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English wine launched with own playlist
A new English wine brand which is aiming to offer a creative, design-led approach has launched a rosé with its own accompanying playlist.
The Heretics wines is sourcing grapes for its first vintages from Essex’s Crouch Valley, which the brand said was “being heralded as the future of English still wine” and has “ripeness levels higher than any other county in the UK”, it claims.
As part of its design-led approach, the new brand will release a “completely different” set of labels for each vintage rather than “churn out the same thing vintage after vintage”, it said. Potentially, it could even change the names of the wines too.
It will appoint a new young illustrator, photographer or designer for each vintage, with the first vintage using images from 22-year old photographer Louix Hunter, who describes his work as “images that tell stories”.
The product, called Blowhorn Rosé, is a 100% barrel fermented rosé in Burgundy barrels, and is made from 100% Pinot Noir grapes grown in the clay soils of the Crouch Valley. The brand says it has notes of wild strawberry, cedarwood and Seville Orange zest.
It is bottled in a black bottle to protect it from light strike and is sealed with Diam corks. The 2023 vintage in the UK came from a frost-free spring and a cool and wet summer with a mid-summer heat spike in September, delivering “the biggest and one of the lowest acid harvests of the last 20 years”, the producer said.
The Blowhorn Rosé is whole bunch harvested, destemmed with no crushing, and held on skins for four hours before gentle pressing, settling, and racking to 3rd, 4th and 5th fill Burgundy barrels. It is fermented in small batches using a variety of yeast strains to add complexity. It then goes through periodic lees stirring to build texture on a barrel-by-barrel basis, with the wine spending a total of five months in barrel.
The product is named after the truck featured on the label, taken from the back of a TukTuk in Jaipur in Rajastahn, photographed by Louix Hunter.
In addition, the bottle comes with a QR code linking to a playlist to accompany the wine, which you can see below.
Gareth Maxwell, “Chief Hustler” at the brand, and who has previously worked at a number of other English wine companies, such as Hattingley Valley, said: “We wanted to do something that English wine (or really, any wine) wasn’t. The labels being created by new, young creative talent and the links to music and fashion weren’t anything that we’d seen from anyone else. It’s all things that we love, and we thought that coupling that with our love of wine would appeal to the like-minded.
“We also wanted to do it all by ourselves, we don’t have big budgets, nor do we have anyone looking over our shoulder though, diluting what we do. That’s the way we like it and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
Jimmy Hunter, creative director added: “The yellow spray paint was designed to be provocative. I’ve always loved graffiti, and bringing that in with the bright yellow, we felt, gave it a huge standout. It also allowed us to use it to spray over traditional vineyard images. It was all about creating branding that looked cool, that would be noticed and, perhaps, more importantly, that would be the opposite of what everyone else is doing. We are heretics after all.”
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