Hello!
Your summer 2026 case is here! A top up from our core range to enjoy through the warmer months, but first, a brief update on what we’re up to.
In May, we planted 55,000 new vines across three new vineyard plots, completely surrounding the winery. We’ve planted disease resistant PIWI varieties for Charmat and I'm passionate that these vines are the future of grape growing in England. Whilst varieties like Chardonnay are on most peoples’ list it isn’t tolerant to downy mildew unlike our PIWIs, requires a significant amount of intervention in the vineyard and doesn’t tick the box from an environmental point of view.
In the winery we're fermenting and bottling Charmat each week and testing out Key-kegs. Soon you’ll see both the 2025 Bacchus and Pinot Noir Précoce out and about in some great pubs and restaurants by the glass. The 2026 season is shaping up strongly. Many vineyards were hit hard with frost this year but we managed to escape any damage as we now know our vineyards and where they need protecting. We’ve just finished flowering, and fruit-set is looking consistent: the dry weather has helped this. Some right now would be quite welcome…but not too much!
Now the wines. I've always taken inspiration by how the best wineries in France make first and second wines. Take Château Latour: a first growth Bordeaux estate making some of the world’s most revered wines. They make two wines: Château Latour (their first wine) and Les Forts de Latour (their second wine). Both are incredibly serious wines and neither is necessarily better but the key principle is that they have recognised in order to achieve the best of something you need to focus. They start with their first wine, using judgement and experience to make this as complex as it can be, selecting fruit from their most prestigious parcels. Their second wine will be different in style, primarily due to it being blended from wines that haven’t made it into the first.
So this is why you’ll see a split in our 2025 range: two Bacchus and two Précoce. Like Château Latour, we’re not just making one wine of any kind and when taken alongside Silex and the new Rosé you’ll see that our wines aren’t singular, they all work together holistically.
In this case you've got our latest Bacchus, Rosé, and Pinot Noir Précoce. All from 2025 and all in clear glass - a reflection that they are our ‘second’ wines. Not second as in second best but second because they enable us to focus. The ‘first’ wines, Bacchus Fumé, late release Précoce and Silex, will come when they’re ready and you’ll be the first to try them.
Cheers,
Ben.
Bacchus 2025
We’re going ‘Back to Bacchus’. For me, Bacchus is at its best when it's either young, fresh and vibrant or when it's had plenty of time to soften, age and develop. Somewhere in the middle it gets a bit...boring. I believe it was a mistake of mine to try and produce a single Fumé last year as this restricted blending options and produced a wine that, although good, was not the best it could be.
After a two-year break, the 2025 vintage marks a return to the wine that defined our early years. A straight up, fresh and vibrant English Bacchus.
Except our Bacchus (as you'd probably expect from us), breaks all the usual rules and traditions. We're using many years worth of experimentation to drive bucketloads of character, fruit and intensity back into a "simple" Bacchus.
We started with excellently ripe fruit from 2025's warmer vintage, giving us plenty of options from vineyard parcels alone. Zesty acidity from slightly cooler sites balance the tropical character of warmer plots. We then intentionally used a wide variety of pressing techniques to extract as much character as we could, using the fresher juice fractions from the press in this wine and reserving the more textural elements to age for longer in barrel for the Bacchus Fumé. Combined with a deliberate selection of indigenous and cultured yeast strains we’re adding character at every step.
Even for this, our early release Bacchus, we don’t mess around. This wine never sees stainless steel but is fermented and aged in either small barriques, larger oak foudre or un-lined concrete. This promotes microoxygenation, which is key to softening the wine and developing more complex aromatics.
We also tried something new here, with bi-weekly lees stirring (bâttonage) to add texture and in an even more experimental test, put 20% of the wine through malolactic fermentation to add a creaminess. This is only usually seen in wines like Silex, designed to be softer and rounder, but here we've gained texture and length.
