Digby Fine English

Trevor Clough and Jason Humphries founded Digby Fine English in 2006 with advice from Californian sparkling wine producers who had already understood, decades before the English wine establishment, that the négociant model, buying grapes and base wine from the best available sources and blending them with precision and ambition, could produce sparkling wine of exceptional quality without requiring the capital expenditure of a single large estate. Digby was England's first sparkling wine négociant house, and its founding insight, that blending across chalk, greensand, and clay sites in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Dorset produces complexity unavailable from any single terroir, remains the engine of its quality.

The range consists of four principal wines. The Brut NV is the entry point, a multi-vineyard blend that manages the quality threshold demanded by a brand with royal and Michelin-star restaurant placements. The Reserve Brut NV incorporates older reserve wines for additional complexity. The Vintage Blanc de Blancs sources Chardonnay from the best chalk sites of a single harvest, and the Rosé Brut, which won Decanter Platinum for the 2018 West Sussex vintage in 2025, has become Digby's most celebrated wine, a sparkling rosé of delicate colour and considerable precision that earned its way onto some of England's most discerning wine lists on merit alone.

Winemaking is handled at the Itasca winery in Kent, with Ben Smith as day-to-day winemaker. Dermot Sugrue, whose involvement with English wine spans Nyetimber, Wiston, and his own Sugrue South Downs label, has provided consultation, and his influence on the structural precision of the wines is discernible. At one point Digby was England's largest exporter of English sparkling wine by volume, shipping approximately a third of its production overseas.

The Arundel Tasting Room, open Thursday to Saturday until 8pm and Sunday until 4pm, is the most conveniently located English sparkling wine destination in West Sussex, situated in a town that already draws visitors for its castle and cathedral. Events and bookable tastings are available year-round, and for visitors in the region wanting a serious English sparkling experience without driving to one of the estate producers, it is an excellent and often overlooked option.