This month, my theme is purity. While I adore complex, multilayered, orchestral wines, and I am sure everyone agrees these are bombastic, invigorating and packed with excitement, a slender category of wines sing a solo tune and the purer, the better.
These wines stop you in their tracks with their singular directness and precision. You might think that genuinely pure wines can only be made from skinny, lean white grapes; this is only partly true. Of course, creating javelin-shaped wines from cool ferments with no oak interference is more straightforward, but these often lack the spark that makes them memorable.
My favourite pure wines are those with a singular flavour and a chassis that allows them to travel with true momentum and direction on the palate, leaving a resonant wake of deliciousness that fades elegantly on the finish.
You can only make seriously attractive pure wines from impeccable fruit with the help of top-flight winemaking talent. The careful addition of texture should not knock the fruit flavours off their course if they are sensitively administered.
I make no bones about the fact that these wines are rare. At the WineGB tasting in September, I tasted a couple of hundred wines, yet only a handful managed to come into contention for this piece. These are wines of uncommon purity, and they all warrant close inspection because these are wines that please all-comers, slip down with embarrassing ease and, on account of their sheer deliciousness, almost always result in multiple bottles being opened. With that in mind, you will have no trouble selling if you can make scintillating, delicious, pure wines. Yes, they are the unicorns of the wine world!
2022 Goldenford, Chardonnay, Surrey Hills
£18.00 www.greyfriarsvineyard.co.uk
You will recognise the logo and the font, but this wine is called Goldenford and not Greyfriars because that name won a competition to create a new name for this spectacular wine.
The Saxon name Guilden Ford or Golden Ford became Guildford, and this is a truly inspirational name, honouring a wine of pure gold. Only 1,400 bottles of this scintillating wine were drawn from Old Plot and Tractor shed, the most venerable parcels on the estate.
It is fermented and aged in neutral oak, which grants this wine permission to hold itself with exquisite deportment. There are so few ‘still’ Chardonnays in the UK for which I use the term ‘sophisticated’. I have no doubt they will come, but Goldenford is already here, and it is an absolute gem.
Silky, linear, resonant and singular, this thrilling wine blows my mind at only £18! I have said it before, and it bears repeating – the wines from Greyfriars are the finest value in our land, and this beautiful wine is genuinely world-class from a taste perspective and also from a pounds, shillings and pence reckoning. If only I still owned my wine bar – I would buy a pallet at the drop of a hat!
2023 Warehorne Vineyard, Oasthouse Divico, Kent
£30.99 www.warehornevineyard.co.uk
£35.00 www.thetudorpeacock.co.uk
Peter Constable is Divico’s loudest cheerleader, and he kindly sent me a tank sample of his ’23 Divico in January this year, and it was a cracker.
Made from vines planted in 2020, this is a baby in every respect, apart from flavour! Peter reports he has invested heavily in this grape and now owns the most extensive plantings in the UK – 8,300 vines!
This is only the second crop, with the 2022 yielding only 200 litres. But 2023 cropped at around 5kg per vine, which is frankly gob-smacking, and the crops will skyrocket in the future.
It’s a good job Oasthouse Divico tastes sensational because it signals a bright future for this estate. While you might imagine I would focus an article on purity, on white wines, there is no doubt this sensational red is as pure as any I have tasted. Smooth, juicy, ebullient, bright, and already drinking perfectly, this is an epic wine, and while it is not cheap, there is a thunderbolt of fresh berry fruit here that hits the bullseye on the palate.
2023 Great Wheatley Vineyard, House on the Hill, Bacchus, Crouch Valley, Essex
£24.00 www.greatwheatley.com – the website was not live at the time of going to print, but I am told it is coming soon.
This wine and its stablemates could easily feature in a column centred around label design because they look incredible. But this month’s theme is purity, and I have never tasted a Bacchus with so much mouth-watering yuzu and grapefruit-soaked bitterness while retaining perfect balance as this one!
This is a silky-smooth but nerve-janglingly alert wine that plays a singular tune with rapier-sharp accuracy. Made by Ben Smith at Itasca Wines, the fruit was whole-bunch-pressed and fermented in steel with a cunning 14% fermented in neutral barrels with periodic lees stirring. This trick has helped the buoyant mid-palate but has not dented the seamless flow of pin-sharp fruit.
As I have mentioned countless times before, we should celebrate our elite Bacchus wines because they are as gripping and invigorating as any keen, dry whites on Earth. Ben is a master at adding texture without weight, and House on the Hill is a prime example of how purity is the most important quality that this beautiful white grape desires. If new releases like HOTH keep appearing, Bacchus can become the country’s most essential aperitif/starter-style white wine.
