Local Wine Expert Explores The Rise of English Sparkling Wine

Story by Brian Acton | Unwined Gourmet Wine + Beer

We need to talk about the “C” word: Champagne. For reasons of history, climate, and production standards, it rightly sits at the top of the sparkling wine quality hierarchy. Though the entry level price is higher than many other wine regions, I’d argue that the wines are still great values when you factor in the yields, additional labor in the vineyard and the cellar, and the aging requirements. That being said, with a roughly decade long track record to back it up, a worthy challenger has entered the ring. It’s not Cava, Prosecco, or Sekt either (though the quality here is better than ever). No, the upstart is jolly old England.

Though winemaking in England dates back to the Romans (it always does in these parts of the world), its modern incarnation was born in the 1950’s but was mainly focused on hybrid varieties like Seyval Blanc and cold weather tolerant crosses like Muller-Thurgau and Bacchus. The results weren’t really compelling. Smash cut to 1988 when an American couple, recognizing that the same band of cretaceous chalk that makes Champagne so famous runs through England (think the white cliffs of Dover), decided to plant Champagne varieties in Sussex. It was thus that Nyetimber was born and it was with their 1992 vintage release that the Champenoise were put on notice. 

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the English Fizz industry, however. While the raw materials are there—marginal climate and poor chalky soils—Champagne had a few hundred year head start to sort out vineyard sites and farming. The climates of these two “dueling” regions are both marginal, surely, they are not marginal in the same way, however (cooler, less hospitable climates are key for high quality sparkling wine since you want your base wine to be quite tart before it becomes sparkling). Most English vineyards sit around the 52nd parallel, a full two degrees north of Champagne, and are coastal in comparison to Champagne’s vineyards, which enjoy a relatively balmy landlocked continental climate. It is common for quality minded English producers to be unable to make wine in a given vintage and yields per acre are much lower than in Champagne, which poses its own problems for sparkling wine production. In a good year, the total bottles of English bubbles produced are amazingly less than the production of Moët & Chandon alone.

Production issues aside, in a blind tasting of sparkling wines from around the wine world, I’d wager the only one that would be mistaken for Champagne would be the English wine. To prove it, please consider the Wiston Blanc de Blancs NV ($53)—a newcomer (2008) compared to the OG Nyetimber. The Sussex based Wiston is the project of the Goring family, who have tended the estate since 1743 and have a history in Sussex dating back even farther. While the backstory conjures images of landed gentry and one would assume that their winery is a “spare no expense” production, the reality of a “land rich, cash poor” family is much different. The winery facility itself was, until very recently, used for turkey processing. In fact, the whole winemaking project was underwritten by the sale of a herd of dairy cows.

The production facility may sound cobbled together, but it is the right blend of traditional modern. Wiston possesses one of four old school manual Coquard presses outside of Champagne and utilizes barrels of various sizes and ages for fermentation and aging, but keeps their reserve wines in stainless steel, following the solera method. The resulting wine, derived 100% from lean and racy Chardonnay, is a beautiful blend of reductive and oxidative styles. The wine shows notes of white flowers, baked apple pastry, hazelnuts and Guernsey cream—all freshened up by the characteristic “stiff upper lip” vein of expressive acidity on the finish.  This haunting wine will pair with everything from fresh shellfish to more substantial dishes like roast chicken, or anything in a cream sauce.