the winery

Chapel Down boasts a state of the art winery and produces all wines on the estate, both still and sparkling.

The grapes are hand-picked and transported to the winery in small bins. They are gently tipped into one of our modern membrane presses and the resultant juice fractions are collected in stainless steel tanks. All still wines and sparkling base wines are fermented with selected yeast strains at cool temperatures for up to 3 weeks. Some maturation of sparkling base wines and red wines occurs in French and American oak barriques. These wines are topped and tasted regularly throughout their maturation to ensure freshness and homogeneity. The wines are then racked, blended, stabilised and filtered before bottling.

Our sparkling wines spend up to 3 years on lees, “sur lie” as part of our house style. After the desired period of maturation the bottles are hand transferred to our modern Gyro pallets for riddling. The riddled wines are disgorged on our new bottling line and packed and labelled.

Chapel Down’s modern winery enables our winemakers to produce smart, varietal and fresh wines that display the best of our English Vineyards. It is our aim to produce the best wines in the UK.

Chapel Down conducts guided tours of the winery and vineyards. One of our expert guides will show and explain the winemaking, riddling, disgorging and bottling processes. It is an experience not to be missed.