The Sommly Blog
Dispatches from the UK wine scene.
My fridge currently has a bottle of Grenache in it. Has done since Tuesday, when I read about the "Refresh Your Wine" campaign Côtes du Rhône quietly launched in the UK market this week, aimed squarely at getting younger drinkers to treat their reds, whites, and rosés the same way they'd treat a cold lager on a hot afternoon.
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Deptford gets a proper wine bar before most of Central London has worked out what Alta Langa is. That's not a dig at anywhere, just a fact worth sitting with for a moment.
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The bottle had been in the fridge since Tuesday. By Friday, when I finally opened it, I'd half-convinced myself I'd ruined it.
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The vines at Nyetimber's West Chiltington estate are about three weeks ahead of where they were at this point last year. That's not a rumour or a hopeful projection from a PR email. It's the kind of thing growers are actually saying out loud, which they rarely do in June.
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A magnum of English sparkling wine just beat everything else at the Decanter World Wine Awards. Every Champagne, every Crémant, every Cava, every prestige cuvée from every country that entered. On June 23, 2026, the judges gave Best in Show to a magnum-format English sparkling, and I think that's going to take a while to sink in for people who still reach for a French label by reflex.
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The wine that finally got a perfect hundred from Tim Atkin MW isn't a Bordeaux. It isn't a Burgundy. It's a Malbec from Gualtallary, a high-altitude sub-zone in Mendoza sitting at around 1,500 metres, and on June 17, 2026, Atkin published what his score sheet had never shown before: 100 points for an Argentine wine.
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Forty years ago, planting Gamay in England would have got you laughed out of the room. Last Thursday, a Gamay won a top award at the WineGB Awards 2026.
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The bottle of Chablis on your local wine bar's list by-the-glass might be about to get a lot more expensive. Or it might not happen at all. That's roughly where things stand right now, and the uncertainty alone is enough to cause real problems.
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The Penedès DO in Catalonia certified its last conventional vineyard out of the appellation on June 11, 2026, according to Wine Enthusiast. Every single one of its roughly 27,000 hectares under vine is now farmed organically. No other wine region of comparable size has managed this.
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The festival programme went live on June 8, 2026, and if you haven't looked at it yet, you're probably already behind on tickets.
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The first reply to our first batch of Sommly Shelf cold emails told us we had got a wine wrong. What actually happened, and what we changed.
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The number that caught my eye was buried in the middle of Defined Wine's 2025 vintage report, published on June 1st: for the first time, still wine production at a leading UK contract winery is matching, and in some categories beating, sparkling. Not nudging closer. Actually rivalling it.
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