Description
Wine tasting dinner with Albourne Estate
Friday 16th February
7.30pm
About Albourne Estate
Albourne Estate is a family-owned vineyard and winery overlooking the beautiful South Downs, just 8 miles from Brighton in the heart of the Sussex countryside. They craft small quantities of award-winning still and sparkling English wine using only their own sustainably grown grapes. The estate was established in 2010 by husband-and-wife team, Alison Nightingale and Nick Cooper, and has rapidly established itself as an innovative and quality-led English producer at the forefront of this rapidly growing industry. Following a career in marketing, Alison took a step back in 2004 and with two young children completed a Viticulture & Enology degree at Plumpton College, before searching for their own site to establish a vineyard in England. After a lengthy search they came across Albourne Farm, just 5 minutes from where they lived in Hurstpierpoint, with the perfect combination of location, geology and buildings.
Over the past 13 years they have established the vineyard, a winery and a stunning Tasting Room. From winning ‘UK Wine of the Year’ in 2015 with a Bacchus wine from the second ever harvest, the range, quality and reputation of Albourne Estate wines has grown to include traditional method sparkling wines, white, rosé and red still wines and one of the first English Vermouths. The bottle labels are printed on recycled paper and feature some of the wildlife seen around the vineyard and winery, which represents their sympathetic approach to the environment. Since their first vintage Albourne has used 100% green energy in the winery and throughout the estate, in part supplied by their own array of 159 solar panels. They are firmly committed to ‘best practices’ in vineyard management and winery processes as they strive to reduce their carbon footprint further to become a carbon neutral business by 2025.
Alison continues to manage the day-to-day running of the Estate and lives on-site with Nick and her three daughters, two dogs, four pygmy goats, four sheep, six chickens and a cat!
