Sunday Drinking: 10 March

What I’ve been up to since January plus two sensational English wines that are worth your time and money.

It’s been a while since I did one of these. Events have intervened. To be honest it’s been a hard year already for reasons I won’t go into so I haven’t had as much time to work this Substack as I would have liked. But things seem to be calmer now and I’ve got lots of interesting fresh human-generated content in the pipeline.

I’ve had a few articles out since January including a look at one of my favourite subjects, sherry, in Academie du Vin, and I spoke with my Uncle Charles, a bona fide whisky legend, for The Critic magazine. I also wrote on a non-booze subject for the Spectator that is pertinent as today is Mothering Sunday in Britain, how flowers are the way to a woman’s heart. I know, ground-breaking stuff. 

I was also in Club Oenologique with an (I thought) interesting look at all the exciting things that English producers are doing with dowdy grape varieties like muller-thurgau and reichensteiner. If you want to sample English wine without breaking the bank, there are certain wines like Davenport Horsmonden or Westwell Ortega that are worth trying especially in a good vintage like 2022.

Which brings me nicely on to two English wines that  I tried recently, both were samples, with show just how producers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this still rather cold marginal climate. They both sit in my favourite wine place of being unusual but not wacky. Here we go!

Love a very specific food match

Westwell Multi-vintage Pinot Meunier (£42.50 direct)

Here’s something you don’t see every day - a champagne-style sparkling wine that is made with no additions. I believe there are maybe a couple of producers in Champagne attempting this but as far as I know only Langham in Dorset has done anything remotely similar in England. The champagne method involves adding yeast and sugar to a still wine, corking it and leaving it for a couple of years, and then removing the dead yeast cells and, usually sweetening it. So how did winemaker Adrian Pike do it without additions. I’ll let him explain:

“We wild fermented pinot meunier in plastic which I liked the neutrality of; and the following year we did the same again. In the third year, we added the fermenting juice to the previous two vintages and bottled the wine when it had enough sugar in the juice to leave the around five bar of pressure in the finished bottles. We then left on lees for two years and disgorged without adding dosage. This wine has had no additions at all. After the fermentation in bottle had occurred, it tasted very like pet nat and I was concerned that it had failed- it was good but not worth the long investment. After the time on lees and disgorging however, I love the wine and wish it was an experiment we’d continued as it’s now going to take seven years to replicate.”

The resulting wine is only 10.5% ABV and initially it lacked the mouthfeel of a normal sparkling wine, but as it warmed up, the mouth explodes with brown apple and masses of yeasty and toasty notes. There’s so much flavour and ripeness that it doesn’t have the austerity of some zero dosage sparkling wines (ones with no sugar added after disgorgement). It’s really a phenomenal wine, one that’s worth spending an evening getting to know. 

Gorgeous colour, tastes nice too

Flint Silex 2022 (direct £24.99)

This is an ever-changing top end wine from Flint in Norfolk which vies with Westwell and a couple others as my favourite producer in England. The winemaker Ben Wichell really opened my eyes to what was possible with bacchus, a variety which can produce some rather horrid vegetal wines. Silex shows that he’s equally adept with French varieties. This is made from 50 % pinot noir and 40 % pinot blanc from his own vineyard on the Suffolk/ Norfolk border and 10 % chardonnay from Crouch Valley in Essex. It’s made from what’s known as cœur de cuvée, the best juice when the grapes are first pressed, fermented in old oak barrels and then aged in a mixture of neutral oak, stainless steel and amphora.

It’s quite a deep colour from the skins of the black grapes and you can really smell the pinot noir on the nose with a distinct red cherry note. The palate manages to be high in acidity but also ripe and richly textured with a nutty even slightly oxidative edge to it. I won’t beat about the bush,  my wife didn’t like it, too acidic for her, but at nearly room temperature, I thought it was magnificent and it got better and better over two days. I imagine that if you put this away for a few years, it will bosom into something quite extraordinary. If you’re drinking it now, it’s worth decanting and don’t serve it out of the fridge. Treat it like Musar Blanc and I think you’ll like it.

Neither are cheap but I think they offer good value compared with similar wines from France. £40 is not expensive for Champagne and £25 won’t get you very far in Burgundy or the Jura these days. I will, however, be featuring some cheaper wines featured over the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading and thank you especially the paid subscribers. You are keeping me in wine.