Oz Clarke and Tom Surgey Taste Our Wines
If you know English wine, you know the names Oz Clarke and Tom Surgey. This year, they came to Nun Monkton to taste ours.
Both are judges on Oz & Tom's English Wine Heroes 2026, a national competition that puts English wines in front of two of the country's most respected critics. We entered three wines this year: our Pinot Noir 2025, our Solaris Orange 2025, and our Vintage Sparkling White 2021. All three came back with tasting notes. Two of them, the Pinot Noir and the Solaris Orange, were tasted on site, on camera, with Oz and Tom stood right there among the vines.
This isn't a paid partnership. It's independent recognition from two people whose job is tasting wine for a living, and we're chuffed with what they had to say.
Oz Clarke tastes the Pinot Noir
Growing Pinot Noir in Yorkshire is not the easy option. It’s a fussy grape even in Burgundy, and asking it to ripen properly in a cool English climate is a genuine test of a vineyard’s patience. Oz clearly rated what he found in the glass:
“Wines of this quality coming out of Yorkshire tells you everything you need to know about how fast English wine is moving.”
“I think it’s so Yorkshire, isn’t it?”
The written judge’s note for the same wine backs it up:
“A bright coloured, lively red with cranberry, redcurrant jelly and rosehip tension… Brilliant that Yorkshire is already making tasty red, of this quality today. Bravo!”
If you’d like to try the wine that got Oz talking, you’ll find our Pinot Noir online, or come and taste it for yourself on a vineyard tour.
Pinot Noir
A light bodied, smooth acidity wine with delicious flavours of red cherry and raspberry producing a long lasting fruit finish
A Proper Moment
Having Oz stand in the vineyard and taste the Pinot Noir straight from the bottle was a proper moment for us. You spend years wondering if a grape like this will ever really work in Yorkshire, so hearing him say it out loud, on our own patch of ground, meant a lot.
Tim Spakouskas
Tom Surgey tastes the Solaris Orange
Orange wine still catches people out. It’s a white wine grape (Solaris, in our case) left in contact with its skins the way you’d make a red, and it throws up a colour and a texture most people haven’t tasted before. Tom got straight to the point:
“It’s orange in colour, it’s orange by name, smells like orange.”
“These are wines that are made in a delicate way, conscientious way. It’s a very, very lovely thing, delicate with a bit of Yorkshire heft.”
The written note picks up the same thread:
“The joy of this wine lies where the skinsy grip meets the racy natural acidity. Vibrant orange pith, peach skin and persimmon reach perfect harmony in the glass.”
Fancy something a bit different in the glass? Our Solaris Orange Wine is the one Tom tasted, and it tends to sell through a batch at a time, so it’s worth grabbing while it’s in stock.
Solaris Orange Wine
Orange wine, also known as skin-contact white wine, skin-fermented white wine, or amber wine, is a type of wine made from white wine grapes where the grape skins are not removed, as in typical white wine production, and stay in contact with the juice for days or even months. This contrasts with conventional white wine production, which involves crushing the grapes and quickly moving the juice off the skins into the fermentation vessel.
This produces a rich, deep colour and flavour, this wine can be enjoyed on it's own, but pairs well with a cheese board or pasta dishes.
A Real Vote of Confidence
You put a lot of trust in the skins when you make a wine like this, you're letting go of control in a way you don't with a normal white. Having someone with Tom's palate pick up on that straight away was a real vote of confidence.
Gillian Spakouskas
A third wine, a third note
Our Vintage Sparkling White 2021 wasn’t filmed on the day, but it received a tasting note all the same, and it deserves its place in this story too:
“A fresh, firm, rightly self-confident sparkler. Tense and electric, baked green apple, lively lemon acidity… Feels properly ‘English’ in its character.”
If sparkling wine is your thing, take a look at our full sparkling range!
Sparkling White Wine
Our multi award-winning sparkling white wine is made using 100% Seyval Blanc grapes which produces a beautifully rounded easy to drink sparkling wine with white blossom & biscuit overtones.
This delicate white sparkling wine is made in the traditional method of second fermentation in the bottle to capture its sparkle and produce a quality flavour.
2025 Award Wins: Best Estate Grown and Made Sparkling Wine, WineGB Midlands and North.
2024 Award Wins: Gold Medal Glass of Bubbly Awards 2024, WineGB Midlands and North Silver Medal and The Egaltine trophy for best Sparkling White.
Other awards: Mercian Vineyard Association Awarded Best Sparkling Wine Trophy 2014, Best Older Vintage Trophy 2014 & Gold Medal.
Suitable for vegetarians.
Size - 750ml
Alcohol content - 11.0%
If you’d like to see more from Oz and Tom, they cover English wine on their Wine Alive Youtube Channel, with tastings and visits from vineyards across the country. Their Wine Heroes 2026 book, featuring the notes and photography from this visit, lands in October, so keep an eye out for that too.
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