The 2016 vintage

“I LOOKED at my dad. We couldn’t believe it,” says Simon Roberts. Mr Roberts and his father, the founder of the Ridgeview vineyard, were at the Royal Opera House for the Decanter World Wine Awards in 2010. They had assumed they had been seated too far from the stage to have won. Champagne makers had always nabbed the “top sparkling wine” award before. It was stated that the winning wine was a blanc-de-blancs (a sparkling wine made only from white grapes). The Roberts family were baffled: that described none of the French wines on the shortlist. It was only when the announcer remarked that the wine was English that the penny dropped. Ridgeview had become the first ever non-French wine to win the prize.

The result sent shocks through the wine world and vindicated the gamble taken by the Roberts family 16 years earlier, when they sold their computer business to buy a fledgling vineyard near the Sussex coast. Their rationale was simple: the mild days would nurture the sugar in the grapes, the cool nights would bring on the acid, the South Downs would shelter the vines and the result would be a sparkling wine that could take on Champagne.