From Grape to Glass

How our wine is made

First, and most importantly, we need high quality grapes, grown by our hard working and talented network of English farmers some of who have been growing grapes in England for over 40 years. England is classed as a cool climate region when it comes to grape production which means growing quality fruit is far from easy! Our growers must contend with our famous variable weather, dodging late spring frosts and carefully nurturing their crops through the various climatic issues that get thrown their way. We carefully select only the best growers who are able to provide us reliable volumes of quality fruit.

Harvesting and Processing

Once the grapes have achieved optimum ripeness they are harvested in the vineyard into our reusable container fleet. They are immediately transported from the farms to our state of the art winery in Sussex. Whatever the time of day or night they are received by our winery team headed up by our very talented winemaker Gareth Davies and booked in ready for immediate crushing once passing our rigorous quality control procedures. The grapes are tipped, de-stemmed, crushed and then get introduced to our beautiful pneumatic press designed to prevent any oxidation of the must.

Vinification

The juice is then gently transferred into our fully temperature-controlled tank farm ready for fermentation. Gareth then carefully chooses yeasts selected specifically to enhance the characteristics of the different grape varieties we use in our wine and introduces them to the grape must. After that it’s all about time, monitoring the progress of the fermentation and maintaining the must at optimum conditions in order to bring about a successful primary fermentation. Once the batches of juice have successfully been turned into wine we taste, profile, filter and blend them to create our final base wine.

Secondary Fermentation

This is where we are different. Once the base wine blend has settled and is ready to be made into fizz, it is transferred into our Charmat tanks. Once again, Gareth will select a different yeast chosen to showcase the fine flavours of the base wine and introduce it to the base wine in tank. Temperature and mixing regimes are carefully planned and monitored over this very important part of the process and the sensors on the tank measure the progress of pressure build up in the tank. Once the wine has reached its target pressure the wine is chilled down in order to stabilise it and left to settle prior to bottling.

Bottling and Labeling

Because the wine is already fizzy and at a high pressure we can’t use a normal filling line. We use what is known as an Isobaric filling line designed to allow the filling of fizzy liquids without letting any of that lovely natural gas escape. The bottles are filled, corked and a wire hood placed on at the start of the process. Then, once corked, the bottles are placed onto the labelling line where our beautiful foils and labels are precisely placed onto the bottles before being packed into their transit cartons.

The End Result…Fitz

All sounds pretty straightforward when you write it down in a few paragraphs, but we can assure you that there is a lot more involved in creating what we hope you will agree is a stunningly tasty and fabulous looking wine. We look forward to sharing it with you and we can’t wait to hear what you think.

Rulers Breed Rebels