Standing on an elevated, panoramic terrace of a winery restaurant, I look out over rows of vines stretching straight and even to the foot of the steep chalk ridge that extends as far as I can see to either side along the valley. It is November, and the leaves are mottling yellow and brown and falling away to compost around the rootstocks. Behind me, the hundreds of tons of grapes produced by these vines over the summer have finished their first fermentation in the winery's vast stainless-steel tanks. These base wines will soon be tasted and blended by the winemakers before being aged in the bottle using the traditional méthode champenoise to acquire their flavor and fizz. The quality of the fruit produced during this past long, warm summer suggests that the vintage might be one of the best ever. We'll know in three years.
But I'm not in Champagne. On the other side of that long, high ridge lies the English Channel, and I'd need to cross it and travel another 200 miles southeast through France to reach the region most renowned for sparkling wine.
Instead, I'm at the Rathfinny wine estate near Alfriston at the heart of English sparkling-wine country, centered in the southern counties of Sussex, Kent and Hampshire. It is nearing winter in northern Europe, yet it's unusually warm here, and I can wander through Rathfinny's vines comfortably in just a sweater. But perhaps we need to rethink what constitutes “unusual” weather. Making great wine is a complicated and delicate balance of skill, soil and, most importantly, sunshine, and the one-degree Celsius (roughly two degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average global temperatures is having a dramatic effect
