12 Vineyards English wine case

At artisan & vine we stock no lesse than 12 English vineyards in our wine bar and shop. 12 English vineyards and at least 25 English wines. artisan & vine has London's longest and best English wine list.

Featuring 12 vineyards is a rather convenient number to create a special 12 Vineyards Wine Case, which is exactly what we've done!

Curious about English wine? We've collected the best to create 12 Vineyards Case. Here you can taste a signature wine from 12 of our favourite English vineyards. This is the ultimate way to taste wines from all over England in the comfort of your own home or with friends for your own comprehensive English wine tasting.

Included in the pack are:

SPARKLING WINES
Limney Sparkling, Davenport Vineyards, Kent
Sirius Rose, Bolney Wine Estate, East Sussex
Classic Cuvee, Nyetimber Wine Estate, West Sussex
Knightsbridge, Ridgeview Wine Estate, West Sussex

WHITE WINES
Warden Abbot, Warden Abbey, Bedfordshire
Coleridge Hill, Three Choirs Vineyard, Gloucestershire
Organic Orion, Quoins Organic Vineyard, Wiltshire
Bacchus Dry, Camel Valley Vineyards, Cornwall

ROSE WINES
Rose, a'Becketts Vineyards, Wiltshire

RED WINES
Gamay, Biddenden Vineyards, Kent
Oxford Regatta, Brightwell Vineyards, Oxfordshire
Tyrannosaurus Red, Furleigh Estate, Dorset

Click here to buy a 12 Vineyards English wine case, available with free delivery anywhere in mainland England.

Click here to see the full range of English wines we currently have available at artisan & vine.

Why does artisan & vine specialise in English wine?

Hurrah! English Wine Week is upon us and, of course, as the owner of London's first wine bar and shop to specialise in English wine, every blog entry I make this week will be about English wine. Let's start at the beginning: Why English wine?

Why would an Aussie (me), reared on belting Shiraz and sun-scorched Chardonnay choose to open a wine bar and shop that would specialise in English wine?

Yes, I think English wine tastes good. I'm a wine lover, there is wine from pretty much every country that tastes good to me. Good taste gets you over a hurdle, but it doesn't warrant investing your entire life savings to open a specialist wine bar.

The beauty of English wine is that it is almost exclusively made by such small producers, with no significant budget for flavour manipulation or artificial vineyard treatments, that the wine cannot help but reflect the Sense of Place of where it's from. Most English wine is extremely distinctly English, which in a modern age of mass-production and global knowledge sharing, is no small feat.

I’ve travelled a lot and lived in a few different countries. One of my favourite ways of coming to know a country or region is through indulging in the wines of that region. It’s that same old speech from me: Sense of Place, Sense of Place! There is no question in my mind that English wines are underexposed in their own, let alone in the global, market. At the same time as local food production in England is enjoying a celebrity chef inspired renaissance, English wines sit on the shelves of local community markets or the homes of wine maker’s relatives; it’s a fascinating contrast.

In order to bring the English wine experience into artisan & vine, I insisted on only working with winemakers who would deal with me directly – no distributors or wholesalers. I visited a wide range of English vineyards and tasted over 300 English wines to come to the 25 or so we have on our list at any one time. The wines are generally fresh, low alcohol and easy drinking – and they’re getting better with every vintage! English wine making may be in something of an infancy - I view this as an exciting thing.

After nearly two years of serving English wines to our customers I am proud to report a very positive response. The feedback we get often is that people are happy simply to be given the option to have a taste of home. The Bacchus from our friends Bob and Carol of Brightwell Vineyard in Oxfordshire remains one of our best selling wines in the bar while three of the five best selling wines (at time of writing) on the artisan & vine online shop are English (Nyetimber Classic Cuvee, Camel Valley Bacchus Dry and Biddenden Ortega). It’s clear that the demand is there. So how is supply? Well... I have to save something to blog about tomorrow...

Image: artisan & vine's vineyard day trip to the quaint Bolney Wine Estate in East Sussex in June 2009.

English Wine Week 29 May – 6 June

Tomorrow sees the beginning of English Wine Week. As usual, we’ll have at least one English sparkly, white and red available for you to try by the glass and a couple of English wines on Happy Hour (5pm-7pm) for you to experiment with too!

The pinnacle of artisan & vine’s English Wine Week celebrations is our Open Bottle Session this Wednesday, 2 June.

What is an Open Bottle Session?

We have an open bottle of every English wine that we stock at artisan & vine – around 25 bottles. For £10/person, you get a glass & the ability to taste as many of those English wines as you can. All the bottles on tasting will be available for sale to take home or drink in the bar.

The Open Bottle Session will run from 7pm until 9pm - enough to let you taste a new wine every 5 minutes!

