Be a Winemaker for a Day

One of our main goals here at London Cru is to make wine approachable to everybody. You can, of course, come down and take one of our Saturday afternoon tours. On the tour, we give you a behind the scenes look at what we do around here as well as some of the cracking wines we made this year. However, if you’ve ever harboured dreams of getting into the nitty-gritty of what it’s like to be a part of the actual winemaking process, you might want to look into our Winemaker for a Day sessions.

We recently had our first WMFAD session and it was not only sold out but a lot of fun! Guests were first given a rundown of the fundamentals of wine tastings, the components of wine, a tiny bit of wine science and the art of wine blending before being let loose to create their very own wine blend.

Two members of London Cru were on hand to help out with any questions or to give advice on how to achieve just the right blend. Once the blends were done, guests were led on a tutored tasting of London Cru’s wine (which were still in barrel at the time) before being presented with their very own blended wine to take home.

You can really work up an appetite doing all that blending so we include a two course lunch break with wine at The Atlas pub halfway through the day to keep you going.

Our First Tours

We’ve been open to the public for little over a month now and it’s been quite exciting here at the winery. We kicked off with our bi-monthly Saturday winery tours on November 9th and it proved to be a popular event. Gavin, our winemaker, happily took our guests around the winery, explaining the wine processes and all the equipment in a fun and informative way.

After a brief talk about the winery’s goings-on, we got down to the fun part where Gavin pulled out his pipette (not what you’re thinking, it’s a long thin glass pipe to withdraw wine from the barrels) and guests were able to sample the wine direct from the barrel. If you’ve never done it before, I can tell you, it’s a unique experience  to taste young wine. We weren’t able to sample all the wines from the barrel as we have to be careful we don’t open the barrels too often but there were other samples from the stainless steel tanks to try.

Adam Talks About the Winery

As well as the kick-off of our Saturday tours, we also inaugurated our first Winemaker For a Day class on November 25th. The class was full and great fun. Participants learned about the components of wine as well as the basics of blending before getting stuck in with their own single variety wines to blend them into a classic Bordeaux blend. At the end of the day, we took everyone’s recipe, blended them up in our lab, returned them to their rightful owners and sent everyone happily home to enjoy the fruits of that day’s labours.

We will be continuing with our tours in 2014 as well as the Winemaker For A Day classes and other such themed events. For more information, pop over to the events page or give us a call, 0207 381 7873.