It was a sunny Monday morning in late September. In the hipster-central east London area of Shoreditch, a pub was opening its doors early. A small group was gathering, including celebrated wine writer Jancis Robinson, Wine Advocate critic Neal Martin, restaurateur Mikael Jonsson and a few others (including this author). We were there to taste sparkling wine, blind, out of Zalto glasses: four grand marque Champagnes, four grower Champagnes and four English sparkling wines. The tasting, organized by counterculture wine magazine Noble Rot, was conducted double blind (none of us knew the identities of the wines we tasted, or even which wines were entered). We took notes and gave each wine a score out of 20. These were simply averaged, and the wines ranked in terms of popularity. We were stunned by the results: The four English sparkling wines took positions one and two (and also, less impressively, eight and eleven).
Of course, these sorts of tastings prove nothing, other than that some experienced tasters couldn’t reliably tell apart good English sparkling wine from good Champagne. And that the best English sparkling wines belong in the same peer group as good Champagne. But to suggest that English sparkling wine is simply aiming to imitate Champagne is to do it a disservice. It is in the process of establishing its own identity, but as with all sparkling wines, the shadow of Champagne looms large, and the flavor profile, commercial success and market positioning of Champagne is the yardstick by which all ambitious sparkling wines are measured. The gently rolling, green hills of the south of England aren’t yet covered with vines, but suitable sites are becoming quite sought after. The good news is that the poorest bits of pasture or farmland, where the topsoil is very thin, are those best suited to growing vines, particularly when this thin topsoil is over a deep layer of chalk.
Christian Seely has a twinkle in his eye as he fills a flute with a new sparkling wine that he’s presenting to a group of journalists. Seely, the head of AXA Millésimes’s wine portfolio, deals with some of the world’s great fine wines on a daily basis. But Seely is so convinced of the potential for sparkling wine from England that he’s decided to partner with an old friend, Nicholas Coates, to form Coates & Seely. The two met in 1986 when they were studying for their MBAs. “We were the only two English literature graduates at INSEAD [the business school in Fontainebleau, France],” says Nicolas Coates. “Two very strange Englishmen who read Shakespeare and Milton.” Move forward 25 years to 2008 and by this time Coates had left his career in banking. “I wasn’t happy,” he says. “I had an entrepreneur in me. So one evening in Bordeaux at two a.m., feeling well refreshed, we concocted the plan. England was the place for sparkling wine.” The deal was that Coates was to do everything, and Seely would bring in the winemaking and marketing platform. “I’m like the CEO and Christian is the chief executive.”
“One evening in Bordeaux at two a.m., feeling well refreshed, we concocted the plan. England was the place for sparkling wine.”
—Nicolas Coates


Coates looked for six or seven months for the right property. Then a friend told him that there was an old vineyard just a mile and a half from the Coates family home in Hampshire. Established by Charles Cunningham 15 years earlier, it was called The Wooldings; Cunningham had died tragically young and the vineyard was in the hands of his 84-year old mother, Daphne. By this stage it was quite overgrown. “We took soil samples, and Bordeaux University said from the samples that it was a Champagne vineyard,” reveals Coates. “We said, ‘No: it’s Hampshire, England.’”
So Coates reached an agreement: They would restore the vineyard’s 12 acres, and plant another 18. “Our view is that this is a best-in-class Champagne vineyard,” says Coates. The vineyards are held in partnership, half and half, and the winery is owned by Coates & Seely. “Over the last ten to fifteen years, we have moved from the wrong side of marginal to the right side. It is clearly economic to be doing this.”
Unhappy with the somewhat clumsy term “English Sparkling Wine,” Coates and Seely have coined a name for the category: Britagne. This brave venture has had only limited traction; so far, the only other producer to adopt it is Exton Park, whose winemaker is Seely’s newly ex-wife Corinne Seely. Whether Exton persists with Britagne in the future remains to be seen. Finding a name for the category has been one of the few slightly contentious issues that have faced this nascent wine scene. The other is the issue of PDOs—the European Union scheme for protecting the origin of agricultural products. Mark Driver, of Rathfinny Estate, has led the move to establish a PDO for Sussex Sparkling, which has ruffled a few feathers in the industry, with many questioning the wisdom of using county boundaries rather than soil type and site characteristics to delimit a new appellation.
