Gutter & Stars Star 69 Chardonnay Crouch Valley, England 2022 (£33, Gutter & Stars) Like many wine lovers, I sometimes contemplate making my own. But my soft-focus daydreams of tenderly tending vines in a gently sunkissed valley only ever get as far as a few back-of-a-crisp-packet sums before the precarious reality of making a go of Château Williams brings me back to earth. So I can only admire those brave souls who do have the will and talent to turn their idle fantasies into something concrete. A journalist by trade, Chris Wilson still writes for a variety of wine magazines and websites. But, he also runs Gutter & Stars, an urban winery he set up in a converted windmill in Cambridge in 2020. Wilson recently sent me a sample of his chardonnay, which he makes from grapes bought from the Missing Gate Vineyard in Essex’s Crouch Valley and which I am happy to report is outstanding: a vivid, fluent, subtly oaked dry white with pristine stone fruit and a cool-stream freshness.
Vinos del Viento Garnacha, Campo de Borja, Spain 2021 (£14.50, Oxford Wine) Many of our British winemakers, dismayed by the erratic summers of southern England, end up pursuing their vinous dreams in more reliably sunny climes overseas. Such as, for example, Calatayud in Aragon in northeastern Spain, where the Scottish master of wine Norrel Robertson makes a range of superb and always reasonably priced wines from high-altitude old vines. Manda Huevos Carramainas Macabeo 2021 (£15, Wine Society), a gloriously mouthfilling, pithy, Burgundy-esque oaked white, is a new-to-me highlight. And it’s not just British vinous émigrés who are drawn to the remote mountainous beauty of Aragon: the man responsible for the effortless flow of strawberry juiciness that is Vinos del Viento Garnacha is the Californian Michael Cooper.
