This is a blend of Dornfelder, Schönburger & Müller-Thurgau grapes, not your typical varieties. Let’s get away from the main grapes and embrace the others out there. This wine is dry with aromas of strawberry and redcurrant and follows on with extra flavours of vanilla and hints of “fruit salad” sweets, the ones you had when you were a child, and get when the wife’s not around.
This is never going to be a massive seller of hundreds of thousands of bottles but it’s a really good rose, decent amount of flavour but easy drinking, excellent to watch the sunset in the garden. At £14 it’s pricey but the reality is that English wine is that price, the vineyards also sell all their wines so people think it’s worth it.
Each year we invite a few winemakers and people in the wine industry for a bit of food, drink.and possibly intelligent conversation, or at least conversation! In past years this has included people from the Decanter magazine, winemakers and wine sellers. Usually we have some English wine, unusual wine, weird wine and crackingly good wine. This evening was no different. Above are the wines drunk. For food we had tapas style food, breads, pates, fish, meat and cheese selections.
Going from left to right we started with Mexican sparkling wine made with Macabeu (a spanish grape), Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc. A little sweet for my taste but more of the Macabeu grape character coming through. It got a bronze medal at the Decanter World Wine Awards. Next was Bethnal Bubbles from a winery in Bethnal Green, east end of London. Some said weird, I said “oooohhhhh, it’s weird” unfiltered sparkling with a hoppy taste and green apple notes. At £23 a bottle it’s a good party conversation piece but not one I’ll get.
Then we went through some English white wines, light and fruity with lots of citrus. The Toppesfield vineyard 2018 Bacchus was excellent, I tried it just after bottling and thought they over extracted, a few months on and the wine is tasting much better with much more fruit. The Ashdown Estate from Bluebell vineyard white was lighter but very drinkable.
The Alsace Schlumberger Grand Cru 2014 Riesling. Full rich flavours of citrus, peach, lychee and a smell of petroleum, magnificent. Burnt Foot Pinot Noir rose followed. Good red fruit flavours and one of the better Pinot Noir wines from the UK.
Next was King Coel red, 20 year old English red that tasted fresh and had vibrant red fruit flavours. For me the highlight as it was under the winemakers stairs for much of that time, please see the blog for a write up. The Potash vineyard red was only 7 years old! but had lost some of its fruit flavours, drinkable but one wine to slip and not knock back, so to enjoy the flavours. A South Africa red followed, Lemberg-Louis 2016 made with Shiraz, Mourvedre and Granache, richer red fruit flavours with black cherry and higher tannins, excellent with the meat course.
The last wines were 2 late bottle vintage ports, grahams 2005 and Quinta Sta Eufemia 2019, both excellent ruby ports with rich fruit and smooth finish were drunk with the cheese course and on their own and finally we had a Czech desert wine, Pechor Vinarstvi 2015 Ryzlink Rynsky, light and full of citrus flavour.
The next afternoon the ones that stayed and had a midd BBQ felt the long night!
This weekend I meet up with one of the finest wine makers in the country, possibly the world.
Mary Mudd was the owner of what is now Dedham Vale vineyard, was Carter’s vineyard untill 2001. Made with mainly the Rondo grape with a bit of Dunkelfelder and Dornfelder this was one of her last vintages. Stored under her stairs for nearly all of that time it was soft in texture with a hint of tannins. A chunk of red fruit and still after all that time quite wonderful. The fact that 20 years on it was so drinkerable is a testament to her skill as a wine maker and that great wine can be made in the UK.
Copdock Hall from Suffolk is a small producer but their wines are of a good standard. This has hints of grass and lychee with a little gooseberry. it’s lighter than the usual British bacchus and it makes a refreshing change. It’s a great summer drinking wine for the garden and it’s reasonable value at about 13 pounds bottle.
Burnt Foot and Lavenham Brook Pinot Noir 2017 are both from Suffolk. English Pinot Noir is not usually outstanding and this is the same with these two. That said they are good with aromas and flavours of strawberry and redcurrant. I tried the Pinot Noir from Bolney vineyard last week which was like raspberry squash, thin and watery and very overpriced at £20 a bottle. These are in in a completely different league. At about £13 a bottle they can’t compete with Provence’s or Australian rose’s but these are good solid, won’t let you down English rose wine.
In 2019 a 2014 English wine maybe a little bit on the old side for most people. They consider drinking English wine earlier rather than later. However Barnsole is a quality producer and this goes to show that 5 years on this tastes absolutely delicious. It’s off dry with huge chunks of honey and honeysuckle aromas and flavours with peach blossom in the background, its aromatic and goes absolutely amazing with a veggie curry.
Veggie curry and Barnsole 2014 Kent classic white wines
