Blackbook Winery tops the competition at Wine GB awards with two trophies for 2023 Pygmalion Chardonnay

“A wine that fires the soul”, and a zeitgeist vibe

Blackbook Winery tops the competition for best English still wine

Press release, July 2026

At Thursday night’s 2026 Wine GB Awards, London Urban Winery, Blackbook, was awarded two industry-topping trophies. One for ‘Best Still Wine: Chardonnay’ and the other, for ‘Best Still Wine’ overall.

Both trophies recognise Blackbook’s gold-medal winning 2023 ‘Pygmalion’- a 100% Chardonnay, made from grapes grown on the South Bank Vineyard in coastal Essex’s Crouch Valley. This is the fourth vintage of this wine to be made (2022, 2020 and 2018) - and is only made in exceptional years.

During the awards, host Peter Richards MW, acknowledged that English and Welsh wine continues to excel thanks to “Quality, confidence and zeitgeist”. These factors echo the same cornerstones of co-founder Sergio Verrillo’s belief in championing English still wine - a confidence in the category he has held from the outset. 

From studying journalism and economics at the University of New Hampshire to running a garage for his dad, before becoming a record label ‘gopher’, Verrillo’s move into making wine has been one of dogged determination and creativity. As son of an Italian-born mechanic and paratrooper for Nato, and a Hungarian National Basketball team player, wine arose through family and a similarly passionate climate he found while working in hospitality - something he maintains in his outlook and own work to this day. In 2017 Verrillo co-founded Blackbook with his wife Lynsey.

Sergio says of winning these trophies: “Being a part of the U.K wine industry and to also be recognised for that is fantastic. I think every year we’re seeing the energy and spirit behind English wines grow more and more, witnessing the progression that we’re making as a whole. The vibe of the awards, and what is currently happening here is brilliant, vibrant and super fun.”

On winning Best still wine: Chardonnay, he says: “Cool climate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay were always at the heart of the Blackbook mission. Our urban winery wines are made thanks to better site selection, lower yields, and more intentional winemaking, all of which are driving a step change in overall quality. At the same time, stylistically, there is a growing confidence. Rather than referencing other regions, we are now able to define what our own expressions of varieties like Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and even Sauvignon Blanc should look like. Winning Best Red wine last year and now best Chardonnay proves what we set out to do.”

On winning ‘Best still wine’ overall he says: “This makes me super proud when I think of how from 2011 or so I travelled around the world working harvests at the best Chardonnay and Pinot noir producers that would let me through their doors [Burgundy, New Zealand, California]. Over the past 15 years, and particularly in the last decade of making wine at Blackbook, there has been a clear shift in how still wine is viewed in the U.K. It is no longer a secondary output, but now a core part of each English producer’s portfolio and identity. With traditional varieties growers are understanding the vital role that still wines are playing in the market, while more obscure PIWI’s are coming to light to show a massive amount of potential in the experimental realm. To me, we are already in the midst of the next stage of the English wine evolution, and it is an honour to be recognised for our belief in, and contribution to, that. I’m really excited about where things are heading! ”

Wine GB stated on their website: “The 2026 WineGB Awards [...] have confirmed a decisive shift in the trajectory of English and Welsh wine. Confidence, diversity and technical mastery were the defining themes of this year’s results, with judges praising an industry that has “outgrown the box” and is now producing wines of world‑class calibre across multiple styles.”

Blackbook were awarded three gold medals in this year’s competition:

2022 I’d rather be a rebel Rosé (London/Essex)

2023 Pygmalion Chardonnay (London/Essex)

2020 Painter of Light Reserve Chardonnay (London/Essex)

In Wine GB’s 2025 Awards, Blackbook won the trophy for ‘Best Red Wine’: Blackbook Winery – Nightjar 2022. In December the same year the 2022 Nightjar was selected as Wine GB's Top 50 wines 2025. Earlier this year, Vinous.com scored Blackbook’s wines amongst the highest in the country, with the Painter of Light Reserve Chardonnay 2020 taking 94 points, the highest rated English still wine in the report.

Wine GB’s official tasting note for 2023 Pygmalion Chardonnay:

“Some depth to the hue. Roasted hazelnut, freshly buttered toast aromas. Rich, generous but profoundly savoury. This is outstanding Chardonnay, bravura stuff. Touch of oxidation but it works in a barrel-aged context. Lovely grounding acidity and minerality, with a delicious saline lick on the finish. This is a wine that fires the soul, gets you really excited. Stunning.”

