There is a particular kind of hush that falls over a room when a wine is about to prove something. Not the polite quiet of a tasting note being scribbled down, but the held breath of a table that suspects it is about to change its mind about something. That was the mood when the first bottle of Patience was opened. A wine that had spent the better part of a decade lying still in the Kent chalk, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

England has spent twenty years being told it makes sparkling wine as good as Champagne. The compliment always arrived with a faint apology attached, as though the country were a talented understudy rather than the lead. Squerryes, a family estate on the Kent Downs at Westerham, has just released a wine that dispenses with the apology entirely.

A name three centuries in the making

Patience is not a marketing flourish. It is a person. Sir Patience Warde, born in 1629, was Lord Mayor of London and an ancestor of Henry Warde, who runs Squerryes today. Naming a wine after a seventeenth-century civic grandee could easily tip into costume drama, but there is a neat logic to it. This is a bottle that rewards the long game, made by a family that has been playing it for generations.

The Patience label is being treated as an occasional release rather than an annual fixture. The estate will only put the name on a wine that clears an unusually high bar, which is a sensible way to protect it from the dilution that eventually softens most prestige cuvées. Henry Warde chose this 2014 as the debut alongside Laura Evans, a Master of Wine, and the restraint of that decision tells you plenty. When you are prepared to release a wine only when it is ready, you have already won half the argument.

What 108 months actually buys you

The number that matters here is the time on lees. One hundred and eight months, which is nine years of the wine resting on its spent yeast before disgorgement. For anyone who has not fallen down this particular rabbit hole, lees ageing is what gives sparkling wine its texture and its savoury depth. The bread-and-brioche register, the creaminess, the sense that there is something to chew on rather than merely sip.

English sparkling wine has historically been released young, and young is where it earns its reputation for bracing, almost painful acidity. Squerryes has been doing something quietly radical instead. It has been holding a portion of each harvest back, letting the acidity fold itself into the fruit rather than fight it. The estate's late-disgorged wines are a different animal from the standard vintage releases: rounder, more generous, more expensive to make because the money sits in a cellar for the best part of a decade doing nothing but improving.

Patience is that experiment taken to its logical extreme. Holding wine back for ten years costs money, nerve, and cellar space, and it only pays off if the liquid genuinely blooms rather than simply gets older. This one bloomed.

In the glass

The theatre begins before the pour. Patience is sealed with an agrafe, the old-fashioned metal clip that predates the modern crown cap, and opening it involves a gilt tool that looks like something a Bond villain might use to open his correspondence. It is gloriously unnecessary and entirely the point.

Then the wine itself. The first thing you notice is the colour, or the near-absence of it. This is a pale, almost silvery liquid that betrays nothing of its age, which is remarkable for a wine that has been ten years in the making. The nose is all chalk and citrus zest, lemon and lime rather than anything tropical or soft, with not a splinter of oak anywhere to blur the edges.

On the palate it is precise to the point of severity, in the best possible way. Think of the difference between a photograph and the actual view. The fruit is there but it is delivered with a clarity that most sparkling wine can only gesture at. The finish is long and scouringly mineral, the acidity taut but ripe, and the bubbles refuse to give up. Left in the glass for a couple of hours, it relaxes and fans out rather than fading, which is the surest sign of a wine with real reserves.

So, should you buy it?

Here is the part where the price arrives and the room tenses again. Patience is £225 a bottle. That is not a number to wave away, and it puts the wine firmly in the territory of vintage Champagne's upper reaches rather than the friendly weekend fizz aisle.

But price and value are not the same conversation. At this level you are not really buying volume or refreshment. You are buying an experience that only exists because someone was willing to wait, and a bottle that argues, persuasively, that English sparkling wine has an entirely different ceiling from the one we assumed. The best English fizz should not try to out-muscle Champagne by being bigger, oakier and richer. It should do what Patience does: be sharper, purer, more haunting, more obviously the product of its own particular ground.

This is a wine that resets expectations rather than meeting them. It will drink beautifully now and hold happily to 2040, which means it is as much an heirloom as a bottle. Score it if you must, and it earns very close to full marks, but the number undersells the more interesting fact. England now makes a sparkling wine that needs no comparison to anywhere else to justify itself.

For the Curious

Producer: Squerryes

Region: Westerham, Kent Downs, England

Vintage: 2014

Grape/Base: 35% Chardonnay, 34% Pinot Noir, 31% Pinot Meunier

Farming: Single-vineyard fruit, planted 2005 at 150m altitude

ABV: 12.5%

Style Notes: Traditional method; late disgorged after 108 months on lees; disgorged May 2024; dosage 5 g/L; sealed with an agrafe closure

Score: 19.5+/20 (drink now to 2040)

A wine that spent nine years learning to be itself, and now has nothing left to prove.