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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?
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.
Temperatures touched 30 ̊C for the first few days of ripening and settled down to 20 ̊C or so for the rest of September. That brought ripening on beautifully and this weather broadly continued into a dry harvest in late October.
Here in the Stonor Valley, the vineyards have excellent airflow, the chalk drains water away beautifully and the vines are well protected by ancient woodland. As in previous years, the crop is perfectly clean and completely free of mildews and botrytis, helped by a huge de-leafing effort to keep air flowing through the vine canopy from fruit set onwards.
We always try to hold our grapes on the vine for as long as possible as all the complexities are generated in the flavour and aromas in the final days of ripening. This year the cool summer meant several passages through each vine parcel, hand picking only perfectly ripe bunches day by day.
The 2021 flavours are intense and complex in the musts, with excellent sugar levels and acidity in the grapes. This should provide the opportunity to make really long ageing and special wines but for now the base wine fermentations are underway and we will have to wait until spring for a first round of blind base wine tastings to know more.
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.
Atlas Fine Wines – January, 2022
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.
The Oxford Mail – December, 2021
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!
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.
Wine List Confidential – September, 2021
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.
Henley Life – December, 2021
Stefan Neumann – January, 2022
It was wonderful to have Asimakis, Suze, Chanel and Nia join us for what was a very memorable harvest at Hundred Hills.
Asimakis Chaniotis – October, 2021
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!
Wine List Confidential – September, 2021
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.
The Drinks Business – May, 2021
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.
As the Met Office reported the warmest summer in England since detailed records began in 1910, the rain at the end of August was welcome and the berries began to swell beautifully as veraison really took hold. Unusually we left plenty of leaf around the fruit zone on the vines and relied on continued dry weather to keep our grapes perfectly clean and completely free of mildews and botrytis.
Sampling each parcel every day we sought to hold our grapes on the wines as long as possible before sugar levels reached the point where we were forced to harvest. Two very busy weeks of harvesting allowed grapes to stay between 102 and 110 days on the vines and enabled beautiful flavours and aromas to fully evolve in late autumnal sunshine. At times it felt as if English history was standing still and we were in the middle of one of Constable’s iconic countryside paintings!
With malic acids declining rapidly in the last days of ripening, the grape musts were sweet and intense. Slow, cool alcoholic fermentations, once again without a malolactic, has created base wines with real finesse. There is already much excitement here at Hundred Hills around the sparkling wines 2018 will ultimately deliver.