Driver’s Rathfinny Estate is probably the most widely discussed (and written about) wine estate globally that has yet to produce a bottle of wine. Coming from a background in hedge fund management, Driver took the bold step of buying 600 acres and planting 160 of them with vines on some very promising-looking chalky soils in the South Downs, near Beachy Head in Sussex.
But there was one thing that Driver hadn’t banked on: wind. His site has beautiful soils for sparkling wine production, and the climatic indices looked perfect. But average wind speed is not a very useful measure: In a coastal site, calm nights and mornings can be followed by an afternoon blast of strong wind—enough to upset vine growth without pushing the average wind speed up to levels that might ring the alarm bells of prospective vineyard planters. Initially, the plan was to plant trees, but the winds were sufficient to stunt their growth. So he’s had to invest a lot of money on windbreaks to allow the tree windbreaks to grow, which proved quite expensive.


“There’s been a tendency with English fizz to plant more pinot noir than the geology might suggest. We have planted 75 percent chardonnay.”
—Ian Kellett
Soils clearly matter in sparkling wine production, and southern England has some chalky soil types that resemble some of Champagne’s most coveted terroirs. Rathfinny has chalk, as does the Coates & Seely site. Another producer banking on chalky soils as the key to quality is the ambitious Ian Kellett, of Hambledon in Hampshire. He is emerging as one of the real stars of the English sparkling wine scene. Hambledon was the birthplace of the modern English wine industry. Just over 60 years ago, in 1952, Major General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones, who’d been a subaltern in the trenches in World War I, was sitting at home, looking out over his property with his stepson, who suggested he should try his hand at growing grape vines. The sloping field with chalky soils in front of his property, Mill Down House, seemed promising for vines. So Salisbury-Jones took a sackload of the soil to Burgundy, to get it analyzed. This went well, the vineyard was planted and in 1955 he launched the UK’s first commercial wine. For a very long time, Hambledon was pretty much on its own, but during the late 1960s and ’70s many more vineyards began to spring up, most as hobbies or retirement projects. Things really began to take off in the 1990s, but the biggest growth has been in the last 15 years, as people have begun to realize the massive potential of sparkling rather than table wine in the UK.
In the mid-1990s winemaking stopped at Hambledon, just as English wines were beginning to become more mainstream. Kellett bought it in 1999 and sunk around £10 million into replanting vineyards and building a cellar. He hired Hervé Jestin, who was for 20 years the cellarmaster of Champagne Duval Leroy. The key to Kellett’s vision is the soils and climate of his vineyard site. Many of the established sparkling wine producers in England are on green sandstone (also known as greenstone), which is very common in Kent and Sussex. Hampshire has more chalk, and both Hambledon and Meon Valley (a vineyard he recently acquired) have solid chalk soils. “In a hundred years, Hampshire will be England’s vineyard because of the chalk,” he claims.
As well as studying soils, he has looked carefully at climate data for the last 35 years from Reims. In July and August Reims is 2.7˚F warmer, but in September Hambledon is 2.1˚F warmer. Interestingly, the Côte des Blancs is mostly northeast facing—the coldest exposure. And this is where chardonnay is grown. Kellett is convinced his site has massive potential for chardonnay. “There’s been a tendency with English fizz to plant more pinot noir than the geology might suggest,” he says. “We have planted 75 percent chardonnay.” The winery is fully gravity flow, over a number of levels, and there’s an elevator to take the grapes to the top floor where the crush pad is located. “We think we are getting a mouthfeel in our wines that is different,” says Kellett. “It would be nice if we could demonstrate that this is because we are not pumping.”


