A great friend gave me a tip-off the other day about a new English wine brand. This chap has a forensic palate, so I immediately followed up on this lead. Wines are not always found at tastings, and this shows that the wine trade grapevine is every bit as valuable and sometimes much faster than doing the hard yards! For the first time since I started writing my Vineyard Magazine column in January 2018, I am featuring three wines from the same estate, and this estate, as I type this article, has not yet sold its first bottle!
The launch of the Whitewolfe trio of Chardonnays is one of the most exciting moments of 2024. Clare Whitehead and Luke Wolfe are two great friends who met in 2009 while studying oenology and viticulture at Plumpton College. They can be justifiably chuffed with their incredible efforts over the last six years since they started pursuing their dream. Established in 2019, Clare and Luke’s vineyard is an exceptional piece of turf. While this month sees the release of their first own-label wines, they already have an enviable client list for their Kits Coty grapes, including Jackson Family Estate, Flint, Gutters and Stars and Black Chalk.
Their vineyard is a neolithic site situated in Kent’s North Downs, and it yields awesome Chardonnay fruit from its young vines. Luke’s viticultural talents (he is a highly sought-after viti-consultant), coupled with Clare’s marketing and communications acumen and Ben Smith’s mercurial winemaking (at Itasca Wines) have resulted in a genuine dream team.
It is worth remembering that Ben made my only perfect 20/20-scoring Chardonnay when he was working at Oxney Organic. That 2018 wine, which I wrote up on this page four years ago, is still a stellar creation. I tasted a bottle recently, and it, thankfully, lives up to its legend. It shows that chiselled English Chardonnay can, in the right hands, rival the very best on earth. It has been a long wait, and many Chardonnays have come and gone over the last four years, but when I tasted the Whitewolfe trio, they took me straight back to the eureka moment I had with that Oxney wine.
All three wines draw on the KC initials, standing for Kits Coty, which cleverly gives these bottles their two-letter GPS locator. The label design is stunning, as you can see, and I know, having spoken at length to Clare about her vision, that they have strained every sinew and used every second of their combined experiences in the wine trade to make these wines as impactful as possible.
Interestingly, Clare’s day job is ‘Head of Education’ at Liberty Wines, so two of these wines (KC1 and KC2) will be sold through this multi-award-winning wine business. You could not get a better leg up when launching a new brand, and you can expect to see them hitting the best wine lists in the best restaurants before too long. KC3 will be sold from the Whitewolfe website, and only 6000 bottles were made in 2022 across the three wines, so put your order in today! There is scope to produce a lot more wine as their fame grows because they currently sell most of their grapes to their clients. With the staggering quality of this thrilling trio, I imagine that they will start to increase their production exponentially before too long, and I can see myself signing up for a standing order, too!
2022 Whitewolfe KC1 Chardonnay
Guide price £47.00
You should approach these wines in reverse number order because KC1 is, without a doubt, the most serious wine of the trio.
This wine has a perfume and flavour that set my palate alight. I have never tasted a Chardonnay quite like this, as it is so loaded with crushed seashells and nerve-tingling freshness it rearranges your central nervous system while romancing your taste buds in a spellbinding fashion.
Firm, statuesque, and with stellar length, the fruit is so commanding that oak nuance is nowhere to be seen. This apparent barrel invisibility is so clever because it allows the fruit the chance to revel in the spotlight, showing every inch of its undoubted quality.
If this is what they can do with their very first vintage, I can see I will have to dig deep in my score pouch in search of a perfect number before too long!
2022 Whitewolfe KC2 Chardonnay
Guide price £47.00
KC2 selects itself. Seven clones of Chardonnay, including some of the best-performing Burgundy clones, such as 76, 95, 96, and 121, are planted in their 9ha vineyard at the foot of Blue Bell Hill. This wine is a cunning barrel selection.
While KC1 plumps for the invisible oak, KC2 adores fruit-forward, opulent carpentry. This means KC2 has gorgeous silky-smooth, expressive, peachy succulence, and this sexy disposition makes it a ravishing early-drinking beauty.
You fall under this temptress’s spell in a moment, losing yourself in the flavour dance it performs on your palate. While KC1 seems brittle, wincingly youthful and reserved, KC2 is a genuinely delicious and mesmerising creation.
2022 Whitewolfe KC3 Chardonnay
Guide price £35.00
While all the clones are picked separately, and second and third-fill oak is used for ten months for every parcel, the variety of Chardonnay flavours and textures on the Whitewolfe tasting bench is mind-blowing.
KC1 and KC2 pick themselves on account of their aforementioned distinct characters. KC3 is a super-complex blend involving every shape and size of this celestial grape imaginable, making it less rigid and commanding than KC1 and more slender and orderly than KC2.
In effect, KC3 is what I call a ‘bull’s eye wine’. It hits the target dead centre and with conviction. Pithy, linear, bright and precise, this is a very grown-up wine, and it is set to be one of the most talked about Chardonnays of the year.
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