Leaving behind The Bell at Ramsbury, and its paintings depicting unusually cheerful US presidents, I climb into a Defender with Nik Fordham and head for higher ground. There is a point, somewhere above the village, when the bottles begin to make sense. Fordham gestures across cereal fields, hedgerows and woodland. ‘If you look around here, basically everything is ours,’ he says, then corrects himself. ‘Ours, as in Ramsbury.’
That distinction matters. Ramsbury is not a distillery with a photogenic field conveniently attached. The wider estate covers some 19,000 acres across Wiltshire, Berkshire and Hampshire, around 7,000 of them farmed directly. The brewery and distillery sit within a considerably larger agricultural system.
