News

All over the southeast of England, grass is struggling with the dry weather, but the vines with their deep root systems are able to tap into moisture and are doing fine. This time in four weeks, the bright, hard, bullet-like grapes pictured will be purple-black, and will have swollen to twice the size, creating dense clusters of fruit. The sugar levels will have skyrocketed and the leaves will have started to enter their last stage, turning a pale yellow-green. This year, fruit is less abundant than you might assume - in part due to the wet weather last summer which...

Tirage: a frantic, theatrical and intense period in any sparkling wine producer's year. Adrian preparing the wine. To explain what tirage is, we need to start at the beginning: harvest. After we have picked and pressed the fruit, the juice for our sparkling wine is fermented in tank to create a still base wine. During tirage (which usually takes place around June), the wine is bottled, and a mixture of wine, sugar and yeast is added to each bottle to create the chemical reaction which traps carbon dioxide in the bottle to produce the fizz. Unlike tank fermented sparkling wines,...

It's easy to see why Chardonnay is the world's most popular white wine grape. It's hugely adaptable - in hotter climes creating primary flavoured, tropical, low acid wines, and in cooler climates like ours, consistently delivering fruit full of complex flavours to create everything from crisp and linear traditional method blanc de blancs to beautifully buttery, oaky stills. Chardonnay growing at Westwell To mark international Chardonnay day on 21st May, we thought we would tell you a little more about how we grow and process Chardonnay here at Westwell. Wherever you do it, making wine with Chardonnay always involves creating...

In Praise of Ortega, by Adrian Pike, Westwell Winemaker. We're huge fans of Ortega at Westwell - a highly aromatic variety which shares much with its parent varieties Müller-Thürgau and Siegerrebe. Ortega is a perfect partner for our cool climate; ripening well even in chilly conditions. Though yields can be high, the fruit maintains depth of flavour and possesses a good balance of sugar and acidity. Those are two of the reasons that it's becoming established as an excellent grape to grow and make wine from - but for me, where it excels is in the flavours it produces. It’s...