As featured in: Club Oenologique

"Their mission has always been to make exceptional still English wine. Blackbook’s grapes, traffic permitting, come from a two-hour radius of the winery – single vineyard and single-clone specific – from growers with whom they have long-standing relationships.

‘While we’re seeing amazing results from certain pockets of the UK, we still don’t know which sites will be best in years to come. That’s the beauty of being able to work this way’, says Sergio, under his ‘pragmatic rather than dogmatic’ ethos of ‘showcasing the best of English terroir’ and not releasing anything without at least a year of age. The accolades that decorate Verrillo’s wines prove testament to the approach."

Read the full piece here.

A trio of golds

We're delighted to share we've won not one not two, but three gold medals in this year's Wine GB Awards, recognising the best of English winemaking talent across the country and beyond. 

2022 “I’d rather be a rebel” rosé

Taking the top scoresis our textural, expressive rosé rebellious in nature because it has been deliberately aged to give it a bit more complexity than you might otherwise expect. It also challenges the previous norm that England can only make rosé when it's sparkling. Made from Pinot Noir grapes grown in Essex this brims with ripe red cherry, strawberries and cream.

Blackbook 2023 Pygmalion.

A 100% Chardonnay from the Crouch Valley in Essex: hand picked, whole bunch pressed and fermented in barrel of varying sizes. This was then left to age gracefully for 24months, with frequent lees stirring - giving a textured, structured, delicious English Chardonnay ripe with aromas of citrus zest, melon, white floral notes and subtle spices.

2020 Painter of Light Reserve

Completing the trio of Golds is a wine we are maybe most proud of because it underlines the reasons why we set up Blackbook in the first place: to make excellent cool climate still Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Also from Essex, with an additional 3 years of ageing, and only 300 bottles made - when it's gone it's gone.

Why London is English winemaking’s new hotspot

As featured in The Financial Times, Globetrotter… By Victoria Daskal (May 2026)

For the full piece, click the link below.

This ethos extends from proximity to people to the grapes as well. Verrillo was among the first of the urban bunch to source exclusively English fruit. He was also early to venture into Essex for its comparatively drier and sunnier climate that is essential for his Burgundy-inspired Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. He prioritises flavour and phenolic ripeness over numbers. “I want lignification of stems, browning of seeds, flavour development,” he explains. The approach has helped position Blackbook as a serious still-wine producer in England, sold in Michelin-starred restaurants and exported to Norway and South Africa. 

Most Saturdays, you can book a tour and tasting, which last around an hour and 15 minutes. The micro-cellar sits inside a 100-year-old railway arch, and you can make a full turn on the spot and take it all in: the wine press, a stacked pyramid of 90 barrels, small steel vats and pallets of bottles waiting to be labelled. The real draw, though, is Verrillo. Much of the time is spent in conversation with him, as he discusses the work behind his balanced and distinctive wines.

What happens when a sommelier starts making wine?

We’ve been featured in The Evening Standard… read the full piece here

“Sommeliers used to pour wine in restaurants. Now, they’re out in the fields producing it, says Douglas Blyde”

“In Battersea, beneath two railway arches where trains rattle overhead, Sergio Verrillo runs Blackbook Winery with his wife, Lynsey. The space feels urban and improvised. Verrillo grew up in the United States with Italian and Hungarian parents who made wine at home. A career in music gave way to hospitality, which led him to Gordon Ramsay’s Maze and eventually to oenology studies at Plumpton College.

Today, he sources grapes within reach of London. Tamesis bacchus, grown organically at Forty Hall in Enfield, shows brightness and restraint. It feels like London wine in temperament. Direct, alert and refreshingly uninterested in pastoral romance (£26, blackbookwinery.com).”

Rounds of applause: where to drink before (and after) the show

“The theatre bar will sort you out at the interval. But that’s only half the story…”

We’ve been featured in The Observer:

Hannah Crosbie reports. Read the full piece here

“Before even considering anything else nearby, Chinatown is my go-to pre-theatre. The past few embarrassingly late nights out have resulted, inevitably, in the reliable embrace of Noodle and Beer – but it’s also good earlier in the evening. While, yes, you can get your hands on a Kirin Ichiban (yum) or a Sapporo (also yum), the wine list is particularly fun. Compiled by critic and consultant Douglas Blyde, you could order half a bottle of Gosset alongside your handcut noodles. It’s rare enough to find Gosset on a list at a reasonable price, even rarer to find it by the half-bottle. Rarer still at a place you can rock up in a bandage dress. There’s also rosé from urban London winery Blackbook Winery.”

