Wiston Estate Winery

Wiston Estate is a name that winemakers talk about in reverent shorthand. When Dermot Sugrue spent sixteen vintages here from 2006 to 2022, making wine from seven hectares of south-facing chalk in the South Downs above Washington, he turned a family farming estate into one of England's most acclaimed sparkling wine producers and simultaneously demonstrated that great English sparkling could be made on a small, focused, carefully managed scale without the resources of a Nyetimber or a Chapel Down. The 2,400-hectare Goring family estate provides the frame; the vines occupy just seven hectares of it, and they are exceptional ones.

The chalk here is pure and deep, the south-facing aspect maximises the growing season, and the South Downs provide shelter from the prevailing Atlantic weather. Sugrue used these advantages to make a Blanc de Blancs that Neal Martin of Berry Bros. and Rudd awarded 95 points for the 2015 vintage, making it one of the highest-scoring English sparkling wines ever reviewed at that point. Tamlyn Currin gave it 17.5 out of 20. Both critics were responding to the same thing: a wine of tense mineral precision, with Chardonnay fruit expressed at the chalk-dry end of the spectrum, aged long enough to develop complexity without losing freshness.

Wiston's other function, less celebrated but no less important, is as a contract winery. The facility has made wine for other producers over the years, and the technical standard it maintains across all those wines is a measure of the estate's real capability. The Cuvée NV, blended with perpetual reserve wine and dominated by Pinot Noir, sits in accessible territory; the vintage Blanc de Blancs is where Wiston's identity is most fully expressed.

Visitors arrive through the South Downs to find a restaurant called Chalk, a working winery, and an events programme that includes the Sundowner Safari Tour and Dinner, which combines vineyard exploration with the kind of meal that makes guests reluctant to leave. The Vineyard Explorer tour is available year-round for those wanting a focused wine education, and the estate's combination of rural grandeur and winemaking seriousness makes Wiston one of Sussex's most rewarding vineyard destinations.