For starters, there’s been greater variability over the years, Greatrix shares, noting a similarly slow and steady climb in the average temperature. “So, in 2012, for example, we didn't make any wine because it was too cold, too wet,” he explains. This he admits can be blamed on global warming, but he is more concerned with the volatility that climate change brings, “because it's not that it's getting warmer and always easier for us”, he adds. “Spring frost seems to come around a lot more often; in 2016 and 2017 we lost more than half our crop to spring frost.”

Harvest dates are coming slightly earlier, and the team is still having a tough time achieving optimum results and yield. “We started on October 5 this year, and there was not a lot of daylight,” Greatrix explains. "But it’s not very warm in October in England; so, if you don't achieve the ripeness you require by now, there’s not a lot you can gain.”

Thankfully, the harvest was largely unaffected by touches of spring frost, shares Spriggs. This, she adds, was followed by "a moderately warm, if at times wet, summer—all ‘typical’ factors in the UK which have previously resulted in great wines from years like 2009". 

The team is constantly working on a knife’s edge, but things seem to be working out so far, as the grapes, Greatrix affirms, seem to thrive for sparkling wine here. This confidence is reflected in the brand’s fast-growing acquisition of prime property to plant vines.  

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Looking Up In The South Downs

Today, Nyetimber plants more than most in the UK, says brand ambassador Steffan Griffiths, from 14 hectares when Heerema took over to today’s total of 280 hectares. This year, they’ve picked from 214 hectares of vines. The average production at the moment is about 500,000 bottles (a year) but "last year we did just over a million bottles, which is a lot more than we've ever done", he shares, before pointing out 2017’s “very bad” harvest that saw production fall to around 350,000 bottles. “It’s been very up and down in terms of quantity but it’s because we’re very picky about what we use,” Griffiths confesses.

He goes on to concur that the advantage is somewhat shifting, as the Champagne region continues to struggle with climate change. “But it's not as if every year [Sussex] is becoming more and more for like the Bahamas,” he quipped, reiterating how climate change has in fact made the weather in the UK more unpredictable.

“One of our best vintages ever was 2009,” he notes as a good example. “And you talk to people about the quality of the vintage and the style of the wine and they’d say, ‘Oh, it must have been a really hot year’—but it wasn’t.

“It was quite a dry year but the temperature was normal, and yet we made some of our best wines that year, which proves that we don’t need to have warm temperatures to make great wine,” he posits.

(Related: Is Extreme Winemaking About To Become The New Normal?)

The key advantages of the area include the fact that the West Sussex microclimate is one of two in the UK that gets the most exposure to the sun (the other is the Isle of Wight). So, all of Nyetimber’s vineyards are south facing, making sure they’re get the best possible exposure to the sun.

Of course, many pundits would add that its soil—a combination of greensand and chalk—is the next most important aspect; both of these soil types, he explains, are very well suited to growing vines.

“We don't find that there’s a sort of qualitative difference between them, but there is a little bit of a stylistic difference,” Griffiths declares. The other notable fact about the land is that it stretches south, under the sea and all the way to the north of France, specifically the feted Champagne region. But really, it is West Sussex’s unique microclimate—a valley protected by the South Downs and North Downs (the latter is a ridge of chalk hills in the southeast)—that contribute most significantly to Nyetimber’s success.

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“You have to find these microclimates … and that's why we've been expanding so much recently; we want to be the ones to find these sites, these untapped and dare I say ‘Grand Cru’ vineyards of England before anybody else gets there,” Griffiths says. “And we've got stiff competition now from other English producers, but also from people around the world.

“I mean, we've got Champagne producers moving into the UK; Taittinger planted vines in Kent a couple of years ago, and Pommery have planted vines in Hampshire—they've already released a wine actually, made with fruit they bought from a Hampshire producer. It's great, it means that people are taking the viticulture of England seriously and realising the potential that we have here.”

No surprise then that Nyetimber is now the largest English sparkling wine producer and the only producer to own vineyards across three counties of southern England.