Wallgrow Riesling 2024

Wallgrow is the block the name comes from. It sits at the top of the estate where the drystone wall runs along the ridge, and the stonecrop — the succulent, Sedum acre — grows out of the wall’s south face in a yellow line every June. There is thirty centimetres of soil up there in the good places. In the bad places there is slate and an opinion.

Riesling is the only thing we would plant in it. The vines root straight into the fracture lines, which means they find water in a drought and almost nothing in a wet year, and the fruit arrives with an acidity that looks like a misprint until you taste it.

Three passes

We pick Wallgrow three times over four days, which costs roughly twice what one pass costs and is the single most expensive habit on the estate. The reason is that the top of the block ripens eleven days before the bottom, and a block picked in one go is an average of two wines neither of which you wanted.

The first pass is the high rows, for acid and for the green-stalk note. The second is the body of the block. The third is the frost-shadowed corner behind the barn, which is always last and always the most aromatic thing we put in the tank.

In the glass

Dry. Three grams of sugar is a rounding error against 8.2 of acid, and the wine reads as completely dry to everyone who has ever tasted it in the room. Quince that has been sitting on a windowsill, lime pith rather than lime juice, and underneath it the wet-slate thing we cannot describe any better than that after thirteen vintages.

It is a wine that gets better the less you do to it. No decanting, no big glass, nothing warmer than ten degrees.