About Langham Wine Estate

Winemaking

Our traditional method sparkling wines are celebrated for their low intervention, oxidative style. Softer, more characterful and made to be enjoyed with food.

The Langham Style

Minimal intervention, traditional method. Uniquely characterful sparkling wines.

Our winemaking style takes its inspiration from a small group of Champagne producers – ‘Growers’, or ‘Récoltant Manipulant’ to give them their legal title, who have led the way in producing sparkling wines through responsible viticulture and a gentle approach in the winery. We believe this gives the best representation of the exceptional grapes that can be grown in this cool, marginal climate, where our long-growing season produces ripe fruit with the perfect balance of intense fruit flavour, sugars and bright acidity.

Winemaking

Oxygen: breathing life into our wines.

Within hours of being harvested, whole bunches of grapes are taken the short distance from vineyard to winery to be pressed. Here the first characteristic step of our winemaking takes place. The fruit is loaded into a three tonne pneumatic press, where over the course of three hours their juice is gently released. At this stage, most winemakers would seek to transfer the juice to inert tanks to ‘protect’ its delicate, volatile aromatic compounds from oxygen. We instead allow the juice to oxidise, sacrificing those more floral, lifted aromas for a dried fruit, nutty character and a softer, more open texture on the palate, while stabilising the wine from the potentially negative effects of oxygen further on in the winemaking process.

After settling overnight to remove remaining solids, the clear juice is moved into fermentation tanks and used oak barrels – almost all French, from Burgundy, Champagne and Bordeaux – where fermentation is allowed to begin spontaneously utilising the wild yeasts found on the grapes and in the winery. During their long fermentation, the wines are regularly stirred to reincorporate the spent yeasts, building texture and richness.

Winemaking

Bottling & ageing.

After fermentation, we are left with over 130 unique, still base wines, ready to be blended. Our winemaking team led by Head Winemaker Tommy Grimshaw, taste the wines from each tank and barrel and assess their quality and character. From their notes, the wines are blended for our core range of sparkling wines – Corallian, Culver, Rose and Blanc de Blancs – as well as for future special releases, before receiving an additional dose of sugar and yeast. This will cause a second fermentation to take place in the just-bottled wine, with the carbon dioxide, a by-product of alcoholic fermentation, trapped in the wine – the source of the sparkle in all traditional method sparkling wines.

Here the wines go into storage for a prolonged period of ageing, contributing bready, nutty aromas which complement, not dominate, our complex wines. After this time, the wines are ‘disgorged’ to remove the spent yeast, before being topped up with a small amount of ‘dosage’ liqueur. Our minimal intervention approach, limiting additions such as sulphur dioxide and bottling without fining or filtration, preserves the body of our wines and allows us to limit this dosage to less than 6g/L across our full range, labelling them ‘Extra Brut’.

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