2025 past events

Meeting 479 Sunday 13 July 2025

Visit to All Angels Vineyard, Enborne Berkshire: tasting and lunch

Our Summer outing this year was a repeat of our 2023 visit to All Angels, the English Sparkling Wine vineyard at Enborne, just west of Newbury. 
It was a scorching day and we started with a tour of the vineyards at the Church Farm site. The tour was hosted by Mark Darley, the founder, and his attention to detail and enthusiasm for excellence shone through at every stage. This was exemplified by the battle with frost, a challenge every year and a real danger to the crop in several years. One solution is the burning of candles. This is common in many vineyards in England and France, but is prohibitively expensive and muckily hands-on. Another method is fanning of air, either on the ground or from the air using helicopters or drones, but this is again expensive and only effective if conditions are just right. A new method that Mark has used is the connexion of strips of infra-red lighting threaded
through the vines. Again this is expensive, but at least once purchased the strips can be used again for at least ten years. The electrical power required is very high, too much from the grid without the installation of a dedicated substation at a quite unaffordable cost. So Mark has used a generator powered by bio fuel. All these methods are expensive and time consuming, and come with various compromises. Mark is not just keen on maintaining the highest quality in all elements of the production of his wines, but is also a keen environmentalist, and his love of nature shone through in our tour. There is on his land a great diversity of flora, but also a perhaps surprising diversity of fauna, including rabbits, hares, foxes, badgers and otters.

Back at the farm we sat at an elegantly laid table and enjoyed tasting three of Mark’s wines. We started with the 2016 Classic Cuvée. This has good acid and is fresh and dry; but the fruit flavour is delightful and is very long-lasting. We then tasted the 2018 Sparkling Rosé; this is an unusual combination of grapes, Rondo and Pinot Gris. It is softer but the fruit flavour is dry with a pleasant but significantly bitter edge. Again it has great length. We then were shown a 2018 Cuvée, not yet released. This was a slightly lighter clone of the 2016.

The buffet lunch included kofta kebabs and marinated chicken kebabs served with tomato and mediterranean vegetable salad, cous cous, herby potato salad and a yoghurt and mint sauce and focaccia bread. Chocolate brownies with strawberries and vanilla cream followed.   With lunch we indulged in three more bottles, a 2016 Classic Cuvée, a Rosé and a 2014 Classic Cuvée. The 2014 is a very special wine. It has the same house style that we experienced with the 2016, but its age, including many years on the lees during secondary fermentation, has resulted in tremendous depth of character.

Mark has not yet decided how to produce the 2018 wine. There are two possibilities, one being a Brut Zero. Watch this space.

This was a fine visit, very much enjoyed. Mark’s wines are made with such dedication, the most significant difference from almost all other English Sparkling Wines being the time he allows on the lees before disgorging. All wines are single vintage. After a few more years it will be very interesting to make another visit and see how his wines are developing.

Meeting 478 Friday 16th May 2025

Kevin Hart (79North)  Wines of Portugal

We welcomed a new presenter, Kevin Hart of 79North, a company based in Reading. He was accompanied by Jill Carver of Added Ingredients. They gave a good overview of the range of Portuguese wines, with maps and explanations of the locations of various vineyards and styles. Our aperitif was a fizzy rosé from the northern region Vinho Verde – a very pleasant start. We then moved to the most southerly region of this tasting, the Alentejo, with a white wine from the Vale da Calada. Their red  wine featured later in the tasting. Then just a little north, to the central agricultural area Ribatejo, along the Tagus river. We tasted four wines from Casal do Conde in this region, starting with an Alvarinho. The tasting ended with three reds from the same grower, and all these wines scored the highest in the tasting. After the Alvarinho we went back to Quinta Pousada de Fora; they produced the rosé fizz and this wine, their Arinto Reserva. The Arinto grape was new to many of us, and this white wine was very acceptable. Next we tasted a wine from the Lisbon area, Manz Dona Fatima Branco 2020; I’m afraid this proved somewhat disappointing, in spite of being the most expensive wine we tasted. Our first red was from Herdade da Calada, Vale da Calada, then followed by the three more reds from Casal do Conde.