The Rise of English still wines

“Once dismissed as a curiosity, English still wine is emerging as a serious category – but how far can it realistically go?”

James Lawrence at The IWC reports…

Here’s a snippet… read the full post here:

"There is definitely a structural and economic dimension to this change. Sparkling wine, while foundational to England's success, is capital-intensive and slow to bring to market," agrees Sergio Verrillo, co-founder of Blackbook Winery.

"Still wines offer producers greater flexibility and faster cash flow, encouraging further investment and experimentation in the category. As a result, still wines are no longer treated as secondary products, but as an essential part of a balanced and commercially viable portfolio."

Meanwhile, a series of warmer, drier summers over the past decade have improved ripening conditions, with recent harvests delivering a step-change in fruit quality and consistency.

"At the same time, increased climatic volatility has forced producers to adapt quickly. This has accelerated the industry's understanding of site selection, with regions such as Sussex, Kent and Essex now consistently delivering riper, more balanced fruit," Verrillo adds.

Vinous.com reVIEWS

2026 is off to a great start - not just for us but for the wider English wine scene. Anne Khrebiehl MW released her U.K report for Vinous (Antonio Galloni) this week, under the title ‘English Sparkling still forging ahead’. We were delighted to be included in her lengthy list of wines that were tasted, recorded and scored.

“Over in the still wine camp, England’s performance is equally impressive, especially when it comes to Chardonnay.” AK, Jan 2026.

We are especially proud that that our 2020 Painter of Light Reserve Chardonnay scored 94 points - the *highest achieving English still wine of the entire report* (not yet released)

Our 2022 Pygmalion Chardonnay scored 93 points (you can now pre-order)

Our 2023 Painter of Light Chardonnay scored 92 points (coming soon)

Our 2019 Pinot Noir Nightjar Reserve scored 93 points, the 2020 Pinot Noir Nightjar Reserve scored 92

Our 2023 Pinot Noir Nightjar (new release) scored 92 points

The 2021 Sea of Love Pinot Blanc achieved 92 points (coming soon)

Our 2022 I’d Rather be a Rebel Rose achieved 91 points (coming soon)

Sergio has always believed that the future of the U.K is in still wine, and we are chuffed these wines are now telling that story (in some excellent company) for the world to see.

“It’s a strong reflection of the hard work that goes into making our wines, from making sure we work with the right growers to the attention to detail we are sticklers for in the winery. This report is a great boost for the category and an empowering and encouraging signal of the quality now being achieved across English still wines.”

To read the full report and reviews for each of the wines above and the rest of our range that was tasted, visit the Vinous website here.

Thank you Anne for your continued support of English wine!

🍷

"Another starry Pinot"

We're delighted to be featured in The Times on the 20th December where long-standing critic Jane MacQuitty recommends our 2022 Nightjar Pinot Noir, in her best place's to buy your Christmas Wines. We're starry-eyed to read her glittering review. Thank you Jane 🍷

"The dry, sunny, relatively frost-free Crouch Valley in Essex is our top spot for pinot noir. And Sergio Verrillo's Black Book urban winery has made another starry pinot noir, hand harvested and aged in burgundy barrels, it's a big, bold, savoury, meaty, tobacco leaf gem."

Wine Enthusiast on The Brits Drinking their oWN WINE

Wine Enthusiast’s Christina Pickard recently wrote a piece called “Against All Odds, the English Are Finally Drinking Their Own Wine”

With a lovely mention of us here at Blackbook…

She comments, on a return visit here in 2022, on how she found an “entirely different and thoroughly more grown-up wine scene” that she left behind ten years prior to go and live in Australia.

In the trend report she gives the Urban winery movement a nod, mentioning Blackbook

“Urban wineries have also cropped up around Britain, like Blackbook, with its array of modern and colorful yet complex still wines made beneath the railway arches in London’s Battersea neighborhood.”

To read the full piece click here

Cheers Christina for the inclusion!

Wine GB’s Top 50 WINES 2025

Wine GB has awarded its top 50 wines for 2025.

With over 105 gold medals awarded, the final selection shows the high quality and breadth of the nation’s wines with 34 sparkling wines and 16 still wines made by vineyards located throughout the UK.

We’re delighted to share that our NightJar 2022 was included in the line up of the still wines.

