Recently a small group of us gathered in the splendid dining room of an old Sussex farmhouse to taste some English sparkling wines. The group included a Master of Wine, England’s most experienced winemaker and two graduates of Plumpton College, England’s premier college for wine studies. Our job was to taste 10 sparkling wines from 6 producers and decide which wines were good enough to be sold by Sparkling English Wine on their web site. I was lucky enough to have been selected to join the tasting panel.
Our task was made easy by the quality of what was on offer - it was consistently good. We did however only chose 6 out of the 10 wines that had been submitted as 4 fell short of the high standards we had set ourselves. However it was pleasing to find out afterwards that we had selected one wine from each producer who had submitted a sample. The producers varied from the well known such as Carr Taylor through to the less well known such Upperton. Its great that the less well known get an opportunity to sell their wines to a wider range of winelovers through Sparkling English Wine.
The star wine for me, and I think all of us, was the Limney Estate 2006 which is incredible value for money and the best rose was the Sedlescombe organic cuvee rose brut 2008.
All of us are looking forward to the next submission of wines from English producers so we can select some more wines to expand and enhance the range of sparkling wines offered by Sparkling English Wine.
Cheers!
0 comments:
Post a Comment