I’ve been making sparkling wine in England for over two decades. For the most part, the difficulty hasn’t necessarily been making the wines, but waiting for them to be ready.
Our naturally high acidity is one of the things that makes English wine what it is, but traditionally it has meant that our sparkling wines often need four or five years in the cellar before everything knits together. What we're now seeing in warmer vintages is something different: extraordinary grape maturity bringing complexity much earlier. I don’t necessarily think the wines are ageing faster, but I do think they’re starting further ahead.
This year we released the 13th iteration of The Trouble With Dreams from the extraordinary 2022 vintage. If you cast your mind back, that was the year temperatures exceeded 40°C in the UK for the first time, and the resulting wine spent less than three years ageing on its lees before we released it – considerably less than we would typically give The Trouble WIth Dreams nowadays.
Despite its relative youth, the 2022 already feels remarkably complete. Julia Harding MW gave it 18 points on JancisRobinson.com – the joint-highest score ever awarded to an English sparkling wine on the site – while Tom Cannavan has given it 95 points, the highest he has awarded to an English sparkling wine on wine-pages.com.
But there's a precedent: the late summer of 2011 brought record-breaking warmth, and the Trouble With Dreams we made that year spent just 18 months on its lees before release. That sounds almost ridiculous by today’s standards, but, surprisingly, the wine had a developed 'autolytic' character in its youth. In 2014, it went on to win the Decanter Trophy for Best English Sparkling Wine.
At the time, 2011 felt exceptional. Since then, we’ve had a succession of notably warm vintages – 2018, 2020, 2022 and, most recently, the extraordinary 2025.
Last year gave us fruit of a level of ripeness that would have been almost unimaginable when I started making wine in England. It allowed us to make Never Mind The Gamay – a generously fruity still red from Pinot Meunier and Gamay, which, twenty years ago, I simply wouldn’t have thought we could ever have achieved in the South Downs.
The change isn’t simply about sugar levels: we’re seeing a depth of flavour and maturity in the grapes that gives us possibilities we simply didn’t have before. Hugh Johnson has been predicting the potential for English still wine for years – long before he became an investor in Sugrue South Downs – and it feels increasingly as though we are beginning to see what he meant.
All of which brings us to 2026. We’re now on the cusp of what looks set to be one of the earliest harvests we’ve experienced, following another exceptionally warm (if, at times, chaotic) growing season. I’ve made wine in England for far too long to declare a vintage before the grapes are safely in the press, but what we’re seeing in the vineyards is enormously exciting.
So what does all this mean for the wines we make in the future?
English wine will always have its own character, and acidity is fundamental to that. That’s something we don’t want to lose. But when you combine that natural freshness with genuinely ripe, complex fruit, you can make extraordinary wines – and perhaps make wines in ways we wouldn't previously have contemplated.
I do wonder whether what was once considered exceptional is becoming the norm.