Nyetimber Vineyard Tour

I'm going to kick off my English Sparkling Wine blog with some "historical" posts for the sake of completeness, and will eventually catch up to real time at some point!

I think I probably first tried Nyetimber in August 2010. It was almost the first English sparkling wine I had, but was just pipped to the post by a couple of months by Camel Valley, which we'd had while on holiday in Cornwall that summer. Over the next few years Nyetimber gradually became something of a stalwart among me and my London drinking cohorts, often usurping Champagne at special occasions (a friend's wedding in 2013, another friend's 40th birthday in 2015) and our occasional crass end of the week blowouts at the office.

For some reason though during those five or six years it never really occurred to me that we could actually go and visit the vineyard! Finally doing so was probably the turning point for me from really liking a wine which happened to be made in England to developing quite a serious interest in English sparkling wine.

Nyetimber only opens for these two weekends a year, and they tend to sell out months in advance. One of those weekends was this weekend in September 2016, and I'd sent them an email earlier in the week just on the off chance there were any last minute cancellations. To my delight they'd replied to say there indeed were, and so I managed to rustle up a couple of like-minded friends from work, and today we headed down to West Sussex.

We took the train to Pulborough and walked from there, stopping off at the Rising Sun in Nutbourne for lunch en route, which turned out to be a delightful pub. 

Lovely ivy clad exterior, pleasingly quirky and unspoiled interior. They had local wines from not one but two vineyards - Nyetimber (of course) but even closer than that was Nutbourne vineyard - just a few hundred yards away - and given we'd be tasting the full range of Nyetimber at the vineyard later we sampled some Nutbourne at the pub. Very nice too - I particularly liked the blush. 

The food was also very good - perhaps most notable was my baked camembert to start, and the excellent tomatoes which also came from just a stone's throw away - it turns out Nutbourne doesn't just have two excellent vineyards on its doorstep, but also a nursery growing some really high end tomatoes, which usually supplies London's best restaurants. The locals here really are spoiled and I have to admit to searching for available properties in Nutbourne when I returned home this evening. What a lovely corner of England.

Alas eventually we had to leave the Rising Sun - I'd have very happily wiled away the rest of the day here - for the 2 o' clock tour and tasting at Nyetimber beckoned. Although I say so myself, my route finding and overall planning of the day out as far as the pub had worked rather perfectly. I think the excellent wine from Nutbourne vineyards has to take part of the blame for the rather less than perfect journey from there to Nyetimber - I'd underestimated how long we'd need by about half an hour somehow, exacerbated by the fact we took a wrong turning, and ended up having to cut across some fields, and climb over a few barbed wire fences. All part of the fun!

So we arrived at Nyetimber well after 2, but they kindly said we could join the tasting part of the 2 o' clock session and then the the vineyard tour of the 4 o' clock session - so effectively doing it in reverse. Which suited us just fine.

Nyetimber currently produce five wines - there's their classic cuvee, a blanc de blancs, a rosé, a demi sec and their "Tillington Single Vineyard". We'd tasted all five of these at the tasting at Fortnum and Mason the other day, and the tasting today covered the first four. So there was nothing new, in a sense, but then it's often said that wines taste better at the vineyard, "tasting the terroir" and all that. It's a great setting, in an ancient wooden barn, and the added "adventure" of having got there added to the appreciation. 

Then at 4 we tagged along with the vineyard tour of the next group. Vineyards are quite magical places - much like orchards - and with the slightly gloomy weather, and the general elation of the day's plan having all worked out in the end, it had a somewhat otherworldly feel to it. 

I transported my daughter around on my shoulders, we tasted some of the grapes, it was lovely. 

An added benefit of our bumbling travel arrangements, highlighted by our late arrival, was that the staff of Nyetimber took pity on us, and offered us the use of their minibus to get from there back to the station. Which was pretty fortunate really, while I would quite happily have tramped back across the fields under my own steam (especially with another stop off at the excellent Rising Sun!) I don't think anyone else in the group was that keen!

Once back at the station, we had just a few minutes before our train, and dinner time was approaching. We'd used up all our snacks for my daughter on the way there, and there had been no trolley or anything on the train on the way there. So I darted into the only business of any description selling food near the station - a fish and chips place - and grabbed us some fish and chips to eat on the train. This was particularly fortuitous as the train was delayed en route, and it took a look time to get back to London - so a potential crisis of a tired and hungry toddler was successfully averted. I also cracked open a bottle of Nyetimber to get us home, albeit that my best efforts to improvise with drinking vessels - the little polystyrene cups they have in fish and chip shops for curry sauce etc - did not meet with widespread approval.

Overall an absolutely lovely day out, one of the highlights of the year for me.