Sir Michael Colman is a man obsessed. By rights, at 79, he should have stopped working years ago. For over four decades he'd dutifully put in the hours for the family firm, Colman's Mustard, making his way up from the shop floor to chairman's office. About time, surely, to work on his golf handicap and retire to the family pile in rural Hampshire (the kind of handsome 16-bedroom Regency house that would have made Elizabeth Bennet's pulse quicken. The 2,000-acre estate even has its own post box.)
Instead he had an idea - to reintroduce a crop to Britain which hasn't been grown here for over 50 years. It started off as an experiment, swiftly became an all-consuming passion and now any thoughts of wedges and putters have been roundly forgotten. He's planted over 80 acres of his Summerdown Farm with Black Mitcham mint which his farm manager, Ian Margetts, painstakingly distils into a rare single-estate peppermint oil.
The man standing in the driveway perusing the Times and awaiting our arrival is remarkably fit-looking for almost 80: slim, spry, smartly dressed, full head of silvery hair, some of it coming out of his ears in rather fabulous tufts. 'Colman!' he says heartily by way of introduction (although it will transpire that everyone else round here calls him Sir Michael).
The first known cultivation of Black Mitcham was in south London in the 1750s. For centuries England was renowned for producing the best mint in the world (so much so the French still call the flavour menthe Anglaise). However during World War II the pressure to grow essential crops plus the rising cost of labour meant that fields of mint have become a thing of the past.
Or as Colman succinctly puts it: 'The Second World War put the tin hat on it.'
His first trial plot of mint - there are over 30 varieties - dates back 11 years. He started growing it when the market for peas began to falter and he was casting around for something new to add to their staple fields of lavender, coriander, parsley and linseed. It was four years and several fact-finding trips to Montana, where Black Mitcham is grown on an industrial scale, before they learnt how to grow it in any meaningful way.
We amble through the arboretum, planted by his wife Judy, past the family cricket pitch, alongside rolling farmland as far as one can see, towards the latest mint field to be harvested and I wonder why on earth he wants to go to all this bother. Sure, he can afford to invest in the project (although he won't reveal quite how much he's ploughed into the enterprise). But doesn't he sometimes wish he could kick back and enjoy his retirement?
I might as well have suggested he bulldozes the Tudor clock tower behind the house and replace it with a drive-in McDonald's. Or, eat his body weight in Polos. 'I couldn't imagine anything worse than retiring. Before I'm sent back to the pavilion' - he's fond, I will come to realise, of cricketing metaphors - 'I'd like to leave some kind of legacy. I never intended to go back into the food business but I was about to draw stumps and realised that I needed to do something to fill the gap. The problem was that I was literally unemployable.'
As we approach the field a sweet, cloying scent of mint fills the air. It's almost overpowering. The combine harvester methodically chops down the dark green leaves and powdery blue petals (it's the flowers which hold the oil).
Looking across at the field, Colman says: 'Everyone thought I was crazy. But occasionally in life you have to take a step and say to people maybe there is more to this than you thought.'
His motivation is a food industry which, he says, sells people short. 'The food trade has had the stuffing knocked out of it by the supermarkets who are intent on making every single economy they can.' Accordingly Margetts has learnt how to distil on site to make an intense pure peppermint oil which, unlike most other mint oils, isn't blended with cheap, harsh-tasting imports from China and India. In many ways the whole scheme is as time-consuming and foolhardy as the wine business - like wine, the tanks of oil must be left for over a year to mature and settle; like wine, the balance of flavours must be perfect.
'I don't know when I'm going to keel over so, in a way, this is a race against time,' he says ebulliently although I can't help suspecting there's a fair bit of va-va-voom in him yet. 'I may be in the departure zone but I want people to realise what they're missing out on. The taste of pure mint versus the blended mint they've got used to.'
Initially they hit on the idea of using the oil for a line of boiled sweets. When these failed to take off they teamed up with a Preston chocolate maker and for the last year they've been producing deliciously rich, thick fondant peppermint creams. Summerdown Mints are the kind of chocolates you want within easy reach of the settee on Boxing Day.
