Wine of the Week – a lovely sparkling wine

Christmas is coming, quite fast it feels, so I am tasting a lot of wine with an eye to festive drinking.

I don’t know about you, but I really like a good bit of fizz at Christmas as I can drink it with all sorts of different foods, or none. Of late I have been tasting some rather wonderful English sparkling wines and I will tell you about some of them soon, but in the meantime I tasted a surprisingly good English sparkling wine recently that is easily available and good value for money too, so I have made it my Wine of the Week – even though there is absolutely nothing to celebrate given the dire world situation today.

Chalk Valley Brut
Denbies Wine Estate
Dorking
Surrey
England

English sparkling wine is all the rage at the moment and rightly so as they can be very good indeed. However, they aren’t all as good as the best ones, so you do have to be careful. This wine is a special cuvée made for Aldi by Denbies Estate in Dorking. I have enjoyed visiting Denbies in the past, it is a lovely place to visit with a couple very nice restaurants, a casual one and a more formal proper restaurant. However, I have often been wary of their wines in the past as I didn’t always find them particularly exciting. If this wine is anything to go by though, then I might have been doing them an injustice. I am sure that their sparkling wines used to taste very green and lean, which can be a problem in our climate, but is most certainly not the case here.

Denise Wine Estate, Dorking, Surrey – photo courtesy of the estate.

The wine is made by the traditional method and is a blend of 54% Seyval Blanc, 34% Pinot Noir, 8% Chardonnay 8% and 4% Pinot Blanc, all aged on the lees for 18 months.

My first clue that this might be rather good, was the rich, golden buttery colour. The nose is like freshly baked rolls and seaside rockpools together with some apple and apricot compote.

The palate is astonishingly rich and weighty with a fine mousse, a remarkable sweetness of ripe apricot, orange and apple fruit as well as a little sweet spice and creaminess, although the wine is dry. I was really thrilled by this wine, it is very drinkable and enjoyable – 88/100 points.

This is a good sparkling wine which gives you a good idea about English fizz and is easily available in the UK at a very good price.

 Available in the UK from Aldi for £14.99 per bottle – £ 89.94 per case of 6 bottles including free delivery.

My Summer Wine Part 2 – Welsh Riesling?

The weather has changed and Summer feels a long time ago now, but I thought you might well be interested in these wines that I was able to try when the weather was a little better.

I love trying new things, so I was thrilled to be able to taste some Welsh wines during the Summer. I suppose I knew there was some Welsh wine, Sweden can make it for heaven’s sake, and so Wales certainly can. However, tasting Welsh wines was a first for me and although they were not actually made from Riesling, but I can never resist a pun. I wish they did grow Riesling in Wales, how could a grower pass up the chance to label a wine as Welsh Riesling?

Monnow Valley Vineyards by kind permission