Sompting Estate Vineyard & Winery: A Family Downland Estate Reviving Wine on the South Downs
Tucked into the narrowest point of the South Downs National Park, between Worthing and Steyning, a 7-square-kilometre family estate is quietly reinventing itself for a new generation. The Sompting Estate, owned and managed by the Crofts and Tristram families for more than 250 years, has for decades been known for its mixed downland farms, its dewponds and chalk grassland, and its Saxon-towered parish church of St Mary. Since 2019 it has also been the home of a new vineyard and winery enterprise - a venture the trustees describe as a 'new, yet ancient enterprise growing out of the quality of Sompting's beautiful landscape'.
A Family Estate at the Heart of the Downs
Sompting Estate covers much of Sompting Parish in West Sussex, sitting astride the chalk scarp where the Downs are at their narrowest between the English Channel and the Weald. The managing trustee is Mike Tristram, supported by his son Alex Tristram, who serves as General Manager. The family's ownership stretches back to the mid-eighteenth century, when the solicitor John Crofts purchased the manor of Sompting Abbotts (the original core of the estate, once held by the Abbey of Fécamp in France) along with Lychpole Manor. The Crofts family coat of arms, depicting three bulls' heads and a dog crest with the motto Con Fido - 'With Trust' - hints at both the farming roots of the family and the loyalty that has kept the estate in one family's hands for so long.
In 1879 Blanche Crofts married Sam Tristram, and the family name changed. The Tristrams added their own heraldic flourish - the Sussex martlet bird, and sometimes a wolf, with the motto Honesta quam Splendida, 'good honest deeds not just show'. The current generation takes the motto to heart. 'Whether in farming or horticulture, there is unending fascination to working with the living landscape, and pleasure in sharing it,' the family explains.
The Estate Today
About 7 km² of downland, woodland, brookland and arable make up the modern estate. There are four farms: Titch Hill Farm (which now also includes the former Upton and Church Farms) and Lychpole Farm are the two main holdings; Church Farm and Titch Hill are managed in-hand by the estate's own team, while Lychpole is tenanted. A small forestry operation, run by Andrew Cossar of Pro Forest, looks after Titch Hill Wood and other plantations. There are also residential properties, small business units, and an increasingly diverse holiday business built around the historic Downs Barn, a 1761 farmhouse B&B, and glamping yurts.
The Estate Office is at Middle Yard Barn, Lambleys Lane, Worthing, BN14 9JX. Day-to-day operations are led by:
- Director / Managing Trustee - Mike Tristram
- General Manager - Alex Tristram (07737 879139)
- Farm Manager - Mark Heritage (07747 577509)
- Winery Manager - Sam Bunker (07702 222584)
- Administrator - Thomas Roberts (07429 171393 / 01903 213710)
- Visitor Support - Josie Lee (07545 696533)
Seasonal vineyard work, holiday bookings and wine enquiries are handled through Titch Hill Farm.
Planting the Mountain Vineyard
The first vines went into the ground in May 2019. The site chosen was an 8.5-acre (3.4-hectare) field on the south-facing chalky slope of the Sompting Downs, just above the ancient Saxon church of St Mary - a slope the estate has christened the Mountain Vineyard. It sits at the heart of the South Downs landscape, with views across to Cissbury Ring and the sea.
The grape varieties are the champagne classics: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, planted by machine on a free-draining chalk substrate that mirrors the geology of the Côte des Blancs. For the first vintages the grapes were taken to the award-winning Ridgeview Winery at Ditchling, where they were made into traditional-method sparkling wine. In the estate's words, 'people sometimes assume vineyards are sterile cropping areas but ours is going to be buzzing with bees, butterflies and other wildlife, and integrated with the patchwork of the farmed landscape.' To make good on that promise, mixed native-species hedges were planted for windbreaks, broad grass margins retained for cowslips and other wildflowers, and the adjacent conservation woodland extended so that the vineyard and its hedgerows connect the woodland on three sides.
A Second and a Third Vineyard
In May 2020 a second, smaller vineyard was planted by hand on a site near the Estate Office, using more varied grape varieties intended for still wines. The 2020 establishment year was marked by severe drought, and the estate did not expect to harvest a crop until 2024.