It's a fabulous opportunity to taste London's best range of English wines at a fantastic price.
Vineyards on show will include: Davenport Vineyards (Kent), Camel Valley Vineyards (Cornwall), Nyetimber Wine Estate (West Sussex), Biddenden Vineyards (Kent), Brightwell Vineyards (Oxfordshire), Bolney Wine Estate (East Sussex), Ridgeview Wine Estate (West Sussex), Three Choirs Vineyards (Gloucestershire), a’Becketts Vinetard (Wiltshire), Warden Abbey (Bedfordshire), Quoins Organic Vineyard, (Wiltshire) and Furleigh Estate (Dorset)

Click here to reserve your place.

Image: Three Choirs Vineyard in Gloucestershire

News and reviews of artisan & vine

It's probably true that we're a little easily excited at artisan & vine. Can you think of a better way to live life?

One thing that excites us most is seeing reviews or news about us. We're always delighted when others get involved in the dream we're trying to make a reality.

Click here to see some of our favourite press articles and reviews on artisan & vine.

Image: we made The Times in London just this month and are still on a high! Yes... re-remark it if we must... we are rather often excited.

Wine Facts: How Wine Ages

Not all wine improves with age. Some wine is more alcoholic vinegar than wine within years of bottling. How can you know which wines will improve with age and which will collapse?

In general, wines that are designed to be enjoyed for freshness and youthful fruitiness should be drunk young. Include within this category most white and rose wines and any lighter style reds, Beaujolais for example. These are wines whose fresh fruit flavours are likely to die within 2-4 years of bottling and which do not have the tannins or structure within the bottle to develop further.

Wines that taste better with aging are wines where a more complex combination of acids, sugars, minerals, pigments, tannins and flavour compounds need longer to integrate. High quality reds and whites will fall into this category.

As a general - if crude - rule, the more expensive a wine is, the more likely it is to improve with age.

The unlucky truth is that even the wine maker cannot know when exactly is the best time to drink any one wine. The best we can do is ask the person selling us a wine; they should know the story of a given wine in their shop and should taste it regularly enough to know it’s current condition.

Image: I asked Olivier from Domaine D’Arlot in Burgundy when I should drink some of his aging Pinot Noirs. He told me to call him when I was ready to open the bottle and he would let me know if it was ok or not. It’s all that exact :)

Randall Grahm at artisan & vine

Wine Unearthed are proud to present
from Bonny Doon Vineyard, California for One Night Only...
Randall Grahm Unplugged

at artisan & vine

Join us for a great evening with Randall, the Wines, the Book (and good food for good measure!)
Randall Grahm is the visionary, irreverent winemaker and President-for-Life of Bonny Doon Vineyard. His goal is to produce wines in a natural, un-manipulated manner, imbued with life force! Cosmic wines for Cosmic times. Often described in the same breath as a genius, madman, and philosopher, the original Rhone Deranger has been at the vanguard of all that has been exciting (and controversial) in the American wine world in the last 2 decades. A champion of screwcaps , a convert to Biodynamics, he has now taken the bold step to list all of his ingredients on the back labels of his wines and is now experimenting with ageing his wines in amphorae and glass jars.

Monday 7th June 7.30pm £35

The Wine Tasting
To kick things off we'll start the evening with an apéritif and some canapes (hopefully outside if the weather is good!) before moving onto the main event.
In his own inimitable way Randall will take you on a guided tour of his new streamlined range of wines. On his quest to make only ‘Vins de terroir’ I am sure Randall hopes that the wines will speak for themselves, but never short of a word or five Randall will be on hand to talk about his wines, the universe and everything in between. Food will be served throughout the event.

BEEN DOON SO LONG
If you have ever read the back label of a bottle of Bonny Doon, you will realise that Randall likes to write ! His first book, or ‘Vinthology’ Been Doon So Long won the 2010 James Beard Foundation Award for best drinks book, and takes readers on a rollercoaster ride from wine to philosophy to rock opera to literary parody and back again.

“Randall Grahm is the Willy Wonka of the wine world and Been Doon So Long is intelligent, insightful and mischievous. It is a work of Genius” - Jamie Goode

Get your first edition copy signed by the man himself on the night pre-order online now at special price£19.50(rrp £24.95)

How often do you get the chance to meet a man who has an asteroid named after him?

You’d be mad to miss it, but don’t just take our word for it, here’s what Jancis Robinson has to say:“Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon in California is truly an exception in almost every way. His wine names, labels, packaging and news[?]letters [aka streams of consciousness] have injected more fun into the self-conscious world of wine than all other wine producers put together..”

Click here to buy tickets for the night or by the book online from our fabulous friends at Wine Unearthed.