Whilst this is designed to be the more approachable of our pair of 2025 Bacchus, it’s by no means a slouch. It is fresher and more Bacchus-like than last year’s Fumé, fresh floral and crisp. And its counterpart, the 2025 Bacchus Fumé, will be even more complex and alluring akin to a developed wine from Alsace. We couldn’t have done this by just making one wine. So you’ll hopefully have the best of both worlds!
Tasting note
Dry and vibrant, with expressive aromas of kiwi and passionfruit, underpinned by heather, leads to a fleshy palate of melon and pear. A subtle hint of cardamom on the long, textural finish.
Rosé 2025
I've always been cautious about making rosé. Not because I don’t like rosé but because I like to focus and a large range of wines could potentially undermine this. We've dabbled a few times with small batches for the Wine Club, first in 2017 with Cabernet Cortis and Rondo. Then a Bacchus blush in 2019 and a Pinot Noir / Bacchus blend in 2020.
Then, in the harvest of 2024, Oli snuck a single barrel of complex saignée rosé under the radar that we bottled as Labs 4 (you might have tried it), and it tasted great! This bottle, Rosé 2025, is a continuation of that single barrel.
2025's dry and warm summer gave us plenty of material to build on that experiment. We again used a saignée juice fraction that we bled from the Précoce red wine fermentation occurring in concrete. This both deepened the colour and flavour of the Précoce (that you’ve also got here), whilst giving us this wonderfully textural and colourful rosé.
This year, Oli pushed the experiment a little further by carefully combining the saignée fraction with delicately pressed Pinot Noir juice that had been given a touch of skin contact. These two were blended together with a splash of Pinot blanc and Chardonnay into our large format oak foudre to lend freshness and a juicy watermelon flavour on the finish. We gave the rosé plenty of time to soften through microxygenation, and we allowed natural malolactic fermentation to occur adding plenty of texture to balance the crispness.
The resulting wine is a fun, fresh rosé that fits in really well with a range. You can see through the winemaking techniques how it augments the other wines through its existence. Concentrating our reds and being tasty in its own right. Finally we have a rosé that’s true to the Flint style: complex, dry and a little unexpected.
Tasting note
Deliciously fresh and floral, the nose is lifted, expressive and filled with wild strawberry, cherry and crushed raspberry. On the palate, white peach, watermelon, bone dry balanced by a bright, crunchy acidity. It is light yet remarkably textured.
Pinot Noir Précoce 2025
I've always been cautious about making rosé. Not because I don’t like rosé but because I like to focus and a large range of wines could potentially undermine this. We've dabbled a few times with small batches for the Wine Club, first in 2017 with Cabernet Cortis and Rondo. Then a Bacchus blush in 2019 and a Pinot Noir / Bacchus blend in 2020.
Then, in the harvest of 2024, Oli snuck a single barrel of complex saignée rosé under the radar that we bottled as Labs 4 (you might have tried it), and it tasted great! This bottle, Rosé 2025, is a continuation of that single barrel.
2025's dry and warm summer gave us plenty of material to build on that experiment. We again used a saignée juice fraction that we bled from the Précoce red wine fermentation occurring in concrete. This both deepened the colour and flavour of the Précoce (that you’ve also got here), whilst giving us this wonderfully textural and colourful rosé.
This year, Oli pushed the experiment a little further by carefully combining the saignée fraction with delicately pressed Pinot Noir juice that had been given a touch of skin contact. These two were blended together with a splash of Pinot blanc and Chardonnay into our large format oak foudre to lend freshness and a juicy watermelon flavour on the finish. We gave the rosé plenty of time to soften through microxygenation, and we allowed natural malolactic fermentation to occur adding plenty of texture to balance the crispness.
The resulting wine is a fun, fresh rosé that fits in really well with a range. You can see through the winemaking techniques how it augments the other wines through its existence. Concentrating our reds and being tasty in its own right. Finally we have a rosé that’s true to the Flint style: complex, dry and a little unexpected.
Tasting note
Deliciously fresh and floral, the nose is lifted, expressive and filled with wild strawberry, cherry and crushed raspberry. On the palate, white peach, watermelon, bone dry balanced by a bright, crunchy acidity. It is light yet remarkably textured.