The third - and most ambitious - site is the Bostal Vineyard, planted in May 2023 across approximately 10 acres of former arable land. This block is dedicated to disease-resistant PiWi (Pilzwiderstandsfähig) varieties, chosen to reduce spray inputs and to support the estate's journey, begun in 2023, towards organic or biodynamic certification.
The Winery at the Grainstore
After the early harvests were made under contract at Ridgeview, the estate brought winemaking in-house. Its first six wines - sparkling and still, all made by the traditional method in a small temporary winery set up in a bay of the grainstore on Lambleys Lane - were launched in summer 2023. The standout of that debut was 'Wild Combination', a light sparkling rosé that the estate describes as 'a memorable success' and 'with the taste of summer'. A second vintage followed in summer 2024.
The grainstore itself is being 'bespoked' as a permanent winery in 2025, as part of a wider estate programme that has already seen the conversion of Lychpole's surviving threshing barn to the holiday let Downs Barn in 2009, the creation of a silage barn in 2013, a livestock handling barn in 2015 and a new grainstore at Stable Cross in 2024.
Farming in Harmony with Nature
Wine is the latest chapter in a much longer story of mixed farming. The four historic Sompting manors - Sompting Abbotts, Lychpole, Peverel and Cokeham - each ran from the coast to the downland heights, a layout that let farmers graze livestock on the chalk in winter and on the marsh in summer. For centuries this rotational system sustained both soil and wildlife. After the Second World War much of the downland was ploughed up for continuous wheat production; by the 1980s many of the dewponds had dried up and most of the sheep had gone.
From around 1980 the estate began restoring species-rich chalk grassland, dewponds and traditional farm buildings. From 2000, working with new tenants at Upton and Lychpole, it reintroduced cattle and sheep grazing alongside mixed arable rotations: spring barley, fodder beet, turnips and grass leys stitched back into the patchwork. Since 2023 the estate's in-hand Titch Hill team - led by Farm Manager Mark Heritage, with livestock man Philip Bower managing his Texel flock and a new herd of pedigree Sussex cattle - has been rolling out regenerative farming rotations across the home farm.
The farms are members of the Arun to Adur Farmers Group, working together at a landscape scale for wildlife, and the estate has planted on average a kilometre of new hedgerow a year since 2005, plus around an acre a year of new mixed-native woodland, including rare Black Poplars as part of the Sussex Wildlife Trust's Black Poplar Project.
The Sompting Brooks and the EPIC Project
In 2019 the estate launched a major community and conservation project with the Ouse & Adur Rivers Trust, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. 'EPIC' stood for Enhancing Places, Inspiring Communities. Working with a band of volunteer River Rangers, the partners re-created 1 km of the Broadwater Brook across Sompting's Church Farm, planted 1,000 trees and 2.5 km of new hedgerow, created two new ponds, and opened the Sompting Brooks Nature Trail in 2021. Walkers using the trail are rewarded with views up to the Downs and, since 2019, of the Mountain Vineyard planted on the chalk slope above St Mary's church. Sculptures by Janine Creaye along the route depict the Sompting Knucker dragon, the Sussex water-monster of folk tradition.
A Haven for Wildlife
Re-wilding the chalk has paid off in spectacular biodiversity. The estate's farm environment plans maintain habitats for ground-nesting farmland birds - skylarks, corn buntings, grey partridges, lapwings and occasional stone curlews. Barn owls, tawny owls, little owls and long-eared owls all roost or breed on the estate; buzzards and kestrels hunt over the patchwork; kingfishers, snipe and teal visit the EPIC wetlands. A 2014 survey on the Sompting downs found two-thirds of British bumblebee species present, and a 2021 update added the rare Scarce Blue-tailed Damselfly to the estate's wetland list. The Mountain woodland is being managed as hazel coppice with beech and ash standards; nine dewponds have been restored since the 1980s, providing drinking water for skylarks, lapwings and dragonflies alike.
