History of Pattingham Vineyard
How We Started
A love of food and wine in the company of friends and family, long summer days and winters by the fire, Birthdays and Christmas get togethers are always events that we enjoy with a glass of wine, and now its English Wine all the way.
In 2016 the family had the opportunity to buy some land adjacent to their home on the outskirts of Pattingham. A quiet picturesque village, tucked away in the beautiful South Staffordshire countryside.
Great. But now what? Could we really make our own wines on this land?
Now, we’re the first to admit we didn’t know a great deal about the winemaking process, but we knew a good wine when we tasted one. We also knew if we put our hard-work and dedication into something, it would work - and so, in 2018 Pattingham Vineyard was born. We are proud to be a family business and love that the vineyard enables us to meet lot's of wonderful people.
Martin & Jane and Stevie Wilcox
Our Site
Our land was perfect for growing vines. The south-facing slopes, natural spring water and free-draining sandy topsoil, provided perfect conditions for our vines to flourish. The land itself had only ever been grazed on, having never been exposed to chemicals of any kind, meaning we could create a low impact sustainable approach to wine making in a nature friendly paradise.
After preparing the land, planting and trellising and adopting a low intervention approach we allowed mother nature to do its thing.
Pretty quickly our four acres grew to twelve, and in 2021 we pulled in our first major harvest, the Vineyard now produces around 30,000 bottles per year across a variety of superb, award winning still and sparkling wines.
Varieties
We took a lot of time to choose which varieties we wanted to grow. We knew that Seyval Blanc was a great, versatile variety that enjoys our climate and is used to create exceptional English Sparkling wines. So when we planted our first two vineyards in 2018 we planted Seyval Blanc along with Pinot Noir Précoce so that we could produce Sparkling white wine along with a Sparkling Rosé. Précoce translate as early meaning that variety of Pinot Noir ripens earlier than usual which is perfect for our climate.
Fast forward another year to 2019 and we had plans to plant a third vineyard. We are avid fans of still wines and were set on ensuring we had varieties that could produce beautiful English still wines so we aimed our sights on some varieties that would suit these plans. We decided to plant Solaris which creates a wonderfully crisp and refreshing white wine with notes of tropical fruits and a gorgeous citrus finish. We also planted Rondo on Vineyard three which is blended into our Divico variety to create our Rudge Heath red wine.
2020 saw us planting our fourth and final vineyard, we had heard great things about a Swiss variety called Divico, it seemed like a grape variety that could produce a heavy, full bodied red wine. Divico (along with our Solaris and Rondo varieties) is also a PIWI variety which is a German abbreviation used to describe a variety that is fungus resistant which requires very low intervention. We purchased 2 year old vines when we planted meaning we could harvest in 2021. Siegerrebe was also planted on vineyard four, we felt that the flavours would suit perhaps a single variety white wine or could provide some extra flavour to our Nurton Brook wine.
Our Solaris, Siegerrebe and Pinot Noir Précoce varieties are also used to create our Rosé wine which has notes of summer berries and is just a stunning summer tipple.
We have also made perfect use of our Pinot Noir Précoce not only in our rosé but it also makes our wonderful single variety Great Moor red wine. The flavours of ripe red berries, subtle earthiness and a hint of spice make this wine a perfect light, easy drinking red wine.
Our Artwork
We have always had a keen interest in art, especially St Ives 1950's artists such as Peter Lanyon and Terry Frost.
At the very start of our project we had a meeting with our marketing agency and met Stu Perry, their designer who would be working on our project who is also an extremely talented artist. He took inspiration from our interests, walked around our vineyard and had the perfect idea to get hold of some aerial plans of the land.
Stu used these to create original oil paintings for us, the artwork on our labels are taken from these original paintings.
We believe our labels are iconic and we feel each one suits the wine it was assigned to.