For the second part of my Recent Wines for July 2026 we start off with a sparkling red from England, followed by a rather attractive white blend from Languedoc. After a spectacular new New Zealand red (or is it a dark Rosé?), we hit a Czech cider with its own wine angle. After a Hungarian red wine we finish with another English sparkling wine, although this one is sixteen years old.

If you wondered why I’m only putting up “Recent Wines” at the moment, it’s just summer folks. Following some brief trips abroad and the annual English road trip to see friends, family and music, we are now in visitor season here. This year everyone is trying to escape the southern heat. Some friends left on Monday, temperatures here being 17 degrees. It even rained that morning. They were returning to Kent, where on Monday night their phone app suggested it would be thirty. Anyway, I’ve a few juicy articles lined up, one I’ve been waiting to write for four-or-five weeks, but you’ll just have to wait a bit longer.

Fizzy Red 2025, Matt Gregory (Leicestershire, England)

Matt’s wines come in very small quantities and that often means by the time I write about one it is pretty hard to source. However, Fizzy Red is brand new label and I managed to get a bottle directly from Matt via someone who visited him just before release. This means there could be some of the 673 bottles he made of this still knocking around.

It’s what I see as a classic MG combo, Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris, co-fermented with indigenous yeasts, every other process commensurate with natural wine (barring any stray overspray by local arable farmers), including no added sulphur. Matt is brave, considering his location in the Leicestershire Wolds, but fortune favours the brave as they say. It so often does with Matt, perhaps because despite the vicissitudes of the East Midlands climate, it is at least windy, so a lot of disease doesn’t get a start, even when it’s humid.

Someone has named this “Leicestershire Lambrusco”. I won’t claim it was me but I’m tempted to keep using it. It is gently sparkling with dark, bosky, concentrated fruit and with that savoury and bitter finish the Italian’s do so well. It’s unfiltered and I chose to stand it up in the fridge for 24 hours before serving. I do sometimes like to go with the sediment in petnats etc, but here I felt I’d made the right call. This summer has seen us drink a few fizzy reds or dark pinks and I find them almost more summery than whites, with the summer fruit pudding vibe.

Matt’s agent is now Wines Under the Bonnet who are handling this. My bottle came up to Scotland with Matt from Spry Wines in Edinburgh, who tend to have a good selection of Matt Gregory’s wines. A good bet in England is Forest Wines, who may get some, or contact WUTB direct. It costs around £25. Go for it! You’ll have a lot of fun glugging it.

Faugères “Les Vignes du Puits” 2023, Bardi d’Alquier (Languedoc, France)

The original Domaine d’Alquier sits in the heart of Languedoc’s Faugères AOP. It has been a source for excellent red blends for a long time now, and white wines are now a welcome addition to the appellation. The domaine has been run by Sophie and Thibaud Bardi since 2018, originally in-tandem with Jean-Michel and Véronique Alquier, hence the amended domaine name as they transition to new ownership and identity.

The estate has always stood out in the region, not only for quality, but also as a source of excellent low intervention, or natural, wines. This white is a blend of Marsanne, Roussanne and Grenache Blanc from vines all over thirty years old, grown on the region’s now famous grey schist, all on hillsides. The grapes were partially destemmed and given a long and cold fermentation. After a direct press the wine was aged eight months on fine lees.

What you get is a super-tasty, savoury white wine with a schist-solid edge to it. Refreshing citrus acids lighten a balanced 13% alcohol. The palate has some medium-weight quince and pear, plus your usual garrigue herbs, though they don’t dominate. This will definitely age another year, maybe longer, but I loved its structure, and that edge it has.

This is another relative bargain I grabbed about a year ago from The Wine Society for £17, so don’t necessarily expect to find this 2023 anymore. I hope it comes back in. They do still list several wines from the estate.

Love Letters 2022, A Thousand Gods Wines (Marlborough, New Zealand)

Lauren and Simon, whose family names seem elusive, are a couple who have worked in Europe and the USA/Australia, and made wine for a decade with Fabien Jouves in Cahors, in Southwest France.  Based at Rolleston in Waihopai Valley, Marlborough, they work exclusively with a biodynamic grower to further the minimal intervention philosophy they absorbed working with Fabien, making wines under the “A Thousand Gods” label. This is a literal translation of the Occitan “miladiou” which is an exclamation of surprise (like the English expression “blimey”).

Love Letters is a crazy blend of Pinot Noir with Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc. It’s a dark Rosé with a light red vibe that is fully natural with no added sulphites. It both tastes and smells of red fruits, the palate adding some darker fruit notes and hibiscus (but I had been drinking hibiscus tonic around the time we drank this). It does hit 13.5% abv, yet despite this I’d argue it is a wonderfully summery wine, and in fact a wonderful wine full stop. An absolutely fantastic discovery.

This is a Modal Wines import, one of the fruits of their recent visit to NZ, and I’m very happy to have a couple more of their discoveries sitting at home. This bottle was purchased at Communiqué Wines in Edinburgh for around £34.

Play: lada dýda dádádá 2021, Utopia Cider featuring Milan Nestarec (Bohemia, Czechia)

This cider is made by Ivo Laurin and his wife, Eva. They moved from Prague to make cider, and now drinking vinegars, at an old 15^th Century fortified farm at Sudkuv Dul, in Southern Bohemia. They make authentic, natural ciders using both their own and local fruit, all from unsprayed trees, some of which are eighty years old. Fermentations happen long and slow, in old oak

The “Play” series are ciders with a wine co-ferment, this one co-fermented with Cabernet Franc skins from Milan Nestarec, who is a good friend of the Laurins. We have exactly the same philosophy here as with natural wine. Fermentations are on ambient yeasts, there is no filtration, and zero added sulphites, for example.