Visiting Sompting Estate
The estate welcomes visitors in several ways. Wine purchases, tasting bookings and tours are arranged through Titch Hill Farm:
- Titch Hill Wine Tastings & Events
- Vineyard & Winery Tours
- Farmhouse B&B (in the 1761 Titch Hill farmhouse)
- Glamping Yurts
- The Downs Barn holiday cottage, a lovingly converted 200-year-old side barn sleeping visitors among butterfly-rich meadows and a dewpond, with starry dark skies and views to Lancing Ring and the sea.
Self-guided walkers can enjoy the estate's extensive public-rights-of-way network. A printable guide to a six-mile circular walk from Downs Barn to Cissbury Ring and back can be downloaded from somptingestate.com/walks. The Sompting Brooks Nature Trail and the South Downs National Park open access at Lychpole Side are also free to explore, with parking at Beggars Bush on the Steyning Bostal Road and at Lyons Farm retail park.
Courses and events at the Downs Barn Environment Education Centre include mindfulness sessions, foraging days, women's retreats, archaeology workshops, and nature-based craft events.
The Community in the Countryside
Since 2013 the estate has worked hand-in-hand with Sompting Parish Council through the Sompting Community in the Countryside (SCIC) initiative, and from 2020 through a six-monthly Round Table bringing together the parish council, Sustainable Sussex, the Ouse & Adur Rivers Trust, Sompting Big Local, South Downs National Park Rangers, Adur District Council, Worthing Archaeological Society and others.
The estate has partnered with Sustainable Sussex to develop a planned Community Farm, Nature Trail & Orchard at a former equestrian site known as 'The Fen', with a community orchard planned nearby. Funding for the project is expected to come, in part, from the West Sompting housing development that Adur District Council has allocated on Church Farm land - a contentious scheme that nevertheless offers the estate an opportunity to convert to a more regenerative system, with 30% affordable homes, a new community farm, orchard, nature trail, playing pitches and ecological enhancements, including improvements to the Cokeham Brooks Local Wildlife Site.
St Mary's Church and the Saxon Heritage
Above the Mountain Vineyard stands St Mary's Church, Sompting, with its unique Saxon Rhenish helm tower - built of flints gathered from the fields and mortared with chalk, and claimed locally as the 'Cathedral of the Downs'. The tower looks east to Seaford Head and west to the Isle of Wight; its setting at the gateway to the narrowest point of the South Downs is one of the most photographed in Sussex. From the footpath behind the church, known as Love Lane, walkers climb to the top of Nore Hill for commanding views of the Downs, the village below and the Downs Barn in its coombe.
Climate, Carbon and the Future
The estate takes the climate emergency seriously. Most of the farm cottages have been converted from fossil fuels to air-source heat pumps powered in part by rooftop solar panels. The farms are experimenting with rotational grazing to build soil carbon and worm counts, and the planned West Sompting development will bring additional permissive footpaths so that more local residents can take a short walk into the countryside without needing to drive.
The new winery, vineyard expansion, holiday business and community farm are all part of a long-term plan to make the estate financially resilient while improving its environmental contribution. The family vision: 'If we can continue to invest locally through developments such as these, we will be able to go on helping to keep Sompting's natural environment and rural economy in good heart - perhaps even for another 250 years.'
Planning Your Visit
Whether the interest is the wine, the wildlife, the walking or the history, Sompting Estate offers an unusually rich slice of Sussex downland. Wine tasting and vineyard tours should be booked in advance through Titch Hill Farm; overnight stays in the Downs Barn, the farmhouse B&B or a glamping yurt can also be arranged there. For environmental-education bookings at the Downs Barn, the booking process is set out at somptingestate.com/downsbarnhire, with a downloadable Booking Enquiry Form.
The Estate Office at Middle Yard Barn, Lambleys Lane, Worthing BN14 9JX is staffed Monday to Friday. Photo updates are shared on Twitter @SomptingDowns.
With its combination of family heritage, regenerative farming, restored dewponds and chalk-slope vineyards, Sompting Estate is one of the most quietly ambitious new wine ventures on the South Downs - and, perhaps, one of the most sustainable.