Bolney: no longer the bridesmaid of English wine

Bolney Estate has an interesting history but made inconsistent wines and lacked the glamour of its Sussex neighbours. But this is changing thanks to German money and South African talent.

You can tell a lot about a wine by its cork. A short agglomerated cork, made from bits of mashed up bark, is usually the sign of a cheap wine which is designed for drinking as soon as possible. Though if you notice the construction of the cork, you have probably already pulled it out, so it’s a bit late to think about cellaring it.

But if you get a long cork made from a single piece of bark, it suggests that the winemaker thinks the wine is worth keeping as it will keep the wine reliably sealed, hopefully, for decades. These are the kind of things you get on good Bordeaux and Burgundy. On opening old bottles, it’s often surprising how well the cork has lasted.

I certainly didn't expect to find such fancy corks on some samples I was sent from Bolney, a medium-sized producer based in West Sussex, for an online tasting with its South African winemaker Cara Lee Dely (below).

Bolney used to be an agglomerated cork type producer. It has a rich history, though, by English wine standards. Originally called Bookers Vineyard, the company was founded at the village of Bolney by Janet and Rodney Pratt in 1972. They were part of the pioneering generation that included the Barnes family at Biddenden and Peter Hall at Breaky Bottom - all still going strong. Their daughter Sam Linter joined the firm in 1995 and soon after the name of the firm was changed to Bolney.

I think it’s fair to say that Bolney has an uneven track record. On the credit side, in a good vintage Linter made possibly England’s best pinot noir, before producers like Gusbourne, Balfour and Danbury Ridge took red wine to another level of ripeness from around 2016. The sparkling wines were sometimes quite fun, I particularly like the robust saignee Cuvée Rosé, but I’ve never liked Bolney Bubbly - made from a mixture of champagne grapes and muller-thurgau. There were also some awful rondo-based reds which the less said about the better.

As well as producing often indifferent wines, the company lacked a coherent image. They didn’t have the glamour of Nyetimber or Gusbourne, the agricultural honesty of Biddenden and they didn't have a charismatic champion like Bob Lindo at Camel Valley.

It came as quite a surprise when Bolney was bought in 2022 by the largest sparkling wine company in the world Henkell Freixenet, makers of the famous Cava in black bottle, Freixenet Cordon Negro as well as oceans of sekt. The deal had the English wine world scratching their collective heads. Why would they buy Bolney of all the English names they could have had?

There were rumours that the German multinational came quite far down the line with acquiring