News

Adam Lowe, Assistant Vineyard Manager, writes about our new plantings. We have just planted another 3,328 Ortega and 375 Regent Vines. The best time of year tends to be May as this means that we have hopefully avoided the last of the frosts but the ground is still moist. We then have the warm growing season for the vines to produce new shoots and create root development in preparation for the colder months - if there is new green growth visible above the ground, then there will be a similar amount of new growth under the ground. We now have...

Dosage is a mixture of liquid sugar (we use grape must) and wine which is added after disgorging (when yeast lees are removed from bottle during traditional method sparkling wine production) to top up the bottles and balance the naturally high acidity of the wine. The blind dosage trials for our 2013 Blanc de Blancs have been sparking plenty of debate around the tractor. Dosage is always a contentious issue - for the purists, any additions detract from the true expression of terroir and vintage, for others, dosage is as key as adding seasoning to a meal. Westwell’s winemaker Adrian...

Westwell’s designer and illustrator Galia talks about the inspiration behind our labels. When we first took over Westwell back in 2017, the very special terroir was the recurring theme of all of our conversations. We marvelled at the site, and whilst there on one of our early visits, we took photographs of the vines and the soil. As soon as we got home, I sat down to sketch a detail from one of the soil photographs that we’d taken and immediately got lost inside the incredible detail - the rocks, leaves and sticks - and the earth itself - sand,...

We are thrilled that in a blind tasting conducted by Neil Walker, founder of The English Vine wine company, sensory perception expert Dr Heber Rodrigues of East Sussex’s Plumpton College and Dr Nicolas Depetris-Chauvin of The Geneva School of Business, Pelegrim came out on top. Blind tasting results: Westwell Pelegrim NV (338) / English Sparkling Wine Nyetimber Classic Cuvée (329) / English Sparkling Wine Hambledon Classic Cuvée (321) / English Sparkling Wine Lanson Black Label Brut NV (317) / French Champagne Laurent Perrier La Cuvée Brut NV (291) / French Champagne Ridgeview Bloomsbury NV (278) / English Sparkling Wine Vueve...