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.
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
