Five things English Sparkling Wine could focus on (and five to quietly retire)
clue - one of them is French-bashing
Hundred Hills, Oxfordshire
I seem to have reached the stage in a wine writer’s career-arc that involves being invited to sit on panels. No complaints - I took part in a lively one at wine club 67 Pall Mall yesterday, part of which was to examine ‘The Future of English Wine’. Ordinarily, I’d say the only thing with the potential to be less exciting than a panel discussion is an article about a panel discussion. But this was a little unusual.
Unusual, at least, in that quite a large proportion of the audience could probably have been sat behind the table themselves. Guy Woodward, chairing, Laura Rhys MS from Gusbourne, James Lambert from Lyme Bay, Sergio Verillo from Blackbook and I were faced with MW students, oenologists, writers, would-be-English Wine retailers, and even wine statisticians.
Tough crowd? Perhaps. At one stage they started answering their own questions, which helped. As I’m now a card-carrying Champagne Correspondent I felt the need to keep the discussion on sparkling wine afloat at times; English still wines have become a talking point of late, but I found myself quietly nodding in partial agreement with one journalist whose safety I became fearful of when he pronounced that he’d never had an English still wine he would serve up, without qualification, to a table of international guests.
I have had such wines - in fact I’ve had about four or five, almost entirely from Danbury Ridge and Gusbourne - but I’m afraid the idea that we’re currently sitting on a mine of fully-fledged cool-climate still wines worthy of a £20+ price point is fanciful. They’re simply not here in any numbers. Yet.
They will be. Some of this brood of plucky fledglings will make it, as will some of the next, and so on, each helped a little more by rising temperatures. I hope, though, that England’s wine producers don’t let their gaze slip too far. There’s still so much headroom in English Sparkling, so much more work to find the most exciting sites, to build reserve wines, to work on blends and balance and complexity…
Uh oh, you’re thinking. This sounds like C…C…..Champagne! Well, if Champagne is currently thinking it wants to be Burgundy, someone needs to think they’re Champagne. We’ll get our turn at Burgundy in another 20 years, and Humberside can take over Champagne (they have chalk up there!). Jokes aside, I don’t mind admitting I have few qualms about English Sparkling Wine trying to ape Champagne. I don’t imagine Christopher Wren worried that St Paul’s Cathedral might end up looking a bit….continental.
Here’s my take on what some of these wines do that I’d love to see more of - and also what English Sparkling Wine could quietly shuffle back in the blend.
The vines I help look after in Kent (for fun), last summer.
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