Kellett has Champagne in his sights as direct competition. He considers Champagne Pol Roger, with its 1.2-million-bottle production, as the model. “The plan is during my lifetime to build an international brand as big as Pol Roger,” says Kellett. He points out that the UK is the most important market for Champagne in the world, and that a large part of the growth of Hambledon and other UK producers will come “out of Champagne’s hide.” “Champagne is in the worst financial state for a generation,” says Kellett. “They are having to put up their prices, vacating the £20 to £30 price bracket. [$30 to $45] Now the grand marques are all £39.99 [$60] with a deal price over £25. Give it five more years and even on a deal you will get branded Champagne abandoning the under £30 space. I firmly believe that it is our job to create enough wine that the £20 to 30 bracket can be satisfied by us, but we will have to build brands. We are looking to take 25 percent of the Champagne market share in the next ten years.” Within 15 years, he believes, “We will have at least three producers making one million bottles a year, all from their own vineyards. No one does this in Champagne.” He says that the capital structure in Champagne, where vineyards are owned by growers and the vast majority of Champagne is made by houses that buy grapes, is a serious weakness for quality. “It exposes a soft underbelly that can be exploited.” Kellett emphasizes the economics. To establish a one-million-bottle Champagne estate that grows all its own fruit would cost around $143 million with today’s vineyard prices. In the UK, it would cost between $23 and $30 million.
“I think there is an opportunity to take sales from Champagne,” agrees Brad Greatrix, a Canadian expat who, along with his wife, Cherie Spriggs, makes the wines at Nyetimber in Sussex. “There are thirty million bottles of Champagne sold each year in the UK, so there are lots of occasions when people are spending thirty pounds on an experience. Why wouldn’t you get an English wine?”
Nyetimber is possibly the most famous of all the English sparkling wine producers, largely because of the reputation the firm built on the first wines it produced in the early 1990s. These were the first bottles that made people realize that English sparkling wine wasn’t just good: it could be world class. Nyetimber now has 370 acres of vineyards spread over eight sites. Six of these are on greensand, but two are in Hampshire on chalk, both planted to chardonnay. 2012 was the first vintage of these chalk-based terroirs, which now account for 40 percent of production here. Interestingly, all the Nyetimber wines on the market are from the greens and vineyards, including the impressive single-vineyard Tillington, which at £75 ($115) is the most expensive of all English fizzes. The wines are excellent, but Greatrix and Spriggs think that the chalk will add something extra. “The greensand brings perfume and brightness to the wines, with fruit intensity,” says Greatrix. “The chalk brings minerality, lime and texture.” He adds: “Greensand works. Nyetimber’s reputation is built on greensand, but there will just be this extra dimension when the Hampshire vineyards are in the blend.”


“Greensand brings perfume and brightness, with fruit intensity. Chalk brings minerality, lime and texture. Nyetimber’s reputation is built on greensand, but there will just be this extra dimension with the Hampshire vineyards in the blend.”
—Brad Greatrix
So far, most English sparkling wine producers have adopted the vintage model, but Coates & Seely and Hambledon have been based around a nonvintage model, which is something that Nyetimber is now shifting to. “Our core model is nonvintage,” explains Kellett. “You need the reserve wines. To have single vintage as a core of your business is challenging. I think we will see people go to multi-vintage blends with time.” Coates agrees, and thinks that the nonvintage model is an insurance against years such as 2012, when there just isn’t enough warmth to ripen the grapes properly. “We are conservative in that we reserve between a quarter and a third of the wine each year,” he reveals. “It’s a fantastic weather mitigant.”
Things are changing fast in the English vineyards. The 2014 vintage was the biggest yet, with 1,571 hectares under vine (a hectare is the unit used to measure vineyard size; it’s a little bit more than a football pitch, and equals 2.47 acres). It produced a healthy 4.45 million bottles. Ten years earlier, there were just 722 hectares under vine. And, since 2010, the UK has made more sparkling wine than still.
But it is still early days. While demand has always slightly exceeded supply, keeping prices firm, production of these wines is set to grow significantly over the next few years. For the dream to become a reality, UK consumers are going to have to find England’s finest more than a match for the Champagne they guzzle in such quantities. And a bit of export demand wouldn’t hurt either. It’s an exciting time to be watching the English wine scene, but there are some nerves, too. No one knows quite how this journey will end.
Based in London, Jamie Goode is a lapsed scientist who now devotes his time to writing about wine, mainly in the UK national newspaper the Sunday Express, and on his own site, wineanorak.com. The author of The Science of Wine (UC Press 2014) and I Taste Red (2016).
This story appears in the print issue
of December 2015.
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