Congratulations!
You've successfully used the QR code on the label of our 2011 Cyder and it's brought you here, where you can find out a little bit more about this exceptional sparkling cider and the growing season that influenced its creation.
Winemakers notes.
A very cold winter saw a lot of snow and plenty of sledging in the Budd household. March, April and May were very warm and dry. Cyder making was far from our minds as we were in the process of establishing a winery with a good friend. We purchased fermentation tanks with enough capacity to cope with the largest crop our vineyard could produce (wishful thinking, but also based on the impressive crop from 2010), but when harvest came it was about half of this amount and so we decided to fill the empty tanks with something else. Although not traditionally a cider apple area, there are plenty of orchards in Sussex and I hired a van and drove around buying up apples from local apple growers. Variation was the key, trying to find as many different varieties of apple as possible to give the cyder the complexity we were looking for. We pressed them in our newly acquired 3 tonne press we had used for the grapes and this was the beginning of our cyder adventure.
We decided to make the cyder in the same method as our sparkling wines, bottle fermenting and leaving on the lees for at least 5 years. As it turns out it, this cyder is now approaching nearly ten years on the lees, developing an incredibly rich and full flavoured cyder and is intended to be enjoyed in Champagne flutes.
The current batch (without date code on the cork) was disgorged on 20/06/19, ageing gracefully for nearly 2 years on the cork.