English White Wines
Gutter&Stars Welcome to Paradise Bacchus 2024
Textured and aromatic with bright notes of grapefruit, peach and fresh herbs.
This Oxfordshire-grown Bacchus is textured and aromatic with bright notes of grapefruit, peach and fresh herbs. Racy and rounded it’s the perfect summer serve. Single-site Bacchus was picked by hand and gently whole-bunch pressed to help preserve the variety’s delicate aromatics. The juice was settled in stainless steel before fermentation in old French oak barrels using non-Saccharomyces and ‘neutral’ Champagne yeasts. Fermentation took 28 days, then the wine was racked off its gross less and aged in a neutral oak barrel (228 Litre, ex-Burgundy) in a ‘fumé’ style. It matured on the fine lees for five months with no battonage. The wine was bottled on 30th March 2025. Just 280 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).