Image: biodynamic wine making legend Randall Grahm

New beers on tap: what and why

I write to you this week in something of a state of shock. Oddly, it is shock without surprise. I knew what was coming. I didn’t realise it would be so big, or so illuminated or so… well… so darn attractive. And we’re only two-thirds into the journey!

Some big boys arrived at artisan & vine this week and they’ve certainly made their presence felt. 3ft high Peroni and Erdinger beer taps now tower above our bar; as if to challenge the rows of little artisan wine bottles lined up across the way on our back-bar.

We tried working with organic English beer at artisan & vine, in keeping with the theme for wines. I come to the conclusion that one can only be niche when one offers choice within a niche. We can be niche in local and natural wines because we have over 100 of them for you to choose from. I conclude that when there are only 1 or 2 options, best make it something that most people are likely to know and like. Enter the big beer brands. With Peroni, Erdinger and Moretti, we’ve maintained our commitment to quality and taste.

These new beer taps are more shrines to their hop-fathers than simple drink dispensers. According to beer lovers (of which I apologetically cannot confess to be one), these beers taste as good as the aesthetically outstanding taps and glassware look. Maybe these new beers will even convert me.

Peroni and Erdinger are available on tap at artisan & vine from today. Birra Moretti will be available on tap from Tuesday.

We still have 1 keg of Freedom lager which we’ll be serving on tap all week end if you’d like to have one last taste of England!

Image: our new very ornate pieces of bar equipment

Nyetimber Classic Cuvee & Blanc de Blanc

As you'd expect, our best selling wines on the artisan & vine Online Shop tends to move around a bit. I've previously written about the wines that are currently sitting at #1, #2, #4 and #5 within this blog. Recently, Nyetimber's Classic Cuvee 2003 climbed our charts to take the #3 position. How exciting!

I first tasted the Nyetimber Classic Cuvee at a friend's dinner party. It is immediately evident why Nyetimber has earned it's sterling reputation in sparkling wine making. Gorgeous depth and complexity of flavours, lasting finish, soft toasty notes. We're currently stocking the 2003 vintage, though 2005 is just around the corner and will be with us by Summer.

In particularly exciting news, the Classic Cuvee's sister wine, the Nyetimber Blanc de Blanc 2001, won a Gold Medal in this year's International Wine Challenge (IWC), of which I was a judge (check out my previous blog entry on judging at IWC 2010 here). We're selling the Nyetimber Blanc de Blanc 2001 both in store and online now too... best grab a bottle before it sells out!

Image: artisan & vine online shop #3 on the best seller list: Nyetimber Classic Cuvee 2003

Precious Metals: The Art of Alice Cescatti

We have some genuinely exciting new art up at artisan & vine. The most exciting thing is that it is all created by one of our fabulous customers, Alice Cescatti. And how lucky we are to have Alice! Her past commissions include: The Curator of Sculpture, The Louvre, Paris; Cartier, Paris; The Sultan of Brunei; Alberto Pinto Agency, Paris; Grosvenor House Hotel, London and Claridges, London. Blatantly, this is a list that artisan & vine belongs on :)

Alice’s expertise is in blending precious metals with water gilding and painting techniques to create incredible landscape paintings. All of Alice’s work on show at artisan & vine is for sale, please ask at the bar for pricing.

I think Alice’s art has added a very beautiful and very personal touch to our very personal wine bar.

Image: Alice’s work is inspired by time she’s spent living in New Zealand, Vietnam, the South Pacific and… London!

Wine Facts: How Wine is Made

As you’re reading this blog, you are probably already aware that there are a lot of variations in the important little steps to how a wine is made. This little article is aimed at giving you a summary of the key steps in making wine. By analogy, this guide is like saying the way to get from London to Edinburgh is to go North; options of train vs car vs stopovers vs B-roads vs etc etc are the sorts of “details” we’re skimming over.

The overview remains of import: there’s a lot to be said for knowing which way is North! The steps:

1. Grapes are picked and collected.

2. For white wines, the grapes are pressed so that the skins are left behind and just the grape juice ferments. For red wines, the grapes are left with their skin on to ferment, and then after the colour and flavours have been extracted, the red grapes are pressed to leave behind skin. (Fermentation is the process by which sugars in the grape are converted to alcohol).

3. Wines – whether red or white – may be aged in some kind of holding device – a bottle, a barrel, a tank. Wines can be aged for months or years or not at all.

4. Wines are bottled and labeled for distribution and sale.
Seems as simple as travelling North… the art is navigating the traffic jams, road works and then optimising lovely scenery and local peculiarities along the way!

Image: renowned winemaker Matthieu Cosse shows me some of the incredible new infrastructure they have in place at Domain La Coste in Provence where they are refining the science of natural wine making.