Freshly picked chardonnay grapes from the Windsor Great Park Vineyard ready to head for the winery. STEVEN MORRIS/LAITHWAITE’S WINE
FROM GRAPE TO BOTTLE, THE PROCESS OF MAKING WINE
SO THE GRAPES ARE RIPE AND READY TO BE PICKED. What happens next? The generally accepted theory is that speed is of the essence: grapes off the vine, into small boxes (to minimize premature crushing) and away to the winery for pressing before oxygen has had a chance to work its flavour-affecting worst. That’s fine when the winery is alongside the vineyard. As at Exton Park in Hampshire, where head winemaker Corinne Seely says: ‘It’s five minutes from vineyard to press. It would be crazy to lose that freshness.’ Or at Stopham in West Sussex, where Simon Woodhead’s grapes grow just across a farm track from his press and tanks. Both are determined to avoid oxidation of the juice from their carefully tended grapes.
But, with 500-plus vineyards in the UK and little more than a quarter of that number of wineries, such proximity isn’t the norm. For example, Lyme Bay Winery in east Devon uses fruit from Kent and Essex, Gusbourne brings grapes from its second vineyard in West Sussex to the Kent winery, and even Nyetimber transports all its grapes, from both the West Sussex estate and its Hampshire vineyards, to its winery at Crawley.
Yet there aren’t loads of oxidized wines around. Gusbourne winemaker Charlie Holland explains why English grapes survive even quite lengthy journeys: ‘They’re pretty hard.’ Lyme Bay’s Liam Idzikowski echoes that: ‘They don’t squish.’ Idzikowski adds a further, forthright fact, so different from the situation in warm-climate wine countries: ‘We’re picking in October, and it’s bloody cold.’ Even so, Lyme Bay’s furthest-flung fruit is in the winery and pressed within twelve hours of leaving the vine. Overall, emphasizes Holland, ‘the best thing is to keep the grapes intact and then get them into the tank as soon as possible after pressing’.
Freshly picked chardonnay grapes from the Windsor Great Park Vineyard ready to head for the winery. STEVEN MORRIS/LAITHWAITE’S WINE
Once the grapes have arrived safely in the winery, whether from a few hundred metres or many scores of kilometres away, the process of turning them into wine begins. The basic theory is very simple. Alcohol results from the action of yeast on sugar. Grapes contain sugar. Squeeze out the juice, put it into a container, leave it and, because of naturally occurring yeast on skins and stalks, even in the air around, fermentation happens and wine is produced.
Of course, in any winery the process is much more closely controlled, for reliable results. This isn’t the place to go into the detail of that, so here is just a brief overview, concentrating on still white and sparkling wines as they are so much the emphasis in the UK. Making red wine follows generally similar principles, although skins stay with the juice during fermentation and are left to macerate in it afterwards so that the wines achieve the necessary colour and depth of flavour.
From grape to juice: a gentle squeeze
Pressing the grapes, after such unwanted bits and pieces as twigs, dead insects and rotting berries have been removed, is the first stage. Various types of press are in use in the UK, with the new wave of sparkling winemakers generally choosing those favoured for champagne. Coquard is the classic French choice, a sophisticated, gentle version of the traditional basket press; alternatives are soft-action pneumatic presses. For those winemakers most fanatical about avoiding oxidation, a press that blankets the grapes with inert nitrogen is the must-buy style. Bucher is the best known and there will surely be more of its presses in England, but the pace has been set by Exton Park, Simpsons and Coates & Seely. Winemakers at these three estates love the precise control that these presses offer. ‘You can see the difference in colour according to whether you are using nitrogen or not,’ notes Exton Park head winemaker Corinne Seely, who insisted on equipment that allows her to press her grapes very, very slowly indeed. Wine from grapes pressed under inert gas has a very citrussy, granny-smith-apple character, says Charles Simpson, while using a more oxidative process for the same grapes will give a more tropical character, with mango and pineapple flavours.
Whatever type of press is used, normally several fractions of juice result. The first runs out freely simply because of the weight of the grapes in the press; the next follows gentle pressure; and the final portion is the result of harder pressing. For growers making both sparkling and still wines, having different fractions of juice is no problem. The earlier parts go to make the base wine for fizz; the later pressings, which have greater flavour, are good for still wine. Makers of still wine can also use all fractions. If there is no room for still wine on a producer’s list, there are other possibilities for the later pressings – English gin and eau de vie are increasingly popular winery by-products.
