English White Wines
Gutter&Stars Age of Anxiety Ortega 2025
Delicate characters of peach tea, honeysuckle and sweet shop fruit
This waxy and floral Ortega is made from grapes grown at Yew Tree Vineyard in Oxfordshire. Delicate characters of peach tea, candied fruit and umami combine to create a savoury and sumptuous wine.
Single-site Ortega from was picked by hand and whole-bunch pressed. The juice was settled in stainless steel before fermentation in old French oak barrels using non-Saccharomyces and Burgundian yeasts.
Fermentation took 21 days, then the wine was racked off its gross less and aged in neutral oak barrels (228 Litre, ex-Burgundy) on the fine lees for almost six months with no battonage.
The wine was bottled on 23rd March 2026. Just 560 bottles were produced.
Gutter&Stars’ winemaker and founder Chris Wilson had wanted to start his own winemaking business for some time, and over the past three years searched for the perfect site for a small-scale urban winery in Cambridge, the city he’s lived in with his family since 2013. In 2020 a golden opportunity came up to house the winery in the basement of a Grade II listed windmill less than a mile from the city centre, and work began turning this octagonal cave into the city’s first winemaking facility. The winery is housed in the mill’s basement. It’s the perfect spot in some ways (a 15°C ambient temperature, a good drainage system, bags of character) and challenging in others (low ceiling height, single phase power, narrow-ish door).
