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.
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 -
Lock in case - One of each of our 6 wines for £105
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.
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.
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:
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
SATURDAY CELLAR DOOR: We will have open doors on Saturday 1-5PM this weekend so you can visit the winery and stock up direct
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
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
