Wine of the Week: Asquith Gardens NV

This week I’m visiting top Northern supermarket Asda with a bargain English Sparkling Wine and a bonus red for paid subscribers.

If I could give one piece of advice to budding drink writers, in fact journalists of any sort, it would be, look on Companies House! This is a website where you can find the accounts of all businesses registered in the UK. 

It amazes me when I read stories about bankruptcies or management buy-outs that are missing a huge chunk of information that is right there in the public record. Companies House is great fun not only for seeing a company’s (often dire) financial performance but also seeing directors who have resigned often long before a public announcement. It was immensely handy when researching my recent book on English wine. 

So when I tasted a wine from a mysterious producer at the recent Asda tasting, I immediately went to my favourite website. The wine in question was called Asquith Gardens, a non-vintage English sparkler made from a blend of 62% chardonnay, 29% pinot noir and 9% pinot meunier. Whereas cheaper Brit fizz can be a bit sweet n’ sour, lots of sugar added to cover up underripe grapes and a lack of bottle age, this was well-balanced with telltale croissant/ nutty notes and fine bubbles suggesting it had been properly aged. 

It was one of the highlights of the tasting especially at £18. Normally I’d expect an English wine of this quality to cost double that.

Asda are being coy about who made the wine from but the tasting sheet it said it came from Rolling Green Hills vineyards. A quick look at Companies House shows that this is based at 8 Sackville Street, London W1. And you know who else is based at this address? Only a little winery you may have heard of called Nyetimber. And one of the directors for Rolling Green is none other than Eric Heerema, Dutch billionaire owner of Nyetimber and the Lakes Distillery. 

So it would be extremely unlikely if this wine came from anywhere except Nyetimber. So why aren't they selling it as Nyetimber? It could be that the quality isn’t quite up to standard to sell as Nyetimber. Or perhaps Nyetimber like many other English Sparkling Wine producers are overstocked and are happy to sell of excess stock. Perhaps it’s a combination of the two.

Either way, we’re likely to see a lot more such wines in the near future. Morrisons has stocked sparkling wines in the past from Rolling Green Vineyards. There are tens of millions of bottles of maturing wine in England which unless exports ramp up quickly are going to be hard to sell. The big crunch is when wines based on the giant 2023 vintage start to come on the market so late 2025 onwards. Roll on the great English wine glut! I get the feeling that many English producers are somewhat relieved that 2024 has been such a poor year. They really don’t need any more wine.

But that wine wasn’t the only ridiculous bargain at the Asda tasting.