Nyetimber hopes for vintage year as harvest begins
Harvest has kicked off for Nyetimber, and the English sparkling winemaker has its fingers crossed for a record-breaking year, thanks to 2025’s sunny spring and scorching summer.
Nyetimber CEO and owner Eric Heerema said he hoped 2025 to be a vintage year, meaning the winery will make some of its vintage-dated wines, such as Blanc de Blancs, Tillington Single Vineyard, and its 1086 by Nyetimber prestige cuvées.
This year, a warm spring was followed by the hottest UK summer on record, providing optimal conditions for sparkling winemakers. Speaking to the drinks business in August, Nyetimber head winemaker Brad Greatrix drew parallels with the record-breaking harvest of 2018. He said; “The cumulative heat to-date in this season is very similar, with flowering and veraison having happened at similar times; indicating that the harvest is likely to start earlier than normal.”
At the time, Cherie Spriggs, head winemaker at Nyetimber, said she was feeling “quietly optimistic” about the upcoming harvest, as long as Mother Nature remained on side.
And now, as harvest commences, that hope has turned into reality, with the quality of fruit proving similar to that of seven years ago.
Earliest harvest ever
Over the next two to three weeks, Nyetimber, which became England Rugby’s first sparkling wine producer earlier this month, will harvest 375 hectares of land across its eleven vineyards in West Sussex, Hampshire and Kent. This will yield around 2,000 tonnes of fruit (just over five tonnes per hectare), which should allow the winemakers to craft up to 1.8 million bottles of sparkling wine – nearly triple the number produced a decade ago in 2015.
Although the date of harvest is always influenced by changing weather conditions, the first day tends to take place around mid-October, making this year’s kick off of 24 September the earliest ever.
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Almost 500 pickers have travelled to Nyetimber’s vineyards to work the harvest. They tend to handpick up to 400kg of grapes per day, before emptying them into small baskets.
Harvest will be overseen by Nyetimber Spriggs and Greatrix; both of whom have led the winemaking at Nyetimber for almost two decades. Spriggs said that, while you could never get ahead of yourself in a cool climate, “we are entering this year’s harvest with an optimistic outlook and are looking forward to welcoming a dedicated team of pickers to our vineyards.”
Exciting times ahead
“The reputation of English sparkling wine is continuing to grow around the world. There is a lot of work to be done over the next two weeks, but this is a very exciting time of year for our team and we can’t wait to see what our vines have produced,” she added.
Heerema added that he’d seen a real variety of harvest over nearly two decades at the winery. “The South East of England can offer fantastic sparkling winemaking conditions, but it can also pose challenges,” he said. “It is wonderful, therefore, to know that 2025 will produce some outstanding wines.”
And it’s not just Nyetimber that’s feeling hopeful. Last month, English sparkling wine producers were unanimous in their high hopes for the 2025 harvest: At Black Chalk winery, Hampshire, winemakers told db they felt “incredibly confident” about this year’s vintage, which is expected to be the vineyard’s biggest harvest yet, and hopefully one of its best.
Tinwood Estate owner Art Tukker added: “2025 is shaping up to be one of the best harvests, in terms of quality, that we have seen for quite some time,” the vineyard’s owner Art Tukker told the drinks business. And Nick Wenman, owner of Albury Vineyards in Surrey Hills, felt the same: “It’s been an excellent year so far so we are very optimistic but until the juice is in the tank we have learnt not to get too excited.”
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