| Essex – the southern English county often mocked for brashness and vulgarity – has the most promising future for English still wine.
This was the message from a lively tasting and debate at 67 Pall Mall last night. Four expert panellists discussed the question ‘Where is English wine heading and how high can it go?’ at the London club.
‘Essex is coming. It has unique qualities for still wines, in terms of soil, altitude and climate. It gets considerably less rainfall than the rest of southern England,’ James Lambert, managing director and head winemaker at Lyme Bay Winery said.
Earlier, the audience had been sampling Lambert’s sparkling Classic Cuvée, and still 2021 Chardonnay. Other wines in the tasting included Gusbourne’s 2014 Fifty One Degrees North, the winery’s recently-released £195 prestige cuvée; Cambridge’s Gutter & Stars winery’s 2021 Strange News from Another Star Bacchus – widely considered one of the standout wines of the evening; Gusbourne’s 2022 Rosé and Blackbook’s Pygmalion Chardonnay, made from fruit from Essex’s Crouch Valley.
English winemakers and many observers have long considered Essex an excellent source of ripe fruit. In 2021 wine expert Jamie Goode namechecked the Crouch Valley as a ‘hotspot’ for English wines. Wineries across Southern England, from Lyme Bay in Devon to Hattingley Valley in Kent use Essex fruit in their still wines.
Champagne and sparkling wine expert Tom Hewson, one the panellists, said, ‘historically Essex has been ignored because its heavy clay soils were thought no good for viticulture – they’re so unlike Champagne. But it’s very dry and a good deal warmer than Kent and Sussex.’
The county has also long suffered unfairly from good old-fashioned British snobbery, its inhabitants considered uncultured, perma-tanned vulgarians, as portrayed in the hit reality TV series The Only Way Is Essex. Unlike its fellow wine counties in Sussex and Kent, Essex has few great landed estates with fine manor houses – it has never really been a tourist destination.
But in wine terms, Lambert stressed, there’s huge potential. ‘There’s a lot of excitement around Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, as well as Bacchus.’ The warm, low-lying Crouch Valley is ‘a key region’. The vineyards which sit close to the Crouch River avoid the spring frosts which bedevil many English vineyards; this allows consistency of ripening.
‘In 2021, when vineyards across the south were struggling to ripen Chardonnay for sparkling wine, the Essex vineyards were getting 13 percent ripeness for good still wines,’ Hewson said. |
