Blackbook Harvest Report 2025: one of the most exciting in Blackbook’s history
Blackbook’s 2025 harvest marks a milestone: exceptional quality, abundant yields, and pristine, balanced fruit. Warm, dry conditions delivered early, healthy growth and beautifully ripe Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris and more—setting a new benchmark for future wines. An unforgettable vintage.
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.
