Most people, if pressed, would tell you that the French do wine and the English make cars, and that the two nations should really stay in their respective lanes. It’s a reasonable adage, the sort trotted out at dinner parties by people who have never tasted an English sparkling wine or driven a French sports car. And, like most adages, it isn’t really based on the evidence.
So naturally, three of us on a girls’ weekend set out to dismantle it entirely. We took a French car with genuine racing pedigree, pointed it at an English vineyard and went to see just how quickly the adage held true.
The car in question was the new electric four-door Alpine A390 and, if the name means nothing to you yet, it soon will. This is a marque that made its name in the mountain passes and rally stages of the 1960s and ’70s, winning the Monte Carlo Rally, the Coupe des Alpes and the 24 Hours of Le Mans; the sort of racing pedigree that even the best marketing cannot replicate.
The A390 is Alpine’s first proper foray into the four-door segment, built, like every serious Alpine before it, at the historic manufacture in Dieppe. It carries its motorsport ancestry with real conviction for a car that also has to accommodate four people and their weekend luggage. Three electric motors, one up front and two at the rear, give it all-wheel drive for the first time in Alpine’s history and, in top GTS specification, that translates to 470 horsepower and 0–62mph in under four seconds.
From vineyard posing to winding Sussex lanes, the Alpine A390 mixes sharp design with sure-footed pace, while its cocooning, tech-filled cabin makes the journey every bit as enjoyable as the destination.
Alpine itself has taken to calling it ‘a racing car in a suit’, which, a couple of hours into a girls’ weekend with a boot full of suitcases, felt entirely fair. It looks the part, too: sculpted flanks, a roofline that nods to the original A110 and a front end borrowing cues from Alpine’s Alpenglow hypercar concept. Rather a lot of concept-car glamour for something that also, in our case, had to find room for several bottles destined for the journey home.
We headed south into West Sussex, to Leonardslee. For the uninitiated, Leonardslee comprises 240 acres of Grade I-listed gardens near Horsham, the sort of estate that comes with its own wallaby colony, a Victorian owner’s taste for the exotic preserved rather charmingly into the present day, a scattering of lakes and a country house offering ten boutique rooms for those inclined to stay after dinner and, of course, wine.
It is also, more pertinently for our purposes, home to an ambitious English sparkling wine operation and Restaurant Interlude, holder of both a Michelin Star and a Michelin Green Star, a pairing not every three-starred establishment across the Channel can claim for itself.
The A390’s torque vectoring, it must be said, was rather wasted on the winding lanes of the Sussex Weald. A leisurely drive towards a 12 o’clock wine tasting is not, after all, much of a case for enthusiastic cornering. But the ride was composed and the cabin genuinely plush, with supportive seats, a stereo worth turning up and enough range in the battery that nobody was reduced to anxious arithmetic about charging points.
L-R: The Leonardslee estate in West Sussex and its three award-winning sparkling wines: Blanc de Blancs, Brut Reserve and Brut Rosé.
Leonardslee’s vineyards are, on closer inspection, a rather charming exercise in stubbornness. Owner Penny Streeter planted the first vines in 2017 on what had previously been a golf course fairway. The estate team likes to point out that, where other vineyards boast of chalk or granite in their soil, their own first harvest turned up mostly other people’s abandoned golf balls.
The classic Champagne trio of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier now covers dozens of nearby acres, tended with expertise imported from Streeter’s sister estate in South Africa, and the results have begun collecting international accolades.
The Brut Rosé is notable for its unusual inclusion of 10 per cent Pinotage in the blend, a nod to the estate’s South African heritage that sets it apart from more traditional English sparkling wines. It has also earned strong critical acclaim, including 90 points at the Decanter World Wine Awards. The Brut Reserve has been praised by judges for its citrus notes and chalky minerality, while the Blanc de Blancs, with its crisp mineral backbone, invites comparisons with Champagne, not always to Champagne’s advantage. There is even a small experimental plot of Pinotage growing beside the house itself, the first commercial planting of that distinctly South African grape on English soil and precisely the sort of border-crossing eccentricity our own weekend had rather come to embody.
Dinner, if we are honest, was the real reason to visit.
Restaurant Interlude is run by chef Jean Delport, a Cape Town native who arrived in England in his late twenties to open a tasting-menu restaurant that few entirely believed in, and secured a Michelin Star within ten months.
Chef Jean Delport and two genius dishes from one of his ever-changing tasting menus: Curried Roe Tartlet and Beetroot, Cheese & Damson.
His cooking threads South African heritage through French technique and whatever the English gardens at Leonardslee happen to be yielding that week. Literally so, given that the kitchen forages extensively across the estate’s own woodland for what eventually reaches the plate.
Its signature dish, ‘Rabbit Eats Carrot’, pairs deep-fried rabbit lollipops with carrot biltong. The menu is effectively a South African’s walk through the English landscape, with highly original dishes such as ‘Vetkoek, crab, elderflower’, ‘Curried roe, slaphakskeentjies’ and ‘Malva pudding, rose geranium’. They arrive, fittingly, alongside the estate’s own wines as well as bottles from Streeter’s Benguela Cove vineyard in South Africa.
Being the excellent planners we are, and having anticipated that the evening might lead to excess, we had booked to stay the night at Leonardslee House, which was awarded a Michelin Key in 2025.
L-R: A peaceful corner of Leonardslee Gardens, where lakes, mature trees and lush planting unfold across 240 acres. The Magnolia Suite at Leonardslee House pairs country-house charm with softly patterned walls, antique details and views across the estate.
Our rooms were beautifully appointed, with fabulous views across the estate’s expansive gardens. Each had been individually designed with quintessentially British interiors, wallpaper and soft furnishings chosen to complement the personality of the property, alongside antiques and works by British artists.
By the time we returned to the A390 the following morning, considerably more sedately than we had arrived, the whole premise of the trip had rather elegantly fallen apart.
The ‘French car, English wine’ reversal we had set out to prove was never quite as clean as the dinner-party version suggests. The car draws on know-how from three different racing corners of France, the wine leans on a South African winemaker, and the whole estate turned out to be a very English country house being quietly, deliciously reimagined by ideas from the Cape.
Which is, on reflection, a rather better story than the one we had set out to tell.
The French and English are welcome to keep their rivalry. The rest of us will simply keep eating and driving whatever happens to be good.
Three cases in the boot, one Michelin Star thoroughly investigated, zero regrets.
Author: Julia Pasarón
Learn more about Alpine cars, HERE; about Leonardslee vineyards, HERE; and about Interlude restaurant, HERE.
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