Sunday Drinking: 23 October
Today I’m recommending some bargain champagne-style cyders and English rosé with oomph
Well, we have finally moved house. The new place feels like a mansion compared with the tiny terrace we were living in before. Best of all, it looks like it was decorated by Audrey fforbes-Hamilton (an unforgettable Penelope Keith) from To the Manor Born, all brass picture lights and green carpets. I love it and don’t want to change a thing.
So it’s just going to be a short post this week as I’m drowning in boxes and I still can’t find my slippers. Last week I referred to a cider or cyder article I had written for The Critic so I thought I’d look a little closer today at Gospel Green which has been making fine champagne-style cider in Sussex/ Hampshire since 1990.
It was founded in the 1980s by James Lane who trained in Champagne. It was based at his farmhouse in West Sussex. Despite being not far from Guildford, it felt very unspoilt when I visited in 2015. When he started, he used fruit from his own orchard but after a while just began buying it from local growers, a mixture of dessert and cooking apples. The set-up was very basic with a huge wooden apple press like something you might see in Victorian photos. He then fermented the cider in tanks and then bottled the still cider with some sugar and a champagne yeast and let it mature for around 18 months. The result was something very clean and lightly fruity with a beautiful fizz like champagne. Then if you kept it for longer, it began to develop toast, toffee and cooked apple flavours.
Production was tiny, he kept below the 20,000 bottle threshold so he wouldn't have to pay VAT and prices were absurdly low for a cyder that a) required so much work b) had to be matured. I think I paid around £6 a bottle ex-cellar. In 2016 he sold up to an entrepreneur called Brock Bergius who based the business on nearby Blackmoor Farm over the border in Hampshire. This was where Lane had sourced much of his fruit so there was continuity. Bergius left in 2022 and the business is now run by Blackmoor Farm itself. Confusingly, Google says it is ‘permanently closed’ but Gospel Green is active on Instagram and is still selling cyder. Suzanna Walters, operations manager filled me in:
Gospel Green’s been taken under Blackmoor Estates wing and we have had the delight of James Lane coming to advise us and ensure the recipe is as it should be. We are also launching both fine ciders and standard ciders under the umbrella of Blackmoor Orchards over the next few months. Blackmoor Estate has been a large grower and producer of apples and pears for over 100 years so it is fitting that cider now comes into the fold. William Selborne is the owner of Blackmoor Estate and now an excited cider maker.
At the moment, the stock available is from the Bergius years and very nice it is too. I can’t try the Lane bottles and the newer ones side by side but from memory, the taste is very similar. There are also two pinks, one made with the addition of raspberry juice and one with some red wine made from pinot noir. The raspberry one I found a little sweet but the pinot noir one is excellent and solves the problem of lack of fruitiness that sometimes plagued Gospel Green in the past. Master of Malt (where I work part time) has all three bottlings at ridiculous prices. These are old stock and some have gone a bit cloudy but every bottle I’ve bought has been delicious. Our neighbour Chris can’t get enough of them.
Finally, I’ve long been banging the drum for England to make a more full-bodied style of rosé that owes more to Burgundy than Provence. And glory be, Lyme Bay is now making just such a thing. They were kind enough to send me samples of their basic one and a reserve. The first, which costs about £20, is glorious, just full of ripe red fruit and orange. In fact, there’s an almost Tavel level of red fruit goodness. The oak-aged version is very different, full of pink grapefruit with spicy woody spice. The fruit has more than enough ripeness to tackle the oak but I think it probably needs a year or so to settle down.
Lyme Bay is a Devon winery but buys fruit from Essex for their best still wines. I only mention it in passing in my book on English wine which feels a bit foolish now because everything I have tasted from this producer has been exceptionally good including great chardonnay and some of England’s best red pinot noir. The winemaking team of Sarah Massey and James Lambert just seem to get better and better. Best of all, prices are quite moderate considering the quality. My employers still have Lyme Bay’s 2020 chardonnay for just over £20 a bottle. Though probably not for much longer.
Links to buy: