The Bakers, from Manchester to a Bordeaux vineyard
How a family of four traded a Didsbury semi-detached for fourteen hectares of Merlot — and what it actually cost.
Sarah and Tom Baker did not set out to buy a vineyard. They went to Saint-Émilion for a long weekend in March 2024 and came back, by their own admission, slightly mad.
Eighteen months later they own fourteen hectares of vines, two stone barns and a 1780 farmhouse outside Castillon-la-Bataille. Their two daughters, eleven and nine, attend the village école. Tom — a software architect by training — has just bottled his first vintage.
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