Grapes go into the Press at Albourne Estate.ALBOURNE ESTATE
Juice bubbles from the press at Redbank winery. SIMON DAY/SIXTEEN RIDGES
The pressed juice then goes into stainless steel tanks, or occasionally oak barrels, is chilled to allow impurities to settle out, and – very frequently for English wine – sugar is added (the technical term for this is chaptalization). The sweeter the juice, the more alcoholic the finished wine will be. Decades back, English wine was very low in alcohol, often below 10 per cent, which meant that frequently it was unpalatably acidic. Warmer growing seasons and riper grapes are putting paid to that issue, but a little sweetening to raise the final alcohol level (the permitted maximum resulting increase is 3 per cent, less for organic and biodynamic wines) helps achieve today’s 11–12 per cent wines, with more rounded yet still refreshingly crisp flavours.
Beware of letting nature take its course
The fermentation that happens without any human intervention if newly pressed grape juice is left sitting in a tank is a risky process. It can take a very long time, there may be interruptions when all activity stops, and the final flavours may not be what the winemaker wants. Hence the importance of cultivated yeasts in the wine industry worldwide. Winemakers need the right one for their particular product, from an enormous choice. There are plenty of yeasts developed for cool-climate areas such as the UK, although anyone making organic wines has to use those from organic sources and for biodynamic certification only natural ‘wild’ yeasts are allowed. With the chosen yeast added, the wine-to-be bubbles away until the sugar is gone and fermentation stops.
That is pretty close to the end of the process for still wines, although if extra flavour is wanted the wine is left for a while on its lees, the dead yeast cells and other solids resulting from fermentation. It is moved to a clean tank, leaving behind that layer of yeasty sediment, in a process known as ‘racking’, then fined and filtered to clear out any tiny particles that would lead to it looking cloudy or perhaps cause contamination. Finally, it is bottled. The agents used in fining determine whether the finished wines are suitable for vegetarians and vegans; for example, they can include gelatin, milk protein or isinglass from fish bladders, or non-animal-based materials such fine clay or pea protein. The less intrusive the approach at this time, the more the wine retains its character. Along the way from picked grape to bottle, the wine is protected from risk of contamination by the addition of a little sulphurdioxide, with the allowed limits set lower for organic and biodynamic wines.
Work all levels in the gusbourne winery.GUSBOURNE
There can be one extra step either during alcoholic fermentation or immediately afterwards: malolactic conversion. This can occur without human intervention but more usually is prompted by the deliberate addition of lactic acid bacteria that change the naturally occurring, very sharp malic acid in the wine into softer lactic acid. Whether winemakers choose to go down this route depends on the final style they are seeking and the practice is much more common in reds than whites. Overdo it, and the wine can have almost a sour cream character or the heavy butteriness that was once a characteristic of much Australian chardonnay. Most extensive debate on the use of malolactic conversion in the UK comes among makers of sparkling wine. Some say it is to be avoided like the plague, so the final fizz is quintessentially crisply English; others find the result is just too acidic if malolactic conversion isn’t done.
Putting the bubbles in the bottle
Such mention of fizz leads neatly to how England’s sparkling wines are created. More and more English fizz comes from the three champagne varieties, chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier. Two of these are red, so how come most of the wine is white? The secret lies in taking away the skins of the red grapes from the juice (which is white, not red – very few red grapes actually have red juice) as quickly as possible. Sometimes, though, a little skin contact is wanted, for a rosé result. Alternatively, a pink colour can be achieved, perfectly legally, by adding a dash of red wine to the white fizz.
The classic three-C grapes aren’t the only choice. Excellent sparkling wines are also made from seyval blanc, as those from Breaky Bottom and Camel Valley have proved, and some newer producers also like the grape. Seyval is suitable because it isn’t strongly aromatic. Occasionally other germanic varieties are used, most often in blends. There are sparkling whites in which sauvignon blanc or bacchus is the sole or largest component, and the occasional red fizz is made from dornfelder or rondo. But the champagne varieties will continue to dominate massively, consultant Stephen Skelton insists: ‘Why look elsewhere for making sparkling? Champagne hasn’t for hundreds of years. Chardonnay and pinot noir have a level of public understanding and acceptance that outweighs any other consideration.’
