English sparkling wine magnum beats champagne in global award
Champagne has long been the choice to mark life's greatest moments, but connoisseurs believe English sparkling wine is in prime position to compete after it beat the French fizz to a prestigious international award.
Sugrue South Downs' The Trouble with Dreams 2009 has become the first sparkling wine magnum to be crowned as one of the top 50 wines in the world at the Decanter World Wine Awards 2025.
The white sparkling wine from Sussex took home a Best in Show medal, something champagne has never achieved in the 1.5L bottle format (the equivalent of two standard 750ml bottles).
Amongst the other sparkling wine magnums in the running was a £598 per bottle champagne, Henriot's Cuvé 38 Edition 6 Blanc De Blancs Brut, which received a Platinum medal, one down from Best in Show.
The judges said: 'Our competition has been open to champagne magnums for the last three years, while this year we opened the competition to sparkling wine magnums from all origins. And guess what? It's an English sparkling wine that's the first to find its way in magnum to our Best in Show selection, not a champagne.'
Dermot Sugrue, founder and winemaker at Sugrue, told The Times: 'It's no longer what has become a slightly outdated narrative of England versus champagne when it comes to sparkling wine. Now it's England and champagne, because we really are on the world stage, beside champagne and the other best sparkling wines in the world.'
His wineis made from a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes. The 2009 vintage's 600 bottles are sold out, but were selling for £185 with sales limited to one magnum per customer.
Sugrue, who has been making wine at the highest level for 23 years and has spent time in Champagne, said: 'Bottling sparkling wine in magnums is almost like the zenith of what you can achieve quality wise, because magnums have got the ability to age in a wonderful way.'
He said the win demonstrates the 'ageability' of their wines. It's a matter of being 'very, very patient and having confidence that we're using the correct vintage to age for a long time', he said.
What sets The Trouble With Dreams apart is Sugrue's 'attention to detail', he added.
The magnum is from Sugrue's first vintage of The Trouble With Dreams. The previous year should have been the first but the grapes were devoured by birds, prompting the name.
Sugrue said the name also resonates with the challenges of making wine in the UK, a 'marginal climate for winemaking' where global warming in recent decades has allowed these types of wines to flourish.
Ronan Sayburn, a master sommelier and one of the five co-chairs of the awards, said the magnum is 'generally regarded as a better format for sparkling wine'.
The UK broke its record for total medals awarded, with 188 medals including two Platinum, six Gold, 80 Silver and 99 Bronze. This was up from 186 medals last year, when Chapel Down's Rose Brut was the first UK sparkling rose to achieve a Best in Show, and 143 in 2023.
The awards saw wines from 57 countries evaluated by 248 top international wine experts.
France took home the most Best in Show awards with 14, followed by Italy with six and Portugal and Spain with five. The UK was on a level with New Zealand, South Africa and Slovenia with one Best in Show. China was amongst those to pip us to two of the top accolade.
Sayburn said a mixture of time, allowing the vines to age, global warming, and the increasing skill and experience of UK winemakers has led to the production of 'world-class wines'.
'Maybe 15 years ago English wine was a bit of a joke, but people take it very seriously now,' he said.
'In places like America they are absolutely going desperate to get English sparkling wine. It jumped in there as a category above Cava and Prosecco and just under Champagne.'
Sayburn cites the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 2011, the late Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee in 2012, and the 2012 London Olympics for giving English sparkling wine 'a big boost'.
Looking to the future, 'the only way for English sparkling wine to go is up', he said. He pointed out that some Champagne vineyards were established a thousand years ago while it's only in the last 50 years that they are emerging in the UK.
'So it may take a hundred years to really get the best sites,' he said.
The south of England is well-established as the most successful area in the UK for wine growing, but this year the first medals for North Yorkshire came from Dunesforde with a bronze for their Queen of the North Brut 2020, a sparkling white, and their Pinot Gris 2022, a still white.
Ian Townsend, owner of Dunesforde, said they planted Pinot Gris in 2016 'as a bit of an experiment' encouraged by records of the Romans producing wine in northern England 2,000 years ago.
'We're testing the boundaries,' he said. 'It gets riskier and riskier the further north you go.'
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