Blending Trials

It’s a tough job…..

Yet another enjoyable part of the viticultural year (trust me, it’s not all this much fun!) blending trials are crucial and entertaining in equal measure.

We only create vintage wines (we only make wines from grapes grown that season, unlike non vintage wines where wines from several years are blended together in order to create a wine consistent with previous years). As such, we approach the trials with one aim in mind, to create the best expression of that year’s harvest that we can. If the Chardonnay is particularly good we will focus on a Blanc de Blancs (2011, for instance), other years we’ll ace the Sparkling Rosé. but rest assured, the time and effort we spend now ensures we are releasing the best wines we could make from any individual year. We don’t aim to make a particular wine, we let the grapes guide us.

As well as the different cultivars (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier), each of the three fields has a variety of clones and rootstocks. This gives us a large variation of grapes from a relatively small-scale planting and we aim to ferment each parcel individually in order to give us as large a range of finished wines with which to blend as possible.

Once the blends are selected, we combine the wines in their relative proportions in the stainless steel fermentation tanks and leave them to rest and cold stabilise until we are ready bottle later in the year.

Different parcels of grapes from the vineyard are fermented separately.

The base wines are blended to create the best possible expression from that particular year.

After the trials the wines are blended in the chosen proportions and left to rest until bottling.