Whatever the grapes used, the process – the traditional second-fermentation-in-bottle method most famous from champagne – is the same. Linda Carr Taylor, whose family was responsible for making the first commercial English sparkling wine, explains why: ‘It’s really the only way to produce sparkling wine of quality.’
The base wine for a sparkling result is made very much as a normal still wine is, though usually the most heavily pressed juice fraction is not included. Most sparkling wine producers keep the grapes from each of their vineyard plots separate throughout the initial winemaking process, and they may even do the same with grapes from sub-plots where clones or rootstocks are different.
This diversity of raw material, extended still further by varied pressing approaches and the choice of yeasts, gives a wonderfully broad palette from which to create sparkling wine. Frequently there are twenty-plus elements available to blend into the final wine, and sometimes that number stretches to one hundred or more. It takes formidable skill to foresee how a finished wine will taste. To increase the complexity of future vintage sparkling wines, or to contribute to the consistency of non-vintage cuvées, some of each year’s base wines will be stored away as reserve wine, while reserve wine from earlier years will go into the new blend.
Components of the future sparkling wine lined up for blending at Rathfinny. RATHFINNY WINE ESTATE
The next step is to get the blended wine fermenting again. The original fermentation agents of sugar and yeast have gone, so more have to be added, mixed with a small quantity of wine, as liqueur de tirage. The wine, now in crown-capped bottles strong enough to support the increasing pressure exerted by the liquid, is left for the second fermentation to occur. As that happens, there is no escape for the resulting bubbles of carbon dioxide, so sparkling wine is created, its alcohol level slightly higher than that of the base wine. Inside the bottle is a new residue of dead yeast cells (lees). This needs to be removed, though not immediately – the longer a wine remains in contact with the lees, the more complex its flavours, the result of a chemical process known as ‘autolysis’. Those flavours often have hints of a bakery – brioche, perhaps, or toast – and the mouthfeel of the wine is also improved. For champagne, the minimum time resting on its lees in cool cellars is fifteen months; for many of the best sparkling wines, English as well as French, this stage extends for upwards of three years.
When the moment for the clean-up arrives, tradition and modernity combine. For centuries, the champagne technique – known as ‘riddling’ – was to place the bottles in angled holes in a wooden rack, neck pointing down. Each day, a skilled cellar hand gently shook each bottle and twisted it a few degrees, encouraging the sediment to settle in the neck. This continued until the bottle was fully inverted and all sediment was lodged next to the cap. Today, electrically powered metal cages called gyropalettes do in a few hours what took the cellar hand a month or more. Most UK sparkling wine wineries are equipped with gyropalettes, although, like all sparkling wine kit, they’re expensive.
Now for the exciting part – getting rid of that lump of sediment. Most wineries dunk the neck of the bottle into a bath of glycol and water at a temperature of minus 20 to minus 25 degrees celsius, which freezes the top few centimetres of the bottle content. Once the bottle is upright again, the crown cap is removed and a pellet of rubbish is ejected by the force of the bubbles. The skill lies in stopping too much wine following it. This process, known as ‘disgorging’, is mechanized in most wineries, and the necessary machine is yet another example of the many costs involved in producing sparkling wine. A few wineries manage the rubbish ejection without the need to freeze, but they are the exception.
Disgorging bottles of English sparkling wine at Hambledon Vineyard. HAMBLEDON VINEYARD
And so to completing the bottling. There is a gap now at the top of the bottle, so a little fill-up is required, of the same blend of wine. Usually, sugar is also added (this is referred to as the ‘dosage’), to create the precise style of wine the maker wants. Then, in goes a big fat cork, compressed into the bottle neck and held in place with the traditional wire cage.
