Ridgeview Wine Estate

Mike and Christine Roberts planted Ridgeview in 1994 with a specific ambition: to produce English sparkling wine serious enough to challenge Champagne on equal terms. Six years later, their Cuvée Merret Bloomsbury beat Champagne to win the Waitrose Trophy at the International Wine Challenge, a result so unexpected that it made the national press and sent shockwaves through the Reims establishment. The English had produced a sparkling wine that the world's leading competition judges, tasting blind, preferred to the real thing.

The Bloomsbury that caused that sensation is now a fixture in the Ridgeview range — a multi-vintage blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier that expresses the chalk and clay soils of the South Downs at Ditchling with clarity and elegance. Son Simon Roberts has maintained the family's award-winning trajectory and added his own ambitions to the range, including a Blanc de Blancs of increasing complexity as the Chardonnay vines mature.

What distinguishes Ridgeview from its larger Sussex neighbours is intimacy. This remains a family operation, with the personality and attention to detail that implies. The visitor centre provides one of the best guided tasting experiences in English wine, with Simon and his team discussing the wines with the candour and depth of knowledge that comes from personal involvement at every stage. The extended lees ageing — typically 24 months minimum for the non-vintage wines — gives the wines a complexity and biscuity depth that belies the modest price point.

The London street naming convention — Bloomsbury, Cavendish, Fitzrovia, Grosvenor — is either a charming joke or a pointed reminder that English fizz is for the capital's tables as much as for French import. Either way, it works. The wines are available at the kinds of London restaurants and bars that previously would have reached automatically for a Champagne list, and that fact alone represents a quiet revolution in English drinking culture.