It didn’t begin in a Mayfair livery hall, beneath gilded crests and watchful oils, with the ghost of protocol fogging the stemware. It began with picnic tables shaded by vines in the garden of the Red Lion and Sun in Highgate, said to rewrite Orwell’s rules of the perfect pub. The British love pubs. The British love Champagne. So why not seat them side by side?
At the Red Lion, you get briny oysters, three-kilo turbot, and manifesto-led Champagne poured into proper wine glasses by a landlord who refuses muffling flutes. The bottles — chilled in ice-filled plant pots — landed hard on the tables. This wasn’t pageantry. This was declaration. A collision of conviction and appetite. The setting for a rosé which might just be the most consequential wine to emerge from Champagne in a generation.
There were no tasting notes printed on vellum, no courtiers with grape-shaped pins on their lapels. Just Heath Ball, landlord of unorthodox generosity, and Ludovic du Plessis, president of Telmont, bearing bottles with more integrity than half the industry. Nobody here was acting. The garden was dappled and real, the rosé cold and defiant, and the setting as deliberately unslick as a pub toilet with nice soap and the seat left down.
The wine needed no help. Réserve de la Terre Rosé (£88, uk.champagne-telmont.com) is not Telmont’s first rosé, but it is its first certified organic one— a wine made without pesticides, fungicides or synthetic fertiliser, from vineyards treated with something rarer than sulphur: respect. A blend of chardonnay, pinot meunier and pinot noir, with 15 per cent of the latter vinified as red wine from the Côte des Bars, a place where pinot grows with shoulders and dirt under its fingernails. It’s built from two oppositional years: 2020, full of swagger and sunlight; and 2021, scourged by mildew, marked by patience and loss. The result? Pomegranate, cherry, blood orange zest, a saline finish, and a line of spice drawn like wire across the tongue. It isn’t pretty. It’s beautiful.
Telmont will be 100 per cent organic across its estate and partner growers by 2031. That’s not a marketing goal — it’s a reckoning
Only 5,119 bottles exist. Each is numbered, bottled in green glass made from 87 per cent recycled material, and stripped of all that lazy, legacy glitz. No unrecycled clear glass. No grotesque, superfluous gift box. No hefty bespoke bottle engineered for shelf appeal. Telmont co-developed what it now uses —the lightest champagne bottle on the market, just 800 grams. They transport by road or sail. They’ve open-sourced the design, so their competitors can stop posing and start participating. This is a house which published its entire sustainability playbook and dared others to read it. Then follow it.
Telmont will be 100 per cent organic across its estate and partner growers by 2031. That’s not a marketing goal — it’s a reckoning, in a region where only around 9 per cent of vineyards are currently certified organic. The house’s transformation, labelled “In the Name of Mother Nature”, has real teeth. It has already banned air freight. It runs on renewable energy. It doesn’t greenwash; it prints the vineyard, vintage, and dosage on every label. That transparency isn’t a virtue. It’s a baseline.
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A soil-born supper
The food was as honest as the wine. Briny oysters from Jersey, still singing of tides, ripe tomatoes from the Isle of Wight. Then turbot — gargantuan, glistening — carved tableside by Telmont’s head of advocacy, Jack Charlton, who moved through the tables like a vicar in a field kitchen: armed only with a serving fork and unflinching calm. The strawberries, dark, sun-drunk, wine-steeped, brought everything back to the beginning.
Standing beneath the pergola, du Plessis addressed the drinkers, including Jancis Robinson MW, arguably the world’s most respected wine critic, and Nicholas Lander, restaurant correspondent and former owner of Soho institution, L’Escargot. Du Plessis didn’t boast. He bore witness. “This is a wine of the soil. Of life. You drink it because something is alive in the glass.”
He knows pomp. His CV runs through Dom Pérignon and Louis XIII Cognac. But Telmont is different. He calls it “la belle endormie” — the sleeping beauty — and he’s dragged her into the open. Alongside what he calls “grapefather”, Bertrand Lhôpital — fourth-generation cellar master and organic pioneer since 1999 — du Plessis is tearing up the script and composting the clippings.
Even Leonardo DiCaprio has signed on. A minority shareholder since 2022, he sees Telmont not as a vanity project, but as proof that you can make luxury with a conscience. Proof that organic viticulture doesn’t just heal the soil; it improves the wine. “It’s the taste of the future,” he said.
The house itself was born of revolt. Founded in 1912, in the wake of the 1911 Champagne riots, when growers rose up against fraud and fakes, Telmont’s founder, Henri Lhôpital, wrote the rebel anthem, “Gloire au Champagne”. His commitment wasn’t to image, but to land.
Which is why Ball doesn’t muck about. He pours 175ml. “Champagne deserves proper treatment. And proper pours.”
As dusk fell and the vines on the pergola turned to lace, the air clung close, wine-warm. Someone asked if this was luxury. Du Plessis didn’t blink. “No,” he said. “It’s consequence. It’s what happens when you believe in something — and then refuse to compromise.”
So here’s the real question — and answer it properly: do you want your champagne to glitter like a bauble at a hedge-fund wedding, or do you want it to mean something? To carry weight — of intention, of conscience, of a future you wouldn’t be ashamed to raise a glass to? The pub was imperfect, thank God. Nowhere near Mayfair. Nowhere near the act. And the wine in our hands held the truth.
