this.
“I didn’t start with a fortune.
“I didn’t inherit money.
“I didn’t inherit land, a farm or anything.
“I’m from a farming background in County Limerick, a rural background so farming comes naturally to me but I started out with nothing to be quite fair.
“And working for other people and then starting my own brand as a result of the income I was able to earn from working for other people and making their dreams come true, by turning wealthy people’s ambitions into reality, by me making the wine for them.
“Dreams bring their own troubles, don’t they?”
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