The rise of English sparkling wine — and which to drink this summer

English Wine Week begins on June 19. It has taken quite a while for the country to embrace its native ferments but English sparkling wine is now fully respectable.

The sommelier at The Dorchester, one of London’s grandest hotels, recently chose Rathfinny’s 2015 fizz, grown on the South Downs near Brighton, to precede a special dinner. Those attending a pre-season “friends and family” performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Opera Holland Park were treated to Gusbourne’s 2016 sparkling wine before the overture. And only last March, James Max, the Financial Times’s Rich People’s Problems columnist, suggested it was time to ditch champagne for English fizz.

A recent blind tasting of far too many English sparkling wines — plus three champagnes, to see if we could distinguish them — proved just how competent those who make wine sparkle in England are. There was no aggressively frothy mousse and the balance of the elements was mostly superb. Yet the wines were also delightfully varied.

The teams responsible for Krug and Dom Pérignon tend to limit the number of champagnes they taste in a single session to 10 and 15 respectively, but my English tasting was organised by an obsessive. I knew that Nick Baker of online retailer The Finest Bubble had an inexhaustible thirst for champagne, but it seems that this applies to any good sparkling wine too.

He invited me and fellow Master of Wine Richard Bampfield to help him assess about 90 English sparkling wines because he wants to expand his online range. They have been divided into three sessions and this first one, he assured us, was the most ambitious. We tasted 23 vintage-dated blanc de blancs, followed by 18 vintage-dated rosés — from noon, with only Carr’s water biscuits and some oatcakes to blot them up. At the end, as I beat a hasty retreat, he suggested opening more bottles.

Because of the number of wines, I’ll confine myself to describing the blanc de blancs, from when my taste buds were at their sharpest. I find quite a lot of people are confused by the term blanc de blancs, which simply means a white wine made from pale-skinned grapes, so it could, strictly speaking, be applied to almost all white wines, sparkling or not. But in a sparkling context it is used to distinguish from blanc de noirs, or white wines made from dark-skinned grapes, where the grape skins are kept in contact with the juice for as short a time as possible.

In practice, a blanc de blancs from Champagne or the UK is most likely to be made from Chardonnay, the dominant pale-skinned grape in both places. The biggest surprise of our tasting was how well one exception to this rule performed. Three of the wines were made by veteran English winemaker Peter Hall, who planted Seyval Blanc vines in his Breaky Bottom vineyard near Lewes in 1974. Back then, the imperative was to have grapes that would ripen in much cooler English summers. Seyval Blanc is a hybrid grape specifically bred to ripen early and was the most-planted grape variety in England until the craze for producing sparkling wines in the image of champagne meant Chardonnay and Pinot Noir overtook it.

Seyval table wine can be pretty neutral but Hall conjures effervescent magic from his vines, perhaps helped by their great age. Each of his cuvées is named in memory of a friend or relative, and the star of our tasting was that named after his great-great-uncle Koizumi Yakumo, better known as 19th-century travel writer Lafcadio Hearn, who gave the west early glimpses of Japan. I wrote: “Definitely not trying to taste like champagne but like a superior English fizz. Lots of energy.”

The magnum of Ridgeview Limited Release 2009 was also excellent, even if it seemed absolutely ready to drink, whereas the Breaky Bottom Cuvée Koizumi Yakumo 2010 tasted as though it still had many years ahead of it. Equally good, and more delicate than the Ridgeview magnum, was Blanc de Blancs 2013 from the pioneer of English champagne taste-alikes, Nyetimber, whose very competent fizz I first had in the 1990s.

Since there have been so many new entrants in the sparkling wine business in the past few years, vintage-dated wines are most common. (Two of the blanc de blancs we tasted were as young as 2017.) The extensive Rathfinny estate was first planted in 2012, so the earliest crop will have been in 2015; owners Sarah and Mark Driver have not had time to build up the stocks of reserve wines that are used by many champagne blenders to add depth to wines from the most recent vintage — a common problem among British wine producers.

It is notable, then, that the talented winemakers at Nyetimber were particularly keen to launch non-vintage blends once they had built up reserves of older wines for blending purposes. The first release of their non-vintage Classic Cuvée, based on 2011 blended with ingredients from older vintages, was launched in 2016.

It will be interesting to compare the quality of the vintage-dated wines tasted in this first session with the 17 non-vintage blends lined up for our second session.

The lone blanc de blancs champagne in our blind tasting, a 2012 from grower Yann Alexandre, didn’t stand out from all the English wines and indeed seemed a bit tart and less persistent than many of them. As Bampfield reminded us, average crop levels are much lower in English vineyards than in Champagne, which may well result in more flavourful English wines capable of ageing longer. Certainly one feature of British sparkling wine is its longevity — perhaps boosted by relatively high levels of acidity.

The UK’s comparatively cool climate has traditionally resulted in such tart base wines that winemakers routinely encouraged the conversion of harsh malic acid into softer lactic acid. But in recent balmy years, this so-called malolactic conversion is often avoided as unnecessary.

What is abundantly clear from the collection of wines I tasted is that the UK’s sparkling winemakers have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of. It doesn’t have to be champagne, folks!

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. More stockists from Wine-searcher.com

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