Essex born and Battersea bred, hailing from Clayhill Vineyard, situated on the coastal peninsula of Crouch Valley and positioned between the rivers Crouch & Blackwater, the vineyard is a beautiful south facing site with clay soils. The 2022 vintage has given us a generosity of pinot noir reflecting the warm dry summer of the year. The wine is wonderfully structured, showing beautiful ripe red fruits and black pepper spices. Fermented naturally in small open top fermenters and aged in Burgundy oak barrels.Unfined and unfiltered. May contain sediment.

Optimal Drinking window: 2025-2033

Total production size: 270 cases

Bottle weight: 400g

The best news? We’ve still got some magnums left - perfect for Christmas!

Click here to order yours.

Salud!

Featured in The Times

Inside London’s new urban wineries — and here’s where to find them

We’re in The Times - read more on this latest piece on London’s Urban Wineries.

Here’s a little excerpt… focusing on what matters to us here at Blackbook.

"Volunteering is important because it helps get the community engaged," Verrillo says. "How often do people get the opportunity to walk straight off the Tube and find themselves making wine?" About 600 people have signed up to volunteer with Blackbook. Some come all the way from Scotland - but the majority are Londoners.

To read the full article, click here…

Blackbook Harvest Report 2025: one of the most exciting in Blackbook’s history

The 2025 harvest stands as one of the most exciting and exceptional vintages in Blackbook’s history - a rare convergence of abundance, concentration, and pristine fruit quality. It sets a new benchmark for our wines and paves the way for the future of Blackbook.

The English growing season started with a bang. A warm, dry spring laid the foundation for what was to come. Ideal early-season conditions led to an earlier-than-usual budburst, pushing the growing season forward. This was followed by a dry, warm summer that further strengthened vine development, with flowering occurring earlier than average. The generous sunshine and lower-than-normal rainfall created remarkably low disease pressure — a welcome contrast to the challenges seen in 2024.

The favourable weather continued into the ripening period. While many vineyards across the UK began picking in what became one of the earliest harvests on record, our fruit took a slightly longer path to perfection. As some producers were wrapping up, our first grapes arrived on the 6th of October, marking the beginning of a steady stream of beautifully ripened fruit. Clean, vibrant, and exquisitely balanced, the fruit exceeded expectations, with yields coming in 20–30% above forecast.

This year we brought in Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, and a handful of other exciting varieties that have already shown tremendous promise in the winery.

We are immensely excited to watch these wines evolve over the next 6–12 months and beyond. Blackbook’s 2025 wines will be ones for the ages — a true milestone in our journey.

Blackbook Reserve Wines

Our goal from the beginning of the journey at Blackbook, was to show that you can make stellar pinot noir and chardonnay in England, and this week marks another milestone in that journey as we release the first of our reserve wines. We’ve been working with the Symons Family at Clayhill Vineyard since our first release in 2017. Dale has a stunning site in the Crouch Valley and he shares our determination to make high quality still pinot noir and chardonnay in England, and we use his burgundian grape clones to make our flaghship Painter of Light chardonnay and Nightjar pinot noir. After a great reception to our 2017 release, we decided to take a leap and save a barrel of each wine for extra ageing in order to create a ‘reserve’ version of our core cuvees. In 2018 it was England’s ‘big’ harvest, and this was when we started to hold back wine. We have had a barrel of the 2018 Painter of Light and 2018 Nightjar in the winery for 2 full years, then another year aged in bottle. These wines have had 3 years of ageing, compared to our normal 1, and that extra time demonstrates the great potential for making world class still wine in England. We have less than 300 bottles of each of these wines. The labels are once again designed by our talented friends, the Yarza Twins, who have created the grown up version of their core wine counterparts.

The 2018 Painter of Light chardonnay reserve and 2018 Nightjar pinot noir reserve are online now.

Harvest Report 2020

As we prepare for our new releases, we have shared some thoughts and memories from the 2020 “COVID” harvest. What a year, what a memory, it was a race to get wine in bottle before the numbers skyrocketed to the level that the whole country shut down. Hopefully we never have to do harvest under these conditions again - due to the rising positive case numbers in London in October, we approached harvest with caution, sad to lose the normal contingent of volunteers who come from all over to get their hands dirty and stuck into grape shovelling and squishing. Thankfully we did have a superb core team in the winery, in 2020 we had our first non-Verrillo full-time harvest team member, the lovely Alice Verburg who left her family vineyard, Luddite Wines in South Africa to be with us through the Blackbook harvest. Special mention also to Jac Smith and Sara Wright who became the extended part of our core team and joined Sergio and Alice for many late nights in the winery.

