Colder and bolder: discovering the joy of cool-climate wines

Bright and light, cool-climate wines have a style all of their own

Iona Elgin Highlands Sauvignon Blanc, Elgin, South Africa 2024 (£17.99, virginwines.co.uk) From ‘oak-aged’ and ‘wild-ferment’ to ‘single-vineyard’ and ‘hand-picked’, wine producers and sellers have a habit of dressing up descriptive phrases as implied shorthand for quality. They’re not alone in that, of course, or even the worst offenders: no wine term is as insidiously irritating as ‘pan-fried’ or ‘handcooked’. Still, it can be grating when something unexceptional, even a little banal about the where and how of a wine’s production is presented as the key to its unique brilliance. I’ve grown wearily sceptical in recent years, for example, of the incessant use of ‘cool climate’ as a term of praise, not least when it’s used to describe wines from places that aren’t, in the global context, very cool at all. Still, there are moments when its use is both factually justified and helpful in preparing potential buyers for a particular set of stylistic cues – and Virgin Wine’s new, pristine, scintillatingly fresh and pure-fruited sauvignon blanc made by Iona in South Africa’s coolest region, Elgin, is undeniably one of those moments.

M&S Lyme Bay Bacchus, Devon, England 2023 (£15, Marks & Spencer) English wine – to borrow from the title of drinks writr Henry Jeffreys’ witty, gossipy 2023 book on its latter-day transformation from amateurish hobbyist’s playground to serious, venture-capital-infused business – is all about making the best of Vines in a Cold Climate. And for all that our domestic summers may, on average, have grown significantly warmer over the past few decades (and, in the process, made it much easier to ripen grapes much more consistently from year to year), wine production even in southern England is still very much on the northern margins. Necessarily, then, the wines made there are still marked by the high acidity and low alcohol that are the key character traits associated with cool-climate winemaking – characteristics that are very much attributes in the two styles with which England has so far had most success: tongue-tinglingly energetic sparkling wines (such as the reliable, well-priced Coates & Seely Brut Reseve NV; £36.95, coatesandseely.com); and crisp, dry, spring-meadow aromatic whites (such as M&S’s leafy, grassy bacchus).