Coates & Seely

Chalk before the cellar

The fruit comes in by hand before the cellar takes over. Christian Seely, winemaker at Coates & Seely in Whitchurch, has built his work here around that first decision, treating English sparkling wine as a matter of site before style. He co-founded the house in 2008, after a route through Harrow School, Trinity College, Cambridge, INSEAD and a managing-director appointment in 2000, a sequence that gave the work an unusual combination of discipline, patience and commercial judgement. At Wooldings Farm, near Whitchurch, the vineyards sit on Hampshire chalk within the North Wessex Downs, part of the same Paris Basin formation that runs under Champagne. Seely’s own language returns to this ground: “The properties I look after all have one thing in common: they have great vineyards and terroir: this is what creates great wines.” That sentence matters here because the house does not ask English sparkling wine to imitate ceremony. It asks the chalk, the weather and the long method to carry the argument. The range includes La Perfide, Brut Reserve and The Entente Cordiale, names that sit inside a cellar program built for clarity, acidity and restraint.

Base wine in oak and concrete

The method is traditional, with secondary fermentation in bottle, but the base wines are where the house shows its hand. Coates & Seely works with Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, the classic sparkling varieties, harvested in autumn and brought into a program that uses well-aged French oak barrels and concrete eggs for fermentation and ageing. Oak gives the base wine room for controlled development without pushing overt wood; concrete keeps a different kind of tension, a mineral line that suits fruit grown on calcium carbonate-rich chalk. The cellar work then follows the long sequence: first fermentation, liqueuring and dosage, bottle fermentation, riddling over months, disgorgement, and a final adjustment before release. None of those stages is ornamental. Riddling moves spent lees into the neck; disgorgement removes them under pressure; dosage fixes the final balance. The house’s position against high-volume supermarket production is part of the same discipline. Scale stays boutique, and the emphasis stays on gastronomic value rather than simple aperitif polish.

The stillness of Wooldings Farm

The winery at Wooldings Farm has the feel of a place arranged around waiting. The cellar is quiet, the vineyards open out into Hampshire countryside, and the tasting room belongs more to the rhythm of the bottles than to the theatre of service. There is polish here, but not rustic performance and not urban gloss. The room gives the wines space to show their acidity, their lees work, their chalk-borne shape. Outside, the North Wessex Downs supply the frame: low light, open air, a landscape that asks for close attention rather than spectacle. The recent addition of a south-facing Isle of Wight vineyard, protected from coastal winds and set on chalky soils, extends the same question across another English site. In the glass, that question comes back to La Perfide.