Less than 3-minute walk from West Brompton tube station, London Cru said hi with a long wall fully painted in bright colours. According to his book English Wine, Oz Clarke got a little lost when visiting London Cru for the first time. I guess these colours on the wall have been a more recent thing – to save people from disorientation.
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UK’s First Urban Winery
London Cru is where what used to be a gin distillery, and has been making wine since 2012 (reverse to the trend, given that global wine sales have been falling year on year, and gin on the contrary). They used to buy most of their wine grapes from Spain, but ever since Brexit, they’ve used only English grapes for ease of transport.
UK wine grapes are mainly grown in England and Wales; Scotland is still too cold, for now. The main regions in England are Kent in the south-east and Sussex in the south. London Cru owns 6.5 hectares of vineyard in West Sussex, mostly planted with Pinot Noir, Bacchus and Pinot Gris.
On Saturday morning (06/Apr), we tasted a total of five wines: two non-sparkling whites, two non-sparkling reds, and one Blanc de Blancs.
Britain, where Bacchus shines
We tasted the two whites first. The lighter-coloured one was Bacchus, made from grapes of the same name. The Bacchus grape variety is a cross created in a German laboratory in the 1930s. Today its plantation in its birthplace is dropping, meanwhile gaining ground in Britain.
To emphasise its Sauvignon Blanc-like flavours, this Bacchus had been fermented on a customised yeast mix (50% from Marlborough, New Zealand and the other half from Sancerre, France, both regions known for Sauvignon Blanc).
In this Bacchus, I did get guava and gooseberry that were typical of Sauvignon Blanc, but what dominated was pomelo. The palate felt as if I’d just had a whole pomelo. The wine was relatively light in body (11.5% abv), with a high acidity of 7 grams of tartaric acid per litre, the same as the Riesling I’d tasted at the Kuenhof Winery in June 2023. But the acidity of this Bacchus seemed way higher, the reason I guess being the acidity of the Riesling had been rounded by higher floral and fruity concentration, so not as singled out as in this Bacchus. The finish was quite long. This Bacchus is perfect to drink on those rare, warm days in the summer in Britain. Too “spine-chilling” for an April day here.
The 2020 Californian Chardonnay was full of pineapple, passion fruit, ripe peach and cream, typical of a warm region Chardonnay. On the other hand, when a Chardonnay hails from a cooler region like Chablis in northeastern France, it tastes more citrusy, appley and peary. The pomelo in the Bacchus I mentioned above is a cool-region birth cerficate.
Unconventional Pinot Noir
The 2022 Pinot Noir was a mouthful of cinnamon and bubblegum, very quirky. Beth, our host, then added that it’d been made with carbonic maceration. No wonder.
Carbonic maceration: Grapes are harvested in whole bunches (not stemmed nor crushed) and put into a steel vat, into which CO2 is filled. The heavier CO2 blankets the surface of the grapes and blocks out the lighter oxygen. In such an anaerobic environment, the grapes initiate “intracellular fermentation”. The Beaujolais region in East France is known for making their Gamay-based reds with this method. And guess what the flavour profile is? Exactly cinnamon and bubblegum.
The purpose, as Beth put it, was to explore more possibilities with Pinot Noir. When learning that they’d already shifted from carbonic maceration to the usual approach, I felt relieved. To me, carbonic maceration is over-intervention, not really helpful for the wine to express the terroir nor its varietal character. But their experimental spirit is definitely appaudable.
The 2015 Garnacha, made when London Cru was still buying grapes from Spain, tasted kirsch, mushroom and pepper with smooth tannins. It was so interesting to see how the whole tasting room was cheering for this Garnacha after the bubblegum Pinot Noir.
The Twin of Champagne
The last one we tasted was the Blanc de Blancs. As the name suggests, it was made from 100% Chardonnay. In England, sparkling wines are made to 100% mimic Champagne, not only the grapes used, the second fermentation in the bottle and the extended on lees post-fermentation, but also, most importantly, the taste. Many regions in the world do the same things with their sparkling wines, but very few are like England, which makes sparkling wines indistinguishable from Champagne. The key is the climate, both cool, and the soil, both chalky.
The apple-pie flavour (apple from cool-region Chardonnay; pie from long lees maturation) and the caramel flavour from the post-disgorgement dosage going through the Maillard reaction are common in many cool-region Blanc de Blancs, and I certainly tasted them in this Blanc de Blancs by London Cru. But what was unique to this English sparkling wine and many Blanc de Blancs Champagne and made them twins was a hard-to-describe reserve and closed vibe, which I’d never experienced in any Italian traditional method sparkling wines.
My Own Bordeaux Blend
After lunch at the pub across the street, we came back to the winery, using measuring cups and pitchers to mix Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc in our favourite proportions to make a Bordeaux blend.
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