Seventeen Countries, One Cellar

There are bottles in our cellar from seventeen countries and none of them are for sale. They are the reference library, and they are the only honest way we have of knowing whether our own work is any good.

You cannot taste your own wine

Not properly. You know what went into it, you remember the season, and you have tasted every stage of it for two years. By the time it is in bottle you are incapable of meeting it as a stranger. A wine from somewhere else, made by someone with different habits, is the only thing that resets the palate.

What we look for

Not scores. We buy the ordinary bottles from good producers rather than the flagships, because the honest measure of an estate is what it does with an average parcel in an average year. Anyone can make one impressive wine.

Twice a year, blind

The whole cellar team tastes eight wines with the labels covered, ours among them, and writes down what they think before anybody speaks. It is a bracing morning. Twice it has changed how we press the whites, and once it stopped us bottling a red that everybody had privately decided was fine.