An extremely rare opportunity will be presented during the Sceptre Sessions of the Tattersalls December Mares Sale when Desert Berry (GB) (Green Desert), the dam of this year's G1 Derby winner Desert Crown (GB), is offered for sale back in foal to Nathaniel (Ire), the sire of the Classic hero.
When Desert Crown passed the line in front at Epsom, he fulfilled a lifetime dream for breeder Gary Robinson of Newmarket's Strawberry Fields Stud, who will offer the 13-year-old Desert Berry as lot 1891 on Tuesday evening of the sale.
“She's a beautiful mare, she's the right age and she's carrying a full-sibling to the Derby winner,” he says. “So this is it: the best chance anybody's ever going to get to buy another Derby winner.”
Desert Berry first came into Robinson's possession as a foal, but he also owns her dam, the Juddmonte-bred Foreign Language (Distant View), as well as Rose Berry (GB) (Archipenko), a six-time winner and half-sister to Desert Crown who is also now in foal to Nathaniel. With younger members of the family also in his possession, including Desert Berry's 2-year-old daughter by Al Kazeem (GB) and yearling colt by Study Of Man (Ire), Strawberry Fields is well stocked with this Classic family.
“She's from a Juddmonte family originally,” says Robinson of Desert Berry, whose relations include the Group 1 winners Proviso (GB) and Byword (GB).
“I bought her as a foal at Tattersalls many years ago with the first four base mares that we had, and she is the last of those base mares.”
Desert Berry certainly has established a strong foundation for Robinson. All five of her foals to have raced are multiple winners. Successive matings with the late Lanwades resident Archipenko produced not just Rose Berry but also the Hong Kong Group 3 winner Flying Thunder (GB), who raced in Britain as Archie McKellar, winning for Ralph Beckett before moving to Frankie Lor.
“Unfortunately Archipenko is gone, but she is a nice mare and Nathaniel was perfect for her,” says Robinson. “She's bred a Derby winner now and that's put us on the map. And we've got all the family to go further with.
“I've got the yearling half-brother here and a daughter by Al Kazeem who is in pre-training as well.”
Robinson describes Desert Berry as an “alpha mare” and he adds, “She's an individual, she's different but she is kind. And she's got a beautiful action.”
He says of his decision to offer her for sale, “Sometimes you have to let things go. At the end of the day, this is a business, so we have to make money to go on again. We're building more new stables…and then we've also created a racing yard, so we've got that as a back-up as well. It's been a big investment and sometimes we have to sell things. This is a great opportunity now to reinvest the money into the stud, but we have the family and I'm quite sure they're going to be successful for a while.”
While Desert Crown will always be first and foremost remembered as a Derby winner, Robinson says that it was the colt's easy victory in the G2 Dante S. for his owner Saeed Suhail and trainer Sir Michael Stoute that lingers most in his mind.
“For me, the Dante was the race where I saw a wonderful walking horse and athlete, and that really that made it for me more than anything, just to have produced a wonderful horse,” he says.
Indeed, Desert Crown's physical attributes were clearly obvious from an early age, as he sold for 280,000gns to Richard Brown of Blandford Bloodstock when offered as a yearling at Book 2 of the Tattersalls October sale in 2020. And there could well be more high days to come for the colt, who has recently returned to training at Stoute's Freemason Lodge in Newmarket.
Robinson says, “Desert Crown is doing really well now, so he'll be ready and they're really excited about him for next year. They're going to go places with him. It's good, it shows that the horses the mare produces are progressive.”
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