2025 Round-Up

 

A very Happy New Year to you all. Fiona, Jeremy and the team at Woodchester Valley would like to say a huge thank you to all our customers for joining us and supporting us during another epic year. We are looking forward to seeing you in 2026, but before then a quick look back at  2025.

January saw the official launch of a new non alcoholic grape product, Verjuice. With the growth of the Low and No movement, it is exciting to have an alcohol free product in our range which came about as a result of the less than optimal conditions of the 2024 harvest. The extended flowering period of the cool and wet 2024 season led to uneven ripening of some of the fruit, resulting in a green harvest of our Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes from some of our vineyards at Woodchester. The green harvest is when unripe grapes are picked early in the lead up to harvest to help the remaining fruit ripen and is common practice in vineyards around the world. The grapes were picked at high acidity levels and low sugar levels and then filtered and bottled as grape juice with no fermentation. The name verjuice means 'green' juice. It is delicious in a mocktail such as a verjuice spritz mixed with tonic water and/or soda with a twist of lemon and a sprig of rosemary or a regular cocktail. This is now available as an alcohol free option for our tours and tastings. 

A new year and a new addition to the Shiner family. A grandson. Mungo Chappell, a bonny baby boy, was born on January 16th to my daughter Meg and our sustainability co-ordinator Grapevine Greg. 

 

February saw our wines featured at Adam Henson's Supper Club, where Harriet enjoyed a wonderful evening of local food paired with local wines, all from the Cotswolds. A match made in heaven. 

Fun fact: It’s a small world as our Amberley vineyard was previously grazed by rare breeds of sheep supplied by Adam Henson's father, Jo, to my parents-in-law Mary and Brendan Shiner. The first of these sheep was called Clarence. He became a firm favourite with the Shiner family, taking walks up to the local pub where he 'mowed' their lawn and supplying copious warm woolly jumpers for many of the Shiner family, homespun on Mary's spinning wheel.

 

March was a record breaking month for sunshine and the vineyard team were treated to some new helpers in the vineyard in the form of the Infaco tying down machine. Let me explain 'Tying down'! This is the final step in the pruning process and is the action  of attaching the fruiting cane to the fruiting wire by bending it from vertical to horizontal and securing it with a biodegradable paper tie. Historically this has been done by hand, and is a time consuming business with over 80,000 canes to restrain. Never short of ingenuity the vineyard team adapted their new found friends into foliage wire clips later in the season to help with canopy management. A worthy investment.

 

April continues the warmer than average theme and after a sunny March the sap was rising and budburst was early. The start of the new growing season was underway with only minor frost events, meaning the bougies went unlit with the exception of one morning in early April. Wine glass specialists, Riedel, visited the vineyard with former Woodchester Valley retail sales executive, Dylan, now working in stemware, introducing the WVV team to the intricacies of the Riedel Range of wine specific glassware. It was a treat for the senses both on the nose and the palate. We were hooked!

 

May was the beginning of the festival season when Woodchester Valley goes on tour with the events team. As proud sponsors of The Stroud Food and Drink Festival and the Blenheim Food Festival, we were delighted to welcome new and old customers to our English wine bar and tutored wine tastings. May is also the month that the vineyard really springs into action and the shoots grew fast and furious. It was a relief to see that there were inflorescences (flower clusters) on the vines after the wet and cold season of 2024.

May ended with the very sad loss of Mary Shiner, known to many locally as Vintage Mary, at the age of 93. Fiona's mother in law and a firm supporter of Woodchester Valley, Mary was a remarkable woman and part of the inspiration behind the planting of the vineyard back in 2007.

June gave us heat waves and with the flowering of the vines on fast forward, bottling the super small harvest of 2024 was also a speedy affair. We bottled both our still and sparkling wines in less than one week. These are usually separate events, but with less than 50,000 bottles from the 2024 vintage, it made sense for only one visit from the bottling line. We had another exciting new addition to our range of wines with the bottling of our first ever Mosaic, a delicious blend of Solaris, Siegerrebe and Ortega, a limited edition wine exclusively for our Wine Club members. Our Reserve Cuvée won a silver medal with 91 points in the International Wine and Spirits Competition and the events team set up camp in our English Wine Garden at the Cheltenham Food and Drink Festival, as sparkling wine sponsor. June is the month of English Wine Week and our Grand Tasting, a rare opportunity to taste all of our current release wines turned out to be a Grand Success!

 

July delivered more sunshine and the vines were well ahead of average in growth development. It was shaping up to be a good year. We proudly sponsored the Summer Soiree at our neighbouring Woodchester Mansion on behalf of the Nelson Trust in association with Murrays Estate Agents, a magical evening of music, history, bats and architecture. Jeremy, our winemaker, gained international recognition on tour in Italy talking to Italian winemakers about English sparkling wine production at the Oenolife Wine Conference. Our new Pinot Rosé 2024 was released just in time for the Party on the Hill, Chalfest, one of the team’s favourite events of the summer season.

August brought yet more sunshine, an early start to veraison (the ripening of the grapes) and busy tours and tastings. The events team headed to the Oxford and Bath Foodies Festivals. In wine news, we were delighted to hear that our Blanc de Blancs 2018, a joint Trophy Winner at the 2024 WineGB Awards was included in Matthew Jukes’ article on Last Orders in the August edition of Vineyard Magazine. It was described as 'a landmark wine for this brilliant Cotswolds estate, and there will be many more chapters to keep us turning the page'. Thank you Matthew. The month ended with some much needed rain.

September started with more rain and a wet start to the picking season. But this did not hinder the earliest start to a harvest at Woodchester which began on the 2nd September with our Siegerebbe grapes. This was a good indication of the potential of the 2025 vintage, with most grapes picked before the end of the month in an extraordinarily quick and easy harvest with clean fruit, very little pest pressure from birds, insects or other wildlife and some of our ripest grapes. In the meantime, Mark, Alistair and Chloe went to London to represent us at a very busy Wine GB trade tasting, and the event team continued their local tour to the Frampton and Minchinhampton Country Fairs, two lovely traditional events to conclude the summer events season. To round off September, we welcomed our Wine club members to our annual Wine Club harvest festival. It was a beautiful sunny day and in contrast to the same event in 2024 when harvest had not yet started, this year there were very few grapes left on the vines to pick as our earliest harvest finishes in record time at the start of October.

October saw the earliest end to harvest yet, finishing on 8th October. We launched our new Riedel universal sparkling/white wine glass, a contemporary quality glass which brings out the best in both styles of wines. In wine news, we were delighted to learn that our Bacchus and Orpheus Bacchus 2023 were recommended wines in Jancis Robinson's article in the Financial Times on The Changing Face of English Wine. Both wines achieved a score of 16.5 points, with the Orpheus being described as a 'serious Bacchus'. The never tiring events team took our English wine bar to the beautiful city of Wells for the Wells Food Festival.

 

November was a month of relative calm, with the ferments almost finished in the winery and after tasting the tanks we were excited at the potential for the 2025 vintage wines. The team geared up for a busy festive period, starting with the Cotswold Christmas Fair, as proud sponsor of the VIP tent with our Reserve Cuvée sparkling wine. From workshops to wine talks, the 40th anniversary of the Fair was a wonderful event to be part of and all in support of the amazing charity, Well Child. We invited our Wine Club members to a wine and nibbles evening to collect their Winter Wine Club cases and try some truly limited edition Magnums (only 14 made) of the Blanc de Blancs 2017. And the end of the month brought some lovely award news - we were thrilled to hear our Tenterhook had been awarded the trophy for the Best Blended White Wine at the annual Wine GB West awards, with 93 points.

 

December turned festive. Mark created a Christmas grotto at the Cellar Door, our popular Christmas Grand Tastings showcased 13 wines from vintages as far back as 2016 to 2024, and our events team were back on the road at some festive Christmas markets. Whilst all was quiet in the vineyard, our winery storage barn turned into Santa’s workshop where the Woodchester elves were busy wrapping and packing and packing and wrapping gifts and wine essentials for the festive period before enjoying a well earned holiday for the festive period. A huge thank you to all our customers for joining us and supporting us during 2025. We wish you a very Happy New Year and look forward to seeing you in 2026.