A Vintage Born in Uncertainty
The 2021 growing season opened with weeks of unsettled weather across the South Downs. Late frosts in April threatened the earliest budbreak, and we spent several anxious mornings in the vineyard before the skies finally steadied. Adversity, as we have learned over fifteen harvests, often forges the most interesting wine.
What followed was one of the most technically demanding summers in recent memory — sporadic rainfall required constant canopy management, and the team walked every row of the vineyard several times a week. The Chardonnay responded with a concentration and acidity that immediately told us something special was happening.
When the vine struggles a little — not too much, but precisely enough — it produces fruit with an aromatic tension you simply cannot engineer.
— Elara Voss, Head Winemaker
Building the Blend
Our Reserve programme draws from three distinct chalk plots on the estate, each expressing a different facet of the site. The east-facing upper slopes give us the wine’s citrus precision and finesse. The lower chalk on the south-west pitch adds weight and a subtle autolytic richness from the older vines planted in 2009.
The assemblage trials began in March of 2023, some eighteen months after harvest, as the wine was completing its time on lees. We tasted over forty individual lots across three sessions, looking not for the loudest voices but for the most coherent one.
The Role of Lees Ageing
The 2021 Reserve spent thirty-eight months on lees before disgorgement — our longest to date. This extended contact with the spent yeast cells builds complexity the way oak builds it in still wine: slowly, in layers, in ways that become apparent only years later. The result is a biscuity depth that frames the wine’s vibrant chalk character rather than obscuring it.
The Final Cuvée
The final blend is one hundred percent Chardonnay from our estate blocks, with a dosage of four grams per litre — low enough to preserve the wine’s natural tension, high enough to bring its elements into harmony. Disgorged in September 2024, we recommend at least twelve months of further bottle age before drinking at its peak.
