▴ Bride Valley Chardonnay 2019
Bride Valley Chardonnay 2019
The wine was made from a 1.5-hectare plot in the Bride Valley in Dorset from vines planted in 2013, and I was impressed with the precision and elegance of it. Blind, I would have been fooled into thinking it was a young Chablis, and maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise, as the soil has a high incidence of Kimmeridgian chalk (Kimmeridge chalk stretches from Chablis and Champagne, under the English Channel, and to the south of England), providing the wine with a melange of white fruits and pure Granny Smith green-apple flavours. There is a delicious cool sea-shell minerality to the wine. While Bella and the late Steven Spurrier’s Bride Valley sparkling wines are their main product, this plot should be watched with interest. The vines are young, but if this vintage is anything to go by, there is something very special going on here.
Price: £19.50 a bottle
UK stockist: Bride Valley Vineyard
Review June 2021, SK