With a clear and lightly mature aroma of coffee and toast, with hints of yellow apples and wax. A dense and concentrated flavour with a fresh, crisp-acid fruit and a rich, brioche-like salty finish. That is how the 2006 vintage of their blanc de blanc, made from one hundred percent chardonnay, tastes. From vines planted in 2004. A couple of bottles of this were opened on the occasion of Gusbourne's 20th anniversary in mid-September.
It is so rare that we can open a bottle from our first vintage, says Laura Rhys, Master Sommelier at Gusbourne. Because we have so few bottles left.
They were probably harvested at the beginning of October, I believe, says Jon Pollard, vineyard manager at Gusbourne. He was also the one who first planted the vineyards in 2004.
This year we started on 25 August, and the last day of harvest is today, 16 September. So it is without doubt the earliest harvest of all time.
Just a few kilometres inside the white cliffs of Dover in southern England lie some of the British Isles' very best vineyards. The Gusbourne estate is blessed with both the warmest climate in the country and a clay- and chalk-rich soil, and is renowned not only for its sparkling wines, but also for what is perhaps England's finest red and white wine.
The original Gusbourne Estate in Appledore, Kent, is named after the farm's first owner, John de Goosebourne, and can be dated back to 1410. de Goosebourne was an important landowner in Kent at the time, and his coat of arms still adorns the local church in Appledore. The 600-year-old estate, which through the centuries has grown wheat and turnips, was also suited to something more. Right up until 1650, Appledore was a tax-free fishing village, as a reward for building the king's navy. That was before the Dutch drained the area, which in hindsight is the reason it is possible to plant vines here at all.
The vines arrived only 22 years ago, when the South African orthopaedic surgeon Andrew Weeber came across Gusbourne during a holiday in Kent. He looked at the soil and thought this would be a perfect place for growing grapes. Weeber was already a co-owner of a vineyard in Stellenbosch back home in South Africa, and had witnessed the rapid development in the country after apartheid. He had tasted British sparkling wine, and was truly impressed by the quality and potential.
In 2004, he bought Gusbourne, with a clear vision and one single goal: to make the best English sparkling wine, with a quality that could measure up to the best from around the world. But Andrew Weeber knew little about planting vines. For that he hired Jon Pollard from Yorkshire, who is still Gusbourne's vineyard manager.
The first vines were planted in 2004 in the Cherry Garden vineyard, Gusbourne's first plot. A full 20 hectares of vineyard were planted between 2004 and 2007 on perfectly positioned south-facing slopes. That way the grapes get as much sun as possible. Today Pollard has planted another 40 hectares, so Gusbourne now has a total of 60 hectares of vineyard. Spread across West Sussex and Kent.
Gusbourne grows only the three classic Champagne grapes: chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier. With a mix of clones from Burgundy and Champagne, which they buy from France.
Only five percent of their total production is still wine, the rest is sparkling. But Gusbourne's winemaker, Mary Bridges, and her husband, Alastair "AJ" Benham, who is operations manager, believe there will be more of it going forward, given how recent vintages have been.
We made a red wine from Boot Hill in 2022, but not in 2023 and 2024, but in 2025 we did, and this year it looks as if there will be red wine again, says Benham as he observes the four tonnes of freshly picked pinot noir grapes coming into the winery. He is clearly pleased with what he sees.
2026 is a wonderful vintage for pinot noir, Bridges adds. She is currently on maternity leave, but is taking part in the harvest all the same, with her daughter in her arms.
- Everyone has asked us about the drought this year, and how it's going, but we just laugh, we love it when it's a bit dry. This year we've even had some sunburnt grapes, Bridges says, laughing. I never thought I would see that here.
Gusbourne stands out from many of its winemaking competitors because of the ageing time its sparkling wines get on the lees after the second fermentation. At Gusbourne it is a minimum of three years, while the minimum requirement for British sparkling wine is nine months. Longer ageing gives more complexity to the wines.
Something else that sets Gusbourne apart from its competitors is that the estate exclusively makes vintage wine; it does not have a "non vintage" blend, unlike most other wine houses producing sparkling wine.
Gusbourne's modern winery was completed in 2014, and welcomes visitors in the section they call The Nest. Here you can also buy their rare wines. Those already available at the Vinmonopol are best bought here at home, as the price is lower here.
The advantage of English wine production with its cool climate is low yields in the vineyards, which gives more concentrated wines than the competitors further south can boast.
Climate change has so far meant that the nights have become warmer. Photosynthesis starts earlier in the day, and higher alcohol is achieved in the grapes. If the climate scientists are right, the best sparkling wines of the future may come from England. Some of them already do. And the 2026 vintage is perhaps the finest and most frightening example of exactly this so far in history.
We Norwegians buy half of all exported British wine, as confirmed by the British wine industry's own body, Wines of Great Britain. This is also reflected in the range at the Vinmonopol, which is now up to almost 300 British wines. Sales of English wines have risen from a modest 896 litres in 2016 to almost 200,000 litres in 2025. If you add the restaurant market, Norway is by far the largest market in the world for British wine.
