No amount of winery tours prepares you for the hands on hard labour of winemaking.
I spent three weeks this year working harvest at Chapel Down, the UK’s largest English wine producer in Kent.
This was how I proudly celebrated ten years at Edelman. With that extended service we receive a long service award, ten days of extra holiday. While most people head to the beach or explore new cities, I wanted to immerse myself in the world of wine. Sparkling wine is my passion, and although I’d studied it, I’d never experienced a real harvest.
My best friend, Tom, part of the winemaking team at Chapel Down, invited me to join him as one of the Harvest interns. An offer I couldn’t refuse.
2025 was a near perfect year for growing grapes.
2025 was one of the best UK harvests yet: warm, dry weather, record sunshine and beautifully clean, ripe fruit. Sunshine and heat are vitally important to ripen grapes, this combination of conditions saw increased sugar development, lower acids, riper fruit flavours and softer tannins. Dry conditions means very little disease - such as grey rot - in the vineyard, providing higher yields of clean, healthy fruit leading to higher quality wine.
2025 vintage English wines will be riper, rounder, richer. Expect more tropical and stone fruit notes, like mangos, nectarines, