Gold Medal Success!

I would like to take the pleasure of introducing you to a brand new single varietal wine, Woodchester Valley’s 1st Pinot Gris! While we have been growing this varietal since 2012 but we have never before made a 100% Pinot Gris still wine. The Pinot Gris 2022 is not to be confused with the high-yielding warm climate Pinot Grigio. Our cool climate Pinot Gris is low yielding with small bunches and berries.  And surprisingly, the grapes are a tawny-pinkish colour. It is part of the Pinot family, is highly prone to mutation and  some bunches will have a mixture of Pinot Noir or Pinot Blanc berries on the same bunch.  This tawny pink colour  allows for a rich gold colour in your glass.

In years past, we have used this deeply coloured free run juice as a member of our Cotswold Classic Sparkling Wine. Additionally, our Pinot Gris pressings play a role in the Culver Hill blend, our signature blend for the vineyard year to year. The 2022 growing season, however, proved to be a very divergent season indeed. You may recall that August of 2022 brought the UK an extreme heat wave along with a drought, and a hose pipe ban to boot. Despite those high temperatures, our vines, specifically our Pinot Gris vines, thrived and were a vibrant green in the vineyards against the brown, parched grass. The very dry summer resulted in small berries with intense, full flavours. As a result, our grapes reached an optimum ripeness by harvest of ‘22 and also brought a textbook minerality to our resulting wine.

On the nose, the Pinot Gris 2022 opens up with this profound minerality in addition to rich honeysuckle, stone fruits, and flint notes below. The Pinot Gris 2022 is an aromatic wine with subtle notes of orange peel blossom. On the palate, this deliciously complex wine is well-rounded, off-dry and medium-bodied. There are copious amounts of chamomile, apricot and minerals, in addition to subtle hints of lychee. This wine has a perfect weight, a rich mouthfeel, and great depth. It has a very smooth acidity and a rich, long-lasting finish to complement its gold colour.

Unsurprisingly, this wine has brought us a Gold Medal from Global Wine Masters in the Unoaked Pinot Gris Category. Judged blind against Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio wines from around the world, it achieved its gold medal in the £20-£30 category. The first Gold medal in this competition for an English Pinot Gris.  Comparable to an Alsace style Pinot Gris, enjoy a glass of our ‘22 vintage, with a sumptuous Alsatian style braised pork or a creamy vegetable or monkfish curry while taking in a blazing sunset, as the smooth acidity and profound depth will complement the richness of curry that we so savour.

Before I leave you, I will say our Pinot Gris 2022 is a limited-release edition due to the fact that our newest single varietal is sourced from only 3,000 vines. With that being said, the Pinot Gris is also a low-yielding vine so we have only produced about 1,200 bottles. So, I advise you to buy your bottles quickly- as the announcement of our recent Gold medal might have a Sauvignon Blanc effect in the near future!

Pinot Gris