Domaine Hugo Traditional Method Sparkling 2021 - 75cl

Botley's Farm ran pigs until the numbers stopped working. Hugo Stewart put vines into a fallow field in 2016 instead — south-facing chalk downland at 90 metres on the Wiltshire edge of Cranborne Chase, near Salisbury, with enough wind moving through it to push frost along. Sheep graze the rows over winter. The site is certified organic and biodynamic.

Chardonnay leads here, followed by Pinot Noir, then Pinot Meunier and a little Pinot Gris. They are picked together and co-fermented as a field blend, which is emphatically not how English sparkling is usually made. Daniel Ham of Offbeat Wines runs the cellar the two of them built on site. Fruit goes through a traditional Coquard basket press, ferments with nothing added in five- and six-fill Burgundy barrels plus some amphora, and every movement is done by gravity. The single addition anywhere is a biodynamic yeast from Champagne Fleury for the second fermentation. Twenty-one months on lees. No dosage, 11% alcohol.

It smells of bruised russet apple and cold chalk dust, with a hedgerow thing going on underneath — hawthorn, elderflower stems. The barrel work shows up as texture rather than oak flavour. At 11% there is nothing to hide behind, so the acidity does the driving and the first pour lands close to austere. Give it twenty minutes and it opens right out.

How to Serve

8–10°C, and please use a white-wine glass. This wine wants air; a flute buries the barrel-fermented texture completely. No decanting — just open it early.

Where to Drink It

Noble Rot — their wine business, Keeling Andrew, is the one that gets these bottles out into the trade. The River Cafe, where the wood oven and this wine's chalky bite meet halfway. Bar Lotus, for a glass before you have decided what you are eating.

Food Pairings

Proper fish and chips from a good fryer. I mean it — the wine scrubs the batter clean, and with zero dosage there is no sweetness to make the whole thing cloying halfway through. A wedge of two-year Cheddar is the other one worth trying.