Nyetimber put English sparkling wine on the map as early as the 1990s. They have led the charge on many fronts, including establishing a multi-vintage cuvée (their Classic Cuvée – which started life off as a vintage wine) that rivals the long-established NV cuvées of the Grandes Marques of Champagne; and releasing the first prestige cuvées of our fair isles with their ambitious “1086” pair. They are undoubtedly the most famed English sparkling wine producer in the world. The history of the Nyetimber estate dates back almost 1,000 years. It was named in the Domesday Book in 1086 as “Nitimbreha” (Nee Timber Ha), believed to refer to a newly timbered house or a small timber plantation. Some 902 years later, in 1988, at a time when the prevailing view was that wine grapes could not ripen in the UK, the first vines were planted on the estate – the noble triumvirate of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. Today, Nyetimber has vineyards spread over eleven sites on the greensand and chalk soils of West Sussex, Hampshire, and Kent – 260ha in total. They work exclusively with estate-grown fruit. As Jancis Robinson writes, “Nyetimber’s growing range of wines is made by a hugely talented Canadian couple whose output is irreproachable” – Cherie Spriggs and Brad Greatrix. The winemaking couple joined Nyetimber in 2007. The story goes that they were given a bottle of an early Nyetimber by Cherie’s father and were both surprised at the present quality as well as excited at the future potential. Cherie is Head Winemaker and in 2018 was the first person outside of Champagne, as well as the first woman, to receive Sparkling Winemaker of the Year by the International Wine Challenge. In an obsessively detailed approach, they harvest and ferment each parcel of grapes separately giving them around one hundred different base-wine blending components every year. Tillington is a large vineyard in West Sussex, covering 37ha, but the grapes that go into Tillington Single Vineyard come from a very specific plot – approximately 2ha in size – within Tillington. In 2009, as Cherie and Brad were really getting to know the vineyards, they pinpointed a section of Pinot Noir vines which yielded particularly distinctive wine and decided that this was just too exciting to blend away, and thus this special cuvée was born. Including that inaugural vintage, Tillington has been released a total of four times to date, with the 2010, 2011 and 2014 following the 2009.