Following a rummage around the ground floor of the house - more velvet curtains than the Theatre Royal, family photographs on every polished surface, embossed certificates from the Queen framed near the downstairs loo - lunch is served. We sit in the sunshine outside the conservatory with Joseph and Jacob, two of Colman's 13 grandchildren, and look down at miles of unspoilt and quintessentially English parkland.
I swear I can see Emma Thompson in an empire-line frock and bonnet popping out from behind the huge record-breaking rose bush (a man from the Guinness Book of Records is arriving tomorrow to measure it). However Colman assures me that he's never hired out the place for a film crew - he hates the idea of them 'messing up the place'.
Joan, the cook, rustles up bangers and mash - albeit flavoursome venison sausages with pillowy mashed potatoes and salad from the vegetable garden, served with freshly mixed Colman's from a silver engraved mustard pot. To follow, his wife's mint-chocolate ice cream - made from Colman's mint - and plump pink mulberries from a tree in the garden.
'There's my own mint tea if you can bear it,' Colman adds. It turns out to be delicious - not the usual seaweedy green that you get from supermarket teabags but a refreshing pale yellow.
I fancy Evelyn Waugh might have liked the cut of Colman's jib. There's much talk of responsibility and duty over the lunch table. He was, he says, brought up to become a soldier - or 'shoot Germans' as he puts it - but then the war ended and that was that.
At 18 his father pressed him to join the family firm. 'He was worried I was spending too much time riding up and down Park Lane with girls,' he recalls. At first he worked on the shop floor and then he was sent abroad - 'More to get me out of the way than anything else. You wouldn't remember, but Britain was very boring indeed in the Fifties.'
He's been married to Judy for 50 years. Remarkably, they first met just yards away in the high-ceilinged drawing room at a party for his brother's 21st birthday. What does she think of his mint schemes? 'She's very patient,' he says. It transpires Judy, 70, is on holiday exploring the Amazon with the former head of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
There's a painting of his father, Jeremiah, resplendent in hunting gear and rifle, in the hallway. I wonder what he would have thought of the whole mint enterprise. It is, after all, a long way from mustard. 'He'd have said, "What harebrained scheme has Michael got into his head this time?"' he says wistfully. 'He wouldn't have understood - but he'd have let me get on with it, all the same.'
And with that this rather delightful man packs me off to the train station with two more boxes of Summerdown Mints, six of his wife's hens' eggs and a pocketful of mint boiled sweets. Just for good measure.
The Colmans' favourite mint recipes
Mint chocolate mousse
Serves 6
455g dark chocolate
1/2 litre cream
4 eggs
30g caster sugar
Summerdown English Peppermint Oil
Break the chocolate into a medium-sized bowl and melt over a pan of hot water with a little double cream. Whisk egg whites until stiff.
Mix egg yolks and sugar over a little heat then stir egg-yolk mixture into melted chocolate off the heat.
Whisk the remaining cream until stiff - add to the egg/yolk/sugar/chocolate mixture. Stir a little of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture, then fold the rest in and at the same time add peppermint oil (after 14 drops adjust one drop at a time according to taste).
Turn the mousse into a glass dish or divide it between individual glasses. Leave in fridge for a couple of hours at least. Sprinkle with a little grated chocolate before serving.
Mint chocolate butter icing
This is a delicious on a plain sponge cake
115g butter
170g icing sugar, sieved
115g cocoa
2 tbs boiling water
A few drops of Summerdown English Peppermint Oil
Beat the butter until softened then cream with the sieved icing sugar until the mixture is a nice light colour and texture. Dissolve the cocoa in the boiling water then beat it into the butter. Add a few drops of peppermint oil.
· Summerdown Pure Mint is available at Harvey Nichols, Partridges and Mortimer & Bennett or to order direct visit summerdownmint.com