A very tiny amount of the sparkling wine made in England follows a different method, a difference subtly shown in the title the French use for it. This is the méthode ancestrale, as opposed to the méthode traditionelle described above. There is a French name for the result, too – pétillant naturel. Its abbreviation, pet nat, is now widely used wherever this style of wine is made. Pet nat is becoming something of a cult worldwide among drinkers who favour wines made as much as possible as nature intended. The English contribution comes from organic producers, with Davenport and Albury the pioneers. What happens in this method is that the initial fermentation of the wine is stopped, by cooling, before all the sugar has been converted to alcohol. The wine is then bottled, and as its temperature rises back to normal cellar levels fermentation starts again, producing the bubbles in the bottle. The fizz is gentler than in the traditional method, the alcohol level is lower, there is usually a sediment remaining – some makers recommend shaking this back into the liquid before serving, for extra flavour – and the final wine is likely to be a little sweeter, with a distinctive apple-y character. Pet nat is cheaper to make than traditional-method bottle-fermented wine, but is much more tricky to get right, and quite what the result will be with each batch is hard to predict exactly. When it turns out well it is fun to drink, especially as a lunchtime wine.
Making any sparkling wine certainly doesn’t come cheap in the UK, and that is not down solely to the cost of the essential equipment. To put the difference in context, one comparison is particularly pertinent. Yields from UK vineyards over recent years have averaged approximately 20 hectolitres per hectare, though that might rise a little as more large, well-tended vineyards come into production. In Champagne, the average is 66 hectolitres per hectare. Turn those figures into a more understandable unit, the bottle, and the result is that, from the same area of vineyard, for each single bottle of English sparkling wine more than three will be made in Champagne.
Would you buy this bottle?
Whatever type of wine is being made, the final stage is to put it into a bottle, cover the cork with a cap of foil or other appropriate material, and stick on the label. Wineries worldwide are inordinately proud of their bottling lines, which are boring in the extreme once you’ve seen one, two, maybe three. But there is some interesting technology around, so keep your eyes and ears open even when you’re confronted with bottling lines four, five and more. I was glad I did that at Chapel Down, to learn of the use of lasers to ensure the labels and foils are correctly aligned.
At this point, there is another important aspect if the finished product is to be a commercial success: how the bottle looks. English wine for many years went rather too far down the route of over-complicated labels with frilly typefaces and fanciful designs. Some bottles still bear them, for nostalgia perhaps, or because consumers have grown so familiar with them. One example is Biddenden’s ortega, which is a wine that is far more modern than its label indicates. For small producers, redesign is a big addition to the budget, so change is often slow.
Many of the sparkling wines follow the champagne precedents of gold or silver foil and neat name-emphasizing label design. Among still wines there is much more variety, and some very attractive solutions. Albourne Estate has chosen stylish paintings of wildlife seen in or around the vineyards; at Lyme Bay an evocative landscape – by a Scottish artist, but well suited to represent England – has been neatly tweaked so different wines have individuality within a common style. And there are many others.
So much for what is on the outside of the bottle. The contents are what consumers most care about. How can someone with no experience of a particular style of wine or of an individual winery’s product judge what to buy? Tasting is obviously the very best route to making a happy choice, and a large number of UK vineyards welcome the public and pour their wares for visitors, either free at the cellar door or at more structured paid-for tastings. There is more about such possibilities later in this book. Another way to choose is to look for medal stickers on bottles. UK vineyards are very keen on entering their wines in competitions, which are usually judged blind (the bottles are covered by anonymous wrappings so the judges make unprejudiced decisions). Some competitions are small and very local, others arebig and international.
The UK regional wine associations hold annual contests, rewarding the different categories of wine made by their members. In 2017 the long-running umbrella event, the English and Welsh Wine of the Year Competition, was revamped to become the UK Wine Awards, with a broader base of expert judges and an intention to provide a much more publicly visible showcase of the quality now achieved by the industry. The 293 entries in the first edition of the new competition were split roughly 60:40 in favour of still wines, but sparkling wines took 75 per cent of the gold medals.
The overall supreme champion award went to one of the latter, Coates & Seely La Perfide Blanc de Blancs 2009, from chardonnay grown on Hampshire chalk. At £65 a bottle, La Perfide is in the top price bracket of English sparkling wine, but the judges were effusive: ‘Fabulously elegant and refined with the seductive toasted brioche and honey notes of age.’ Nicholas Coates and Christian Seely must have been smiling broadly at the awards announcement: not just top wine, but also two more trophies for that same La Perfide blanc de blancs, plus another for La Perfide rosé 2009. Bolney Wine Estate (pinot gris), Lyme Bay Winery (bacchus) and Digby Fine English (classic cuvée) carried off the remaining trophies. Bolney was also named winery of the year.
Important as it is, that event is an insular one. Much, much broader in scope are the two principal competitions held in England, the International Wine Challenge and the Decanter World Wine Awards, where UK wines are judged against thousands of their peers worldwide (and can beat them, as Winbirri’s Bacchus 2015 proved, by taking the latter event’s 2017 award for best-value white wine from a single grape variety from any wine-making nation). The judges are as international as the entrant wines and offer experience of every aspect of the wine industry.
Christian Seely and just one of La Perfide’s trophies at the inaugural UK Wine Awards. TOM GOLD PHOTOGRAPHY/WINEGB
Some people in the trade are dismissive of the worth of the medals awarded in these and other wine competitions, arguing that such events are more commercial money-making exercises than true reflections of wine quality. Not so, I believe, certainly as far as the best are concerned. I judged for many years in the International Wine Challenge and I retain a very great respect for the rigour of the selection process. The Decanter awards, though run in a slightly different way, are equally professional. There is an issue at the lower levels of recognition, with the tag of ‘commended’ or a bronze medal. Sometimes, these can be awarded because the wines are rather better than those that aren’t recognized at all, not because the bottles concerned have outstanding qualities in themselves. But it can be the case that great wines don’t win higher awards because they are simply too quirky. Move up to silver or gold, however, and the wines should be special.
Beyond the UK-based competitions there are scores more, some more worthy of respect than others. Full results of most are available online, so a quick look will give an idea of the level of wines entered and hint at the value to be placed on the medals awarded. But it can be difficult to understand why a wine may be awarded a gold medal in one competition yet only a bronze in another. The individual tastes of even the most punctilious of judges can play a part, or there might be a difference in the criteria of judging. The stage of the moon could even be a factor – there are serious proponents of the theory that the lunar calendar can have a significant effect on how wine tastes. And wine is a natural product. However high the quality standards of producers are, individual bottles can differ.
Bottles lined up before judging at the International Wine challenge. AUTHOR
Consultant Stephen Skelton is an advocate of competition both in these wine-against-wine events and on a broader scale: ‘It helps spur winemakers to higher things.’ Overall, he agrees that quality has improved, but argues that older efforts certainly should not be dismissed out of hand. ‘Sure, there were a lot of terrible wines in the past and the number of terrible wines is much, much lower now (although still not low enough). The best wines in the 1980s and 1990s were very good.’
Julia Trustram Eve, marketing director of WineGB, agrees that the late-twentieth-century past must not be forgotten in celebration of the present and future. ‘One thing that is so special about the UK wine industry is the people who have been stalwarts for so long. They are still there, though they may be producing very different wines.’
Advice that has stood the test of time
Before we move entirely away from the subject of making wine, I can’t resist offering a little more history, from John Evelyn’s account of how it should be done, first published in 1669 and entitled The Vintage. This is thought to be the oldest description originally written in English (as opposed to being translated from another language) of the recommended process.
His very first advice is to ‘gather your Grapes when very plump, and transparent’. Wine grapes can never be over-ripe, he contends, noting that ‘where they make the best Wines, the Clusters hang till they are almost wasted’. As for pressing, ‘in most places they tread them with their naked Feet in a Vat, pierced full of holes’, though there are the alternative methods of heaping so many grapes into the vat ‘that the very weight of the Bunches press themselves’ or crushing them in ‘an Engine like a Cider-press’. So what’s new now?
Some of Evelyn’s other instructions also have a very modern ring. For red wine, he advises leaving the juice with the skins ‘till the tincture be to your liking’; he notes ‘yet even Red Grapes will make a White-wine, if timely freed of the Hulk’; he describes the practice of rolling ‘Casks about the Cellar to blend with the Lees’, to be followed a few days later by racking off the wine ‘with great improvement’. There is, too, mention of the use of wood chips (which is frequent now – though not a UK practice – as a cheaper means of giving wines something of the character that comes from barrel fermentation or maturation). But in Evelyn’s day the wood was green beech, not dry oak, and the chips were used for clarifying the wine, not flavouring it.
As with much else in the story of English wine, what is current so often reflects historic practice.