As far as the vintage is concerned, 2020 kicked off with a bang! We welcomed a new and exciting Essex grower to our repertoire, who provided us with some of the best pinot noir seen all harvest. That mainly went into our 2020 “I’d rather be a rebel” rose, however, there was a single pinot noir clone that tasted incredibly good that it was syphoned off into a new limited edition red wine, “Trouble Every Day”. This set the tone for the rest of the harvest. Working with some of our existing growers, we have worked with two new grape varieties for Blackbook - sauvignon blanc which we fermented on skins and are releasing as “Slow Disco”, and pinot blanc which is “Sea of Love”.

The season started with an earlier than normal bud burst in the spring but was met with the mid-May frost that the UK is often plagued with. Fortunately enough, all of our growers were spared giving way to flowering and fruit set which took place in good conditions and a warmer than average August bringing on ripening on quickly, setting the scene for a great harvest.

The harvest was one of the earliest of modern times with reduced yields, but exceptionally high natural sugar levels, and flavour development. As a still wine producer, we are always one of the last to pick with our harvest starting the  second week of October running for 3 weeks. It was met with sporadic rain and sunshine, a very different environment to 2019 and the wines reflect this. In summary, 2020 has produced some great wines but not many of them.

How do you drink during lockdown?

It’s week 13 of the UK lockdown and we can’t decide if it’s raced by or the quintessential never ending groundhog day. We posted in March about the uncertainty ahead, the shift we were planning to make to shift our business to survive and get through. Three months on, we are happy to report that we have grown our direct to consumer base (79% of all wine sold in April and May is Direct to consumer, the inverse of our normal business), and really happy that a lot of people have discovered us as UK wine drinkers looked to 1. support small businesses and 2. buy local. Sadly however, our trade sales have dropped off massively, and we see our customers through Hallgarten, and direct trade relationships we have, suffering significantly. We’ve been happy to see some of our retailers doing well and hope the restaurants can see a positive bounceback beginning in July.

How are customers buying and drinking during lockdown?

Whilst we’ve all been cooped up at home, the way people are buying and sharing wine has been a real joy to see - and glad we’ve been able to help people stay connected during lockdown. Here are a few of our favourite trends:

1. Thinking of others and gifting to your friends & loved ones

   25% of all orders so far in lockdown were gifts ordered to be sent to friends and loved ones, compared to 7% of our orders prior. Are we getting more generous? Not only were orders being sent across the UK but we had quite a few orders from around the world, sending to UK based friends. Building on this, we’ve also had some new corporate clients who are sending boxed Blackbook wine to their colleagues to say thanks for all the hard work during lockdown.

2. Drinkalong wine

   We launched a ‘lock in case’ deal which is a sample pack of all 6 of our current wines available. This has been by far our most popular order during lockdown. What we’ve loved seeing across instagram and twitter since, is that these are being bought by groups of people to drink virtually together. We’ve had a family across three households sharing a bottle each week, we’ve had groups of friends trying a few together. Happy that we have helped bring a different dimension to the catch ups.

3. Tutored tastings

   Similar to above, groups are order en masse, but in some cases we’ve been invited to join them and talk through the wines and run a tutored tasting. This has been a fun way to bring the wines to new groups and great that we can do this from our living room, reaching people across the country. We’ve also run a couple of drinkalong tastings on instalive during many of the English Wine Good Fridays, it’s such a thrill when we are hearing your thoughts and comments on our wines live with us. We’ll be doing more for English Wine Week, do join us again, or get in touch if you want to book a private event with us.

4. Word of mouth

   Recommend to a friend - at least 12% of our orders (not everyone tells us where they heard about us!) are from customers who have been recommended to try our wine via a friend. THANK YOU for sharing the love for our wines, it means a lot to us. We were a little surprised to see which of our wines were most popular, outside of our lock in case, 41% of all wine orders were across our 2 red wines, and who said people didn’t want to drink an English red!

