Opened in 1998 by Sir Peter Michael, a British businessman who’d established a working vineyard in Northern California the decade before, his English Vineyard is a five-star hotel with luxuriously sophisticated rooms in a modern building that has a faint whiff of French Château about it. All the rooms are named after California wineries, and the place is tastefully decorated with the Michael family art collection and a fabulous array of wine bottles and paraphernalia. There’s a spa, and a small conference facility, but the beating heart of the place is its extraordinary wine cellar and the restaurant that accompanies it. You can’t miss it; 20 steps across the lobby from the front door and you’re in a glass-framed hallway-cum-wine-cellar with bottles on either side and below your feet. Beyond is a life-sized mural of the judgment of Paris, with Sir Peter ... who was not at the real event ... painted in, benignly looking on like one of those art patrons included in medieval nativity scenes.
As a restaurant, The Vineyard reached its apogee in the early 2010s under head chef Daniel Galmiche, who won them a Michelin star and Decanter’s Restaurant of the Year award while gaining publicity as a frequent guest chef on the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen. Galmiche and the star have gone, though the restaurant still holds a Michelin plate (one step below) and remains noted for a wide-ranging wine list with an unusual number of wines-by-the-glass and what I’d guess is England’s best range of Californian wines. This includes bottles from Sir Peter’s eponymous label and Schramsberg and Honig, vineyards we visited (and I wrote about) on our Napa tour. I’ve had the good fortune to at The Vineyard three times for work events, but my wine-loving husband had never gotten to join in the fun. It seemed a perfect venue to celebrate his birthday.
We are only three weeks past the government allowing hotels and restaurants to open in England, and the rules for indoor spaces both dampen the atmosphere of restaurants and make profit margins a challenge. Outdoor dining is the only way to approach the conviviality and turnover of pre-pandemic days, but that’s always a gamble in the English summer. The Vineyard has risen to the challenge by filling their garden with a magnificent tent, its spiked dome, sinuous roof line, lanterns and painted canvas wall panels like something out of an upscale, fine-dining version of The Arabian Nights. It would have been a treat whatever the circumstances and, to be honest, is much more fun that their tastefully understated but unremarkable regular dining room. The only drawback was a slightly wobbly plank floor that sent a tremor through our table whenever anyone passed, but given the circumstances driving the alfresco pop-up, it’s a small irritation easily forgiven.
We had started indoors, sinking into the deep upholstery of the country-house-style lounge to peruse the wine list before settling on a bottle of sparkling golden Schramsberg to take us from there right through our starters. Once inside the fairy tale pasha’s palace, made all the more surreal by all of the masked servers, I started with a beautifully presented and very tasty pork terrine while the half-Danish husband opted for cured salmon. “Someone in that kitchen understands the Nordics,” opined the arch critic. “ This has been home cured to a proper recipe.” So much of restaurant salmon would be hard to differentiate from packs you can buy at Waitrose. This was in a different league, with the curing reducing the original fillet to perhaps half its starting thickness, concentrating the salmon flavours and imbuing it with aromatic herbs and spices.
We reverse-engineered the main courses around the next wine.
A 2011 Chateau Musar occupies a price point I normally wouldn’t consider sane, even for a special 
occasion, but four months without restaurant dining has left a budget surplus that could handle the momentary insanity. Lebanon is one of the world’s oldest wine producing regions and Musar its most famous house. The result is pretty much what you’d hope for from 4,000 years of accumulated experience. Tannins melted away to an intense berry richness but with subtle hints of mushroom and earth that reveal its core of Cabernet Sauvignon. Mr. B was an English purist with a ribeye and triple-cooked chips, while I strayed closer to the Mediterranean with a beef shin ragout with freshly-made tagliatelle. With each mouthful-following sip, I thought “If I could only have one wine for the rest of my life, this would be it!” You need the right food, however, to bring the Musar to its full glory. We both had a few sips left after we finished our meal, at which point spices that had meshed seamlessly with the beef became so noticeable as to be almost overpowering. Validating our menu choices and the kitchen’s talent.
We split a custard tart with pink rhubarb sorbet. The former was pleasant but paled in comparison to the sorbet, served on a trail of golden crumble to deliver a hit of both sharp/sweet fruit and satisfying crunch.
One of the great joys of the “restaurant with rooms” concept is that you don’t have to kill your buzz, either literally or metaphorically, getting home. Push back your chair, enjoy a short, post-prandial walk and slip between some high thread-count sheets that someone else has had the chore of ironing. Bliss. The suites at The Vineyard have all those subtle, small touches that add up to the label (and the price tag) “luxury hotel”. The crisp bed linens and deep feather pillows. The classical music playing over a good sound system when you enter. Decor that’s streamlined and modern but not at all corporate. Tasteful lighting in multiple places to change mood and focus. (There was even a subtle nightlight glowing over the step between sleeping and sitting areas to prevent late-night mishaps.) A palatial marble and wood bathroom with a tub so big I could barely touch the end. Nice shower in a separate alcove, too, though people as tall as my husband will have to duck beneath the shower head.
I don’t think I’ve ever brought my dogs to a five-star hotel, but The Vineyard excelled there, too. Waiting in the room was a dog bed, food and water bowls, their own bottled water and pedal bin for used poo-bags and a fresh tennis ball. Needless to say, the canines enjoyed the outing as much as the humans.
The traditional British hotel breakfast buffet is another infringement of COVID-safety standards; many establishments seem to be switching to a policy of everyone taking breakfast in their rooms. At The Vineyard this means a wooden wine case left on a luggage rack outside your door. Flipping its brass latches revealed croissant, sourdough, jams, butter, milk and orange juice. A Nespresso machine in the room added DIY caffeine. If you order a cooked breakfast (a supplemental charge to your room rate) it arrives at a scheduled time and is well worth the extra cost. Mr. B’s breakfast featured “bacon” that was essentially a thick, cured slice of grilled pork belly that had his eyes glazing over with delight and scrambled eggs he reported as perfectly “baveuse“. (Too runny for me, but I know he ... and any other European serious about food ... considers American scrambled eggs horrifically overcooked.) I had gone for a different style of American: Californian Eggs were poached sitting atop pillow-like home-made English muffins slathered with crushed avocado and a spicy tomato salsa.
Our last pleasant surprise came with the bill. Which, of course, is delivered by email and charged to your pre-registered card upon agreement, to eliminate the need for human contact. Thanks to current government stimuli, there was no VAT (sales tax) on the room or food, only on the alcohol. When you’re pushing out into the luxury end of the market, this can be an enormous saving. So if you’ve been thinking about splashing out on a fine-dining-with-rooms experience, now many be the time to do it. While the pandemic makes the experience more unusual, the novelty can also be quite special, and up to 20% off the final bill adds to the delight.
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