The lowdown on vintage wines and non-vintage wines

What is vintage sparkling wine?

In technical terms, it’s quite simple to define what any vintage sparkling wine is. It’s a sparkling wine made from grapes grown exclusively in the year shown on the label.

They are, as our Head Winemaker Simon Roberts puts it, “wines made to celebrate the uniqueness of a particular year in the vineyard”.

 

What is non-vintage sparkling wine?

The basic definition of non-vintage wines (NVs) is sparkling wines made using grapes grown in different years. To be more precise, they’re a combination of base wines from the current vintage and ‘reserve wine’, a stock of base wines stored up over many years and replenished year on year for future releases. 

Our library of reserve wines is a mix of previous vintages, all stored together in tank and topped up annually, in a simplified version of the Sherry solera system. We can also make sparkling wines by assembling archive wines from a number of specific vintages. These are known as multi-vintage wines and are a very different proposition from NVs.

Why do we make non vintage wines?

We mentioned the term ‘house style’ above. This is what we’re looking to deliver in our non-vintage wines, such as Ridgeview Cavendish NV. Unlike vintage wines, the ultimate goal of NVs is a reassuringly familiar sparkling wine in every bottle you open.

So how do we achieve that familiarity, working with different base wines for every release? The secret is in how we select and blend those base wines together. This is the alchemy that turned NVs like Cavendish into gold!

In terms of grape varieties, the proportions for Cavendish are typically a fairly even split of the Champagne trio – Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier – grown in carefully selected vineyards around South East England. This may be at odds with the cult of estate wines that has taken root in English winemaking, but it’s in line with the Champagne model, where the top houses select the best grapes from around the region, purely in service of quality and consistency.

When we blend, the overarching aim is to use around a [66/34] ratio of new wines to reserve wines. With each batch, we subtly tinker with the formula to reach that sweet spot of consistency. Fortunately we have plenty of ingredients to work with: Simon estimates that well over 20 different base wines go into Cavendish NV.

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Are vintage wines better than non vintage wines?

“Vintage wines aren’t superior wines to NVs at all. With NVs, you know what to expect and that brings its own pleasure. They’re different wines for different purposes, different occasions”, says Simon. 

Vintage sparkling wines arguably carry more prestige and you can always expect to pay a premium for them. But the reasons for this are largely economic. 

For one thing, they’re made in far smaller quantities: the number of bottles of Ridgeview Blanc de Blancs we can make is restricted to how many grapes we can harvest from a single vineyard each year.

On top of this, it simply takes more time to make vintage wines, and all those extra years ageing in our sustainable underground cellars don’t come for free!

However, in terms of craft, it’s NVs that come out on top. As Simon says, the aim with vintage wines is to let the grapes express the qualities of the year, which means less oenological tinkering. NVs, on the other hand, require more active care and attention in the winery to achieve that all-important house style.