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.

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.

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

Ready to launch

It's been a busy 12 months for Blackbook as we've set up our Battersea premises, sourced our first English grapes, completed a hectic harvest and now bottled and labelled our first release.  We're ready to launch to the market, starting with our Essex-grown, London vinified pinot noir rosé.  There are 3 more wines maturing away down in Battersea, a still chardonnay, still pinot noir and a sparkling seyval blanc, our “GMF”. All three will be released later this year.

We only have 1,000 bottles of the rosé, which has been awarded a Silver medal by Drinks Business Global Rosé Masters 2018.  It will soon be on the wine list at Michelin-starred Chez Bruce and we also have advance orders from local merchants, Dvine and Cellar SW4. 

Come and join us at CellarSW4 in Clapham on the 30th May as we takeover the bar for a “Blackbook Hijack” and we’ll be pouring our rosé alongside 2 other wines that Sergio, our winemaker, helped to make during his previous vintages at Ata Rangi in New Zealand and Mulderbosch in South Africa.

We’ll be beginning winery tours in July, booking details will soon be available in our shop. 

Our online shop is now live and offers a quick route to order our rosé and have it delivered to your door.  We are offering a special release discount for our mailing list customers so sign up now to receive details.

We’d love to hear from you so please get in touch and tell us what you think of the wine and website. 

Our journey from choosing the site through to bottling our first wine...