Graham Beck's first English sparkling wine launches in South Africa at R1 200 a bottle. We tasted it alongside a Chef Wandile pairing lunch at The Carnelian, Fourways.
Graham Beck’s first English sparkling wine, launched at a pairing lunch in Fourways. Picture: iStock
South African bubbly is world-class, so one wonders what would inspire an award-winning, respected brand to consider making it in someone else’s backyard. So, when cellar master Pierre De Klerk was asked how one makes English sparkling wine in Robertson, he had a ready answer. “Don’t worry, we just print the labels in English.”
The joke filled the room with warm laughter at an intimate lunch at The Carnelian at The Rock in Fourways, where Graham Beck introduced the 2018 vintage of its first sparkling wine made outside South Africa. The brand says this makes it the first South African Cap Classique producer to debut an English sparkling wine under its own label.
CEO Helen Kock framed the launch as a statement of intent rather than a novelty.
“It reminds us that we can honour our roots without being constrained by them,” she told guests, adding that the House remains “proudly South African” while engaging “confidently alongside other sparkling wines in the wider world.”
Why England?
According to De Klerk, the idea took shape at ProWein in Düsseldorf in 2016, when a Graham Beck team tasted its way through the English wines on show and heard a lecture on the geology of southern England. The chalk soils reminded them of Champagne, and they wanted a closer look.
The wine house didn’t buy land. Instead, it works with selected growers in Hampshire and West Sussex, sourcing individual parcels of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. These make base wines high in acidity, freshness and mineral character. De Klerk says English vineyard sourcing is “extremely tricky” and “extremely volatile”, with the weather able to wipe out a promising harvest overnight. The 2018 vintage, he said, was a bright spot in that history.
That acidity was the thread running through the afternoon. The base wines, De Klerk warned, are so sharp that “you better know a good dentist”. Graham Beck’s answer is patience, which means long ageing on the lees, which De Klerk estimated at north of six years.
Side by side
Guests were poured the Graham Beck English Sparkling Wine next to a Chapel Down for reference, a producer De Klerk described as one of England’s earliest and its second biggest. Both are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier blends, but the stylistic gap was the point. By De Klerk’s account, Graham Beck’s wine sits at 2.3 g/L of sugar (2.4 per the tasting brochure) and spent far longer ageing than its English counterpart. The Chapel Down reference sits at 8.5 g/L after 18 months.
When De Klerk asked the room for impressions, one guest put it neatly: great acidity, very Champagne-like, but “no sunshine in the glass”. De Klerk took it as the lesson of the project.
The lunch
The 2018 stayed at our elbows throughout the mostly seafood-based menu, curated by Chef Wandile Mabaso, which was paired with the House’s South African sparkling range. A first course of baked Mozambican kabeljou came with coconut and cauliflower purée, lime confit, black quinoa and a smoked fish jus. It was followed by otoro, the prized fatty tuna belly, with tobiko caviar, umfino purée, green pea, asparagus, artichoke barigoule and a shito mousse.
The main was grilled smoked chipotle chicken with saffron bulgur wheat, apple gastrique, baby beet, mint oil and a chicken and rosemary emulsion. Dessert was a nutty mille-feuille with pistachio crémeux, cranberry and Malibu sauce and hazelnut parfait.
Addressing guests at the start of his presentation, Mabaso admitted that the acidity of the wines on offer proved quite the challenge when curating the menu, but he tied the lesson he and his team learned back to the spirit of the day, quoting the wine house’s own line “mastery knows no bounds” in his speech.
The 2018 vintage is made in extremely limited quantities and launched in South Africa in September 2026 at a recommended retail price of R1 200 a bottle. The brand expects it to reach the UK in due course, with possible expansion into selected international markets.
Perhaps out of curiosity, I kept returning to my glass of the English Sparkling throughout the day and fully intend to give it another go, guided by Chef Mabaso’s instinctual fish pairing. Because there was something about the wine’s crisp freshness when paired with the prized fatty tuna belly.
