News 

The Team from Core by Clare Smyth visit Hundred Hills

It was a real pleasure to welcome to Hundred Hills the team from Core, the fabulous 3 star Michelin restaurant by Chef Clare Smyth, located in the heart of Notting Hill. It is wonderful to see our wines being served alongside such highly creative dishes, and the visit left us pondering some beautiful Hundred Hills pairings. Perhaps when you’re next there a glass of our Preamble No. 2 from 2017 with Clare Smyth’s iconic English Strawberry and Lemon Verbena?

2021 Harvest Report

The 2021 vintage has the potential to be an exceptional one for Hundred Hills. Despite some cold spring nights, we started a late season with all the buds intact and warm weather quickly allowed the vines to catch up. Then a cool summer turned into a warm autumn and small, intense grapes ripened beautifully across all our ten parcels of chardonnay and pinot noir. The aromas and flavours are intense in the grape musts, with an excellent balance of sugars and acids promising some fine, long aging wines ahead for the 2021 vintage.
The cold Spring delayed bud burst by a month, but the burst of warm weather in May left flowering only a week later than normal, in early July. Summer rains created strong growing conditions and veraison at the start of September saw an extraordinarily warm few weeks as the grapes started to ripen.

Too good to miss: 2018 Rosé de Saignée

At Atlas, we aren’t in the habit of offering the same wines twice, but I think a number of clients may have missed our offer on the sparkling wines of Oxfordshire-based Hundred Hills late last year, in which we offered the extraordinary, limited production 2018 Rosé de Saignée. This new release from the estate, which I can safely say is easily the finest English sparkling wine we have collectively tasted, is too good to overlook.

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Hundred Hills wine top sparkling wine at Raymond Blanc’s restaurant

In just two weeks, an Oxfordshire-made sparkling wine has become the number one best seller listed at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. The wine is made by ‘Hundred Hills’ which kept its 42-acre vineyard in Oxfordshire quiet for almost 10 years until the first wine was aged perfectly. The two-starred Michelin chef said it “amongst the very finest” that he has ever tasted.

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Hundred Hills support Impetus

We were delighted to support Impetus in their outstanding work with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Natural History Museum reception was the perfect setting for guests to enjoy our Preamble No.2 wine and our Blanc de Blancs magnums proved to be an exciting auction lot!

Find out more about the work Impetus do here

Hundred Hills debuts at The Connaught

We are honoured to see our base wine featuring in the Eclipse, an impressive cocktail created by the team led by Agostino Perrone, Director of Mixology of Mayfair’s Connaught Bar – the World’s Best Bar (50 Best). The Eclipse takes inspiration from the high contrast photography of English street photographer, Alan Schaller, which in turn inspired English glassware designer, Richard Brendon to realise a futuristic glass for it featuring a shiny black core and bright white outside.

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Chalk of the town

Searching England for the perfect vineyard to produce world class sparkling wines, Stephen and Fiona Duckett found the Stonor Valley’s chalk soil a perfect match to Champagne’s Côtes des Blancs. If you have ever sipped Champagne in the Côtes des Blancs, or toured the glittering Champagne houses of Epernay, then you’ll know that chalk goes an awfully long way down.

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Hundred Hills 2017 Blanc de Blancs features first on Stefan Neumann MS wines of the year tasting list

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The Team from Pied à Terre Restaurant join for Harvest at Hundred Hills

It was wonderful to have Asimakis, Suze, Chanel and Nia join us for what was a very memorable harvest at Hundred Hills.

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Le Manoir offer their guests the rare invitation to visit Hundred Hills

We are delighted to be partnering with Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons to welcome their guests out to Hundred Hills for exclusive wine tasting experiences and are very much looking forward to a lively season ahead. Our 2016 First Edition wine, now regularly enjoyed by guests of Le Manoir, is brimming with honeyed fruits, nectarines and apricots and a creamy intensity on the palate complemented by delicate exotic touches. It is lovely to see guests of Le Manoir celebrating and creating lasting memories with one of our finest wines to date!

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Is this England’s most select wine estate?

Bounded by ancient woodlands carpeted, during the time of my visit, in bluebells, no pylons mar perfectionist and founder, Stephen Duckett’s Hundred Hills wine estate because he had all twelve structures dismantled in favour of threading the cables deep underground. Nor will you encounter a deer heedlessly gorging on slowly ripened Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes because the herd Duckett discovered on first seeing what was then Bank Farm resulted in the construction of, unseen from the estate, two miles of fencing encapsulating the amphitheatre of 85,000 vines sown in this dry chalk valley, six miles north of Henley.

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2018 Harvest Report

The 2018 vintage will undoubtedly become a reference vintage for Hundred Hills and for English Sparklings more generally. The stars aligned to deliver a perfect budburst and midsummers day flowering. Then the warmest summer on record turned into a warm, dry autumn and beautiful, perfectly ripe grapes were hand picked across all our ten parcels of chardonnay and pinot noir in early October. Each parcel yielded its own distinct aromas and flavours, with an excellent balance of sugars and low acids offering ideal ingredients for non-malolactic winemaking.

2018 was certainly a remarkable year for English vineyards and even by May 1st unseasonably warm temperatures had yielded a verdant green across the vineyards as shoots and leaves grew rapidly. June saw tempartures touch 30 ̊C allowing an almost complete fruit set and the bunch structure to expand, making room for plenty of fully ripened grapes later in the season.