Charlotte provided the supper - a selection of tapas of goats cheese, salt cod croquettes with garlic aioli, lupins and olives,  followed by a main of pork fillet marinated in white wine, garlic and piri piri pepper sauce, served with parmentier potatoes and pickled vegetables. To finish,  ginjinha liqueur in chocolate cups and pastel de nata.

Meeting 477 Friday 21st March 2025

Paul Fritz-Johnson (Welch and Co)  Wines of the Southern Rhône

We were pleased to welcome back Paul Fritz-Johnson, who is a partner at Welch & Co Wine Merchants and Pierre le Vin, an independent wine supplier to restaurants and bars. The two linked companies are based in the Oxfordshire town of Wallingford and are entering their 38th year of business. Their aim is to provide 'Good Wine at the Right Price'. Paul showed a range of wines from the Southern Rhône to highlight the principal villages/sites of the area.  

Mark provided a starter of tartiflette with green salad and a main course of smoked bacon and duck leg with lentils
and red wine.

Meeting 476 Friday 21 February 2025 
AGM followed by Richard and Eka Cox: Wines of Georgia

This was a fascinating and unusual event, because it introduced our members to wines that none had previously tasted, and to a region none had visited.  Richard and Eka Cox’s company, Taste of Georgia, is a small independent husband and wife operation; now in its eighth year, it was set up to improve awareness of Georgia, its culture and customs, and its wonderful wines, the product of 8000 years of unbroken wine-making heritage.

Eka is Georgian, and their presentation gave us an insight into some of the culture of the country.  It was interesting to see photographs illustrating the fact that many Georgians grow their own vines, even within towns, and make their own wines.  More recently professional winemakers have developed, using some autochthonous grapes, and we were introduced to wines from two white grape varieties, Mtsvane and Rkatsiteli, and the red variety Saperavi.  Many of these wines are made in the traditional manner, in which clay egg-shaped pots called qvevri are used to mature the wine.  The qvevri are buried underground or set into the floor of a cellar.  Photographs of the production of the qvevri showed that it is entirely by hand, painstakingly  building up the shape.

The white grape varieties are often made with fermenting before removing the skins, resulting in an amber wine.  This practice originated in Georgia, and has become popular in several other countries, where the wine is often called orange wine.  Most of these orange wines are made a deeper colour than Georgian amber wines, by leaving the wine longer in contact with the skins, and using some grape varieties with deeper colour in their skins.  The amber wines we tasted were dry and quite a light colour.

Mark gave us a starter of Khachapuri (cheese filled bread with egg), served with the Khikhvi amber wine, and a main of goulash served with the Mukuzani red wine.  This red wine was very much enjoyed, and we decided to invest in some for the Branch cellar, so that in a few year’s time we will be able to see how it has matured. 

Richard and Eka’s presentation was excellent, entertaining and very interesting, and the wines showed well, especially the red wines.

Meeting 475 Sunday 19th January

Neville Hall Lunch by Mark Robertson, wines from the Branch cellar

Last year’s January Sunday lunch was so successful that all who were there insisted that it become an annual event. This year it was better than ever. Mark produced an outstanding menu, greatly enjoyed by all.
We started with fig stuffed with goat’s cheese and wrapped in Parma ham, with walnuts, lamb’s lettuce and sprinkles of honey and balsamic vinegar. The main course was venison suet pudding, with parsnip purée, tenderstem broccoli and braised red cabbage. Dessert was lemon curd & passion fruit meringue roulade. After this a variety of cheeses were available, and tea or coffee.There were 32 diners, and all agreed that it had been a very special occasion, with perhaps Mark’s best food yet.

The food was matched with wines of the highest quality. Holding our lunch at Neville Hall enabled us to bring out wines from the Branch cellar, and those we drank are listed below. We did not have a sparkling wine in the cellar, so the aperitif was purchased  from The Wine Society.All the wines were well liked, but most agreed that the Wilson Gunn was an absolute star, with great depth of fruit, lovely balance and great length. I had decanted the 2005 wines the day before, and there had been a lot of tannic sediment. Ageing had certainly removed any hint of bitterness in the remaining tannins.