Our own drinkalong with friends

Breakdown of individual consumer bottle sales by wine, during lockdown (Mar-Jun 2020)

English Wine Week 2020

It’s English Wine Week starting next week, and for the rest of lockdown and through EWW, we are continuing our lockdown offers - the lock in case, free shipping for 3+ bottles and free local shipping around the winery. We’re also launching a few new case offers and gift packs, so watch this space for more coming soon. We’ll be running a few special, virtual events for our followers during English Wine Week:

• 15 minute tastings: On instagram live at 8pm each night from Saturday 20th June through to Thursday 25th June we’ll taste one of our wines and talk you through it. The full schedule to be published on our instagram page, be ready to drink along with us.

• The “Not another virtual quiz” English Wine Quiz: Friday 26th June at 8pm, we’ll host an hour long instagram live pub quiz on English Wine, bring a friend, play together and drink along with us.

• Private virtual winery tour & tasting: Saturday 27th June at 8pm, join us to round off the week with a special and interactive virtual wine tasting and tour of our winery. This will be available for customers who buy our gift packs or case orders, inclusive or as an add on, as well as our wine club members.

Lock in diaries

Since our last post a couple of weeks back, the world we live in is unrecognisable. You all know that. We remain in awe of the brave people on the frontline, from medics to couriers to supermarket workers. We’re putting some plans together to show our support for them, more on that in a couple of weeks.

If you’re interested in the experience for a boutique English winery like us, we’re today sharing our observations. In some respects we’re very lucky - we don’t have any employees, so there are no salaries / furlough concerns to deal with. However this has hit us, majority of our bottles sold are to the trade. In Spring last year we gained significant momentum. We were thrilled to host wine critics and consumers at the winery, priviliged to be invited to run tastings, meeting a tonne of people to get the word out there about our small business. This spring, those chances to interact are gone - our winery tours are cancelled for the foreseeable and we can’t even see a friend, let alone a prospective customer, and our main sales channel is shut down. How this affects us will depend on how long that all lasts, and we’re working hard to try and adapt our business to survive in this environment. We’ve seen a brilliant amount of support in the past couple of weeks from consumers, which we’ve really appreciated.

The winemaking challenge: If you have visited us, or volunteered, you’ll know already how manual we are at Blackbook. We rely on the support of volunteers to help us at three key stages in the year - harvest, spring bottling and autumn bottling. We are really hopeful social distancing has been largely lifted by harvest or relaxed enough to enable us to welcome volunteers in to help us. Spring bottling however will certainly fall within this period. Thankfully we are well so Sergio can continue to work in the winery, adhering to all safety advice. Yet he may end up doing bottling alone…after a long day of looking after the kids?! The other risk is access to supplies and thankfully we ordered in bottles and corks some months ago so we’re ok for now, but will think about the impact for autumn bottling.

The small business challenge: This has been the fascinating piece to witness, we do not meet criteria for much of the government criteria as we are a supplier to the restaurant / retail bus and not directly there - we’re exploring and seeing how we can get help. We have been thrilled to see many of the companies we use to run our business, like Squarespace, iZettle, the FSB offering support and offers to help us pivot and get through. We’ve also loved the support of the wine community to highlight and promote small businesses that are open and selling, and we’ve been delighted to feature on lists from Jancis Robinson, and Abbie Moulton.

One great initiative next week is the Big English Wine Good Friday - rallied by a range of English Wine Producers and communicators. Check out the #bigenglishwinegoodfriday on instagram and twitter. We are doing a few new offers -

1. Lock in case - One of each of our 6 wines for £105

2. BIGENGLISH - Use “BIGENGLISH” discount code to receive 10% of any 12 bottle case order AND a spot on our first Virtual Winery Tour & Tasting on 18th April.

3. Shipping offers - We are doing 100% free local shipping in postcodes SW4 SW9 SW8 & SW11 and free shipping to mainland UK on 3+ bottle orders.

4. Gift cards - You can support us by now buying gift cards in our shop to give to a friend, these can be redeemed against anything bought in our online shop

Look forward to raising a glass together on Good Friday at 7pm, we’ll be live on instagram

Lynsey & Sergio xx

At least we have good wine…

In these unusual times

Everyone now understands the impacts and the effect of this current pandemic. We don’t need to restate the way it has affected us, you get it, and we are trying to keep positive and grateful for a situation that could be worse for us personally (like the Southern Hemisphere dealing with this throughout harvest, or businesses reliant on footfall and social interaction).

We are a small business, yet as a largely B2B manufacturer, we don’t know exactly how it will hit us as we don’t have a steady day to day income stream, so hard to predict. Many of our customers are feeling the immediate impact, particularly the bars and restaurants. Our thoughts & hopes are with them to weather this storm and come back blazing once we can relax the social distancing. Some of these are repurposing, like Bistro Union who will become a store selling fresh pasta and other things, and many moving to take away/delivery only, like Dvine Cellars.

