Expressing our site

Our energy is largely focused on the vineyard - on producing the healthiest possible fruit.  When it comes to the winery we want to capture that fruit in the bottle - making the best wine possible from our site each vintage. 

We are so small that we don’t have our own winery, instead our wines are crafted at one of the exceptionally well-equipped wineries nearby. The wines were for many years made at nearby Hambledon Vineyard, but are now made at The Grange, which is even closer, in Arlesford. The building in which our wine is made may not be ours, but the winemaking is.

It’s impossible to talk about the style of our wines without referencing Hervé Jestin, a pioneer of biodynamics in Champagne, now at the helm of Leclerc-Briant. He was our consultant winemaker at the start, and undoubtedly influenced our path – making pure, site-driven wines.

We craft wines of precision – preserving fruit quality and definition with our winemaking. All our fruit is hand-picked, with only the finest bunches making it into the winery. The bunches are pressed and vinified, largely in temperature-controlled stainless steel. We have a handful of old barrels, but avoid any overt oak influence in our wines. Most of the lots go through malolactic fermentation, although this varies according to vintage. We bottle only after a minimum of 36 months and frequently longer, allowing the base wines to benefit from autolysis in tank/or barre, lending additional complexity.

Our reserve wines come from a solera started in 2011, but we consciously use low levels of reserve wine (a maximum 15%, and often much less), wanting each release to speak of the base vintage. This also has an added benefit, allowing us to use less sulphur at bottling. That means each release has its own style, reflecting the season that shaped it. We use lees aging to bring texture, with a minimum 42 months on lees for our Brut and 36 for our Rosé. Dosage levels are modest, adapted to the vintage, but generally sitting between 6 and 9g/l. The wines are then aged on cork for another minimum six months prior to release.

Production is low, making on average 20,000 bottles each vintage. If the quality isn’t there, however, we won’t make a wine – as in 2024.

The resulting wines are pure and vibrant, precise and detailed, a clear expression of their site and season.