Coates and Seely

Nicholas Coates and Christian Seely met at business school in Fontainebleau, and the partnership they formed was, from the beginning, a Franco-English enterprise in the most precise sense. Seely is the managing director of AXA Millésimes, the Bordeaux négociant that owns Pichon Baron and Suduiraut and Petit Village, and the winemaking philosophy he brought to Hampshire chalk was informed by decades of watching the Bordeaux establishment pursue terroir expression with single-minded technical ambition. Coates provided the English ground; Seely provided the French rigour. The result is La Perfide, a name that contains its own wry joke about Anglo-French relations and produces some of England's finest sparkling wines.

The concrete fermentation eggs that Coates and Seely use are unique in England. Champagne houses and Burgundy domaines have been fermenting wine in concrete eggs for decades, recognising that the ovoid shape promotes gentle convection currents within the wine during fermentation, creating a lees contact and a textural integration that neither stainless steel nor oak barrel replicates. That Coates and Seely are the only English producers to have installed them is either an oversight on the industry's part or a sign of the significant capital investment the eggs require. The textural consequence is evident in the wines: there is a roundness and a creaminess to the La Perfide range that other Hampshire producers approach but rarely quite reach.

The Stéphane Derenoncourt consultation further distinguishes the approach. Derenoncourt, who has worked with Pétrus and Le Pin among dozens of Bordeaux properties, is not typically a sparkling wine consultant, and his involvement here suggests that Coates and Seely are thinking about their wines within the global fine wine context rather than narrowly within the English sparkling category. The La Perfide Blanc de Blancs 2009 won the IWSC's Best Bottle Fermented Sparkling Wine trophy in 2019; the La Perfide Rosé 2009 was, in 2017, the highest-scoring English sparkling wine in Robert Parker's Wine Advocate. The 2014 Blanc de Noirs was named Blanc de Noirs of the Year in Great Britain by The Real Review in 2025.

The listing at the Hôtel George V in Paris, the only English wine so listed, is the most telling credential. The George V's sommelier team, who maintain one of the world's most celebrated wine lists, have concluded that La Perfide belongs in Parisian company. Hampshire chalk, in a concrete egg, with French consultation, apparently travels well.