Cook it!: The Fizz Biz
Celebrating 20 years of world class wine from Ridgeview Wine Estate
How lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place and especially so when it is a day like today with the sun bathing the coast and the south downs in glorious heat. Is it any wonder that here in East Sussex we are now the centre of an incredible business success and that is the production of fine sparkling wines. Last month I was lucky enough to be invited to London’s Bloomsbury Hotel to celebrate the achievements of Ridgeview Wine Estate to taste a rare line up of their flagship sparkling wine, Bloomsbury.
With press from across the globe I visited the exclusive Bloomsbury Hotel, to taste through archive vintages of Ridgeview’s Bloomsbury wines. This included the wine from their very first vintage in 1996 through to the current 2013 vintage which has just been released.
The first vintage of Ridgeview’s pioneering sparkling wine was released in 1999, back then the English wine industry was at an embryonic stage and wines from the UK were met with much skepticism. At that time we had not really embraced the difference between the hideous ‘British Wines’ made from imported grape juice and wines made from grapes grown here.
Tamara Roberts, second generation CEO commented “our wines have always had a sense of place and provenance, however the world of wine drinkers was yet to see the full potential of what England was able to produce. Two decades and hundreds of awards later, Ridgeview, and our industry, is in a place where our wines are not only understood, they are applauded. We have been delighted to be a part of that journey and this tasting is to celebrate all that we have achieved.”
Roberts adds “My father Mike had the foresight to plant our vineyard in Ditchling, Sussex in 1995, and as a family we have all invested in the long term plan for our business. It’s fabulous to be able to show our wines at a tasting like this, where the wine press and trade have had so few chances to taste multiple vintages of one key wine from England. The longevity of our cuvées will add yet a further dimension for those that are already familiar with our wines”.
So there we gathered in the intimate surroundings of the library room at the Bloomsbury Hotel, guests invited to stay and enjoy a quintessentially English afternoon tea with the Roberts family after the tasting. With limited quantities of these wines available it was a great privilege to have been invited along to join some of the world’s top wine masters and critics and I have to say, it was a delight to discuss the wines with them.
The overall opinion? Well, Ridgeview is certainly world class. The early vintages are still drinking well, proving that the wines are of a very high quality and the newer vintages highlight the adherence that the family have to creating fine wines that certainly challenge the supremacy of Champagne.
Of course here in Brighton and Sussex we all love Ridgeview, but on my travels around Europe and beyond it is so exciting to see how well the wines are received. In the Netherlands Ridgeview is very popular as it is in Sweden and Finland. In Sicily it went down very well amongst the public and winemakers alike and in Vancouver it proved to be a massive hit.
I could talk about geology, minerality and terroir till I am blue in the face, Sussex boasts fine credentials in all of these areas. What really matters though is how much you enjoy drinking a wine. I throw away the science and the jargon, I rate a wine not on how much it costs but on how much I enjoy drinking it. Sussex produces many fine sparkling wines (we are globally famous for this) but it has to be hats off to the Roberts family at the Ridgeview Wine Estate for producing a flight of fine wines that I simply love to drink. www.ridgeview.co.uk
