WHEN Sam Lindo left the family farm in Cornwall to study maths at the University of Bath in 1995, there wasn’t much to tempt him back. Sheep farming was becoming difficult as the fields turned brown in the heat and the five acres that his father Bob had put aside to grow — of all things — grapes were producing nice-tasting wine, but it was hardly a thriving industry.

Yet “by 2000, there was something to come back to”, says Lindo, now a director of Camel Valley vineyard, one of the great successes in the short history of English wine. “We first picked grapes in 1992 and that vintage got quality wine status. We started making sparkling in 1996, and in 1998 we got it into Rick Stein’s seafood restaurant. It snowballed year on year.”

Last year’s harvest was 180 tonnes of grapes (compared with 4 tonnes from the 1992 harvest). Since the summer harvest, Lindo has, as he puts it, “been in the winery making wine”. When asked what that involves, he says: “It’s a lot of pumping things about. We’ve got 50 tanks to squeeze into six or seven wines.”

The key to decent wine is the right conditions and attention to your vines. “Grape juice is the best thing you’ve got. Winemaking is a series of simple options and attention to detail. There’s so much to analyse.” This side of winemaking suits his mathematician’s mind: “One disadvantage of making wine in England is that not many people know what I’m doing. But one aspect of my degree is being able to find out anything. I’m not fazed.”

Where there are brains in this business there also has to be brawn. “It’s a physical and mental job. Harvest is six to eight weeks — I have black hands for two months — and by the end of it you just want to go to sleep.”

Not that the physical work has dampened his enthusiasm at all — Lindo seems to thrive on it. And there’s still so much to learn, he says. “Hopefully next year I’ll do a vintage in Australia. It’s a bottomless pit of knowledge.”

The subject and subjective nature of taste is a complicated one and he attributes part of the success of that first vintage to his parents having “no preconceived ideas of what wine should taste like”.

The dinner table is apparently a good testing ground for a spot of their latest vintage before it’s bottled for public consumption.

“My favourite is our sparkling. But with the warmer weather, I might soon have another favourite.”

He says that global warming is forcing the wine industry out of France to the more temperate climate of southern England. “It’s very interesting. We were one of the first to diversify into vines and ten years ago people said ‘What on earth are you doing?’ ” What was he just saying about having no preconceived ideas about how to do things? It seems to have worked for the Lindos.

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