The colour is a lovely sunset pink. You get pure zesty apples on the nose, which is echoed on the palate, especially the freshness. You’d never guess this is a 2021 vintage. I had drunk a bottle at friends earlier this summer, buying my own bottle on the strength of that. I’d not even considered the vintage. The grape skins add lots more depth and a little complexity, though it really is that apple freshness that stands out.

Around £20 from importer Basket Press Wines. If they don’t have any left, try Forest Wines.

A Change of Heart 2022, Annamária Réka-Koncz (Eastern Hungary)

This 100% Kékfrankos (aka Blaufränkisch) varietal is made by Annamária from grapes grown in Mátra, Hungary’s second-largest wine region, situated in the Northeast, to the west of the River Tarna, and the once-famous Eger region, so in fact a way west of her base at Barabás, near the Ukrainian border. The grapes are organic and the same natural winemaking methods are used as with Annamária’s other wines.

The fruit sees a mix of carbonic fermentation and direct press, ageing taking place in stainless steel. The wine is bottled unfined/unfiltered with minimal added sulphites. From a distance the wine looks dark, like beetroot, but closer up it has a lovely warm magenta glow that is worth remarking on. The nose is very fresh, in the way that wines made from grapes grown on volcanic soils often are.

When I first began to drink so-called “volcanic wines” I used to say that they had a bouquet that smelt like iron filings. Of course, I’m not sure I can recall from my schooldays what, if indeed anything, wine filings smell of. It’s just an image which, for my own appreciation of the wine, seems to provide the visual image for the sensory experience. It may be a super power I have which is lacking in the naysayers of the “minerality” experience, a result of my artistic, not scientific, mind.

Anyway, after that initial freshness we begin to note a bit more complexity on the nose, the wine after all being four years old. Maybe it is reflecting the varied and complex soils and sub-strata of the andesite-rich geology of Mátra? No, that’s not possible…

The vats layer destemmed fruit and stems in alternate layers. The method seems to give the wine both fruit and more complex notes of earth and vegetation. In December 2025, when I last tried this ’22 at Hide in London, I said it tasted like a fine Beaujolais Cru, despite the very different grape varieties. It has even more complexity now but it hasn’t lost its vibrant cherry fruit and good sappy acidity. A lovely wine.

The importer, Basket Press Wines, from whom I tend to buy direct (as can anyone), are now onto the 2024, which I think they list for £32.

“The Trouble with Dreams” 2010, Sugrue Pierre (now Sugrue South Downs)(Sussex, England)

As I mentioned in Part 1, although these Recent Wines articles are usually full of the wines we drink at home, sometimes I’ll take a special bottle when we visit our best wine friends, and this is one such wine. It has been sat in my cellar for many years and I suppose with such wines I build quite a bond of affection, until the day arrives (which I know many of us keep putting off) when they must be opened.

Actually, giving up a bottle which you’ve nurtured for a decade or more is hard, and I’m as bad as anyone for hoarding wine. However, there comes a time, if we are lucky, that we sense the time is right to start drinking the family silver. I think that time has arrived for me. So long as the right people come to Scotland to share them.

In 2010 Dermot Sugrue was still Chief Winemaker at Wiston Estate. He only left in 2022, from which time he has worked under the label Sugrue South Downs. Whilst working for Wiston he also had his own side project, Sugrue Pierre. In 2006 he had planted a vineyard at Storrington Priory in West Sussex. He had hoped to make his first wine in 2008 but the crop was decimated by birds, hence the name he chose for this wine, The Trouble with Dreams. Since then, a second and larger site, further west, called Coldharbour Vineyard, has provided excellent fruit.

The first vintage was therefore 2009, but it was the legendary quality of the 2010 which was first to catapult Dermot to the very highest level, and since then he has achieved great things with the personal project he shares with his wife, near Lewes.

I had admired this 2010 after its release, never having tried the 2009. I selected one bottle of it for longer ageing because the only other English sparkling wine I could compare it to, in terms of thrills and excitement, was also a 2010, from the late Peter Hall at Breaky Bottom. I should add that TTWD 2010 did appear in the top-50 wines of 2014 in Decanter Magazine, that’s a worldwide top-50 out of 4,800 wines.

We have a classic blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier, the Chardonnay dominating at around 60%. This is a mature bottle with stone fruit, biscuit and nuts, but also a clean line of creamy lemon freshness and such lovely, refined, acids. That’s pretty good for a sixteen-year-old bottle of English wine. It’s very fine and astonishingly good. It must be up in the top dozen English sparkling wines yet made. Of course, the fruit was excellent, but this wine does assist in the suggestion that Dermot is a candidate for England’s best living winemaker. He’s also doing some wonderful work today, both with the fizz and with his still wines. I am currently looking out for a bottle of his strikingly-labelled Gamay/Meunier.

This was purchased from Butlers Wine Cellar in Brighton. As well as being great supporters of Breaky Bottom and English sparkling wine generally, they have also supported Dermot Sugrue from the off. They currently list the 2021 vintage of The Trouble with Dreams for £52.50.