Journal

Essex clays are poised to lead the charge of quality English still wine. Andrew Catchpole, Editor of Harpers Wine & Spirit magazine reports from Crouch Valley’s Danbury Ridge.

Côte d’Essex –  Jancis Robinson MW explores how a workhorse region produced a thoroughbred. Original article published on JancisRobinson.com and in the Financial Times. 

Grape growing in the UK resembles cricket: there are just so many different ways to be out. Accordingly, frost damage is a duck - caught for nought. Yet even at the end of the season, like a batsman chasing down a score to save a game, you can suddenly find yourself stranded without partners. Your carefully constructed innings was all in vain.

In discussions of terroir rocks have exalted status. The journey downwards through the geological record is mostly a search for hard boundaries – chalk, basalt, slate – while the overlying burden of clay, silt and sand tends to get lumped together, as soil. Causative descriptions tend to bottom out when bedrock is struck with a few high profile exceptions, most notably at Château Pétrus in Pomerol, where a blister of smectited blue clay challenges the limestone-dominated underworld of French vineyards for the top spot.

To claim Burgundy is all about money would be wrong, but neither is it true to say the region only serves the aesthetic interests of its buyers and makers. The truth lies somewhere in between. 

A look back at previous growing seasons on the Danbury Ridge estate and their impact on the resulting wines.