We will post about any of these businesses on our instagram and hope that you can continue to support them as they switch to a model that works in this context. We hope that you can choose to shop local right now and help small business owners survive.

We will lose sales to the on trade over the next few months, and we hope that we can fill this gap with more sales direct to consumer, and be an option for Brits that are skipping the night out but still want to enjoy a nice bottle of wine at home. We will be taking great care with the handling of the wine, carefully cleaning and packaging wines to be sent. During this time, and until further notice, we offer some additional services to our customers:

1. FREE LOCAL DELIVERY: If you live local to the winery (SW8, SW4, SW9 & SW11) then we will offer FREE DELIVERY of orders of 3+ bottles

2. SATURDAY CELLAR DOOR: We will have open doors on Saturday 1-5PM this weekend so you can visit the winery and stock up direct

3. DOOR DROP SERVICES: If you order a delivery from us, whether local or UK wide, and if you require a drop off outside your home due to quarantine, we are happy to take specific instructions and ensure that your wine can arrive safely. Use the ‘Delivery Preferences’ section of our checkout

4. EXTENDED GIFT VOUCHER EXPIRATION: We are adding 6 months as standard to all current gift voucher expirations and each new voucher purchased will be valid for 18 months, until otherwise advised

We also continue to sell gift vouchers for winery tours, so please do consider these as great digital gifts that can be redeemed well into 2021.

Thanks for reading, stay strong, love to all and let’s keep the small businesses alive through this crazy.

Lynsey & Sergio xx

Easier times back at the Brixton Wine Car Boot, Nov 2019

Harvest report 2019

Harvest 2019 in numbers

19 tonnes of grapes
12.5K litres
5 varieties
5 growers
24 volunteers
8 days of picking
85 beers consumed (probably!)

After the bumper 2018 harvest in England with stories of tanks at capacity resulting in grapes being left out for the birds, the expectations for 2019 were generally low. The chances of two super vintages for England were slim. 2019 indeed faced a number of challenges - September average rainfall in South England of 142% vs a typical year - and double last year (91mm vs 45mm, Met Office), and cooler temperatures created conditions which impacted the crucial grape ripening periods. October offered no respite with rainfall in the South of England 175% vs average and sunshine at 83%. This resulted in grapes hanging longer, lower yields due to some loss associated with this and more challenging sugar/acid levels. England is still such a young industry, we’re learning how to prepare for our unpredictable weather and each year quality will continue to improve. We saw our experienced growers really mitigating the tough conditions and producing great fruit at a yield they were happy with. The end result for us in 2019 was a later harvest than usual, with processing starting proper on 16th October, and wrapping up on 25th October. Short and sweet. The timing was also later as we did not work with early ripening varieties, such as bacchus, in 2019.

This year, we worked with 5 vineyards: revisiting four from our 2017/18 vintages - Clayhill Vineyard in Essex, Crouch Valley Vineyard also in Essex, Yew Tree Vineyard in Oxfordshire, and Shotley in Suffolk who we started working with last year but at small scale. We continue to explore East Anglian growers due to their more favourable weather conditions, and we were happy to see the overall progress across our 4 East Anglian growers in 2019. We also added a new grower for 2019 - Combe Bottom, in Sussex.

We received 19 tonnes of grapes this year, a little down on our 2018 which wasn’t too surprising considering the yield variances. We scaled back the varieties we are working with, to concentrate on our core pinot noir (3 sites) and chardonnay (3 sites), plus seyval blanc for our 2019 GMF and this year we are introducing pinot meunier and pinot gris. We haven’t quite finalised what happens for our 2019 wines, however we are expecting both our core range (Painter of Light, Nightjar and I’d rather be a rebel) plus GMF, and on top of this expect to see a still blanc de noir and a new white blend.

We are following a similar approach to winemaking in 2019 - whole cluster fermentation, daily pigeage, barrel fermentation and gentle oak integration. We will continue with plenty of lees stirring and malolactic fermentation to coax out texture in our wines. The higher acids may result in us ageing in barrel a little longer for certain wines, and we may do an additional sparkling wine. The fun part lies ahead as we see how these wines develop and evolve. The winery currently smells amazing with fermentation going at great guns and in spite of the challenges we’re excited about the prospects of the 2019 vintage.

We were really pleased to be able to welcome more volunteers than ever before to the winery for this harvest - we received offers of help from many people and managed to get 24 volunteers into the winery over a number of sessions, who came to help shovel, scrub, squish and clean. We couldn’t do it without this amazing group of people who come from and amazing array of backgrounds - we get a lot of WSET students but also enthusiasts who have nothing to do with wine day to day, including geologists, architects and tech entrepreneurs.

Finally, next week we host our first annual wine club members event, where we are welcoming members of the Black Book to the winery where we’ll talk them through harvest and offer barrel and tank samples next to our 2018s and possible some 2017s out of the archive. We look forward to starting to share 2019s at the early stages as well as finished next year.

Now we’re off to catch up on some sleep! (we wish!)

~Sergio & Lynsey

The English micro-negoc project

Sergio’s article below recently published in Vineyard Magazine, June 2019 edition https://www.vineyardmagazine.co.uk/onlineissue/

Buying in grapes means not being tied down to a specific site.

In our beloved wine country, the old and new alike venture in search of the perfect vineyard across the Southern line. However as suitable land is becoming scarcer and land prices continue to climb, is planting the future for the UK wine industry? Well, perhaps not. Wines of Great Britain reports in 2019 a 24% increase in the overall land now under vine, with an estimated 3 million vines going in the ground this year alone. This brings the total hectarage up from 2,888 to just over 3,500 hectares. In 2018’s bumper harvest, capacity issues were seen where there was no remaining tank space for vintage demands. While this anomaly maybe due to the perfect storm of 2018, it could become more of a common occurrence in future years, due to climate change and more established vineyards coming online. As the market for grapes continues to mature, and grow, it is logical that more producers may opt, as we have at Blackbook, to bypass the decision to plant and instead focus on developing relationships with trusted growers to source our fruit. For decades, even centuries, wineries around the world have adapted to changing conditions through the ability to purchase fruit from different sites, some locally and others further afi eld to make their wine. Those whose production is from 100% purchased fruit can be described as a négociant – a winery who buys grapes, or grape juice, from others and sells the wine under their own name. In recent years many have preferred to use this model; often the younger generations marked as New Wavers. No better example can be seen than in South Africa, where a group of likeminded individuals are seeking forgotten vineyards and varieties lost in the fog of Chenin blanc, Pinotage and Chardonnay. Take for example, Blankbottle, Craven Wines and Savage Wines. Beyond the romance of the New Wavers, a good example is Burgundy as an epi-centre for micro-negoc due to the prohibitive cost of land - vineyards can cost upwards of millions for a sliver of a 1er cru or Grand Cru plot; Le Grappin is a key example known well to the UK market. While both arable land and established vineyards in the UK are nowhere near the infl ated prices of Burgundy and its neighbours, a commercial planting could set you back between £15-25K per acre for land and planting. But it is not just the establishment. There is the yearly running cost of anywhere between £5-10K per acre, plus the 3-4 year waiting time. The initial outlay and waiting, ultimately ends up with at least a 10-year timeline to see any return. Dreams of transplanting the south of France to the sunny hills of the English countryside could end in tears. For us, grape purchasing may be the answer. As well as offering a more accessible route to starting a label, grape purchasing enables the producer to source a diverse selection of varieties, adjust the mix over time according to desire and demand, and shift the production size up and down. As a producer, grape-buying means not being tied down to a specifi c site. I am able to source fruit from Sussex, Kent, Essex and beyond, highlighting the immensely diverse micro climates within each of those sites. In some cases, fi nding lost plots and working to revitalise them. As a micro-negoc, there is no need to wait four years (for still wine, sparkling is an eternity of a wait!) before seeing a return on one’s investment. Conceptually, wine is being sold earlier therefore income is received earlier. The earlier returns lead to a reduced time towards profi tability making the whole project more viable for a start-up. There is a third scenario here. The option to lease vineyards. I believe this could be a good alternative for the control freaks out there (I include myself in this grouping). The capital outlay is much lower than planting, but the direction of the vineyard is under direction by Leasee who rents the site, as is the cost of maintaining the site. This is a good alternative, but I feel the same can be achieved with the right grower relationship. As the UK rises through the ranks of growth, would more businesses want to be a négociant? At the moment, in the current state of affairs, I would say yes. As years continue, vines are coming of age, more fruit is hitting the open market and by extension more wine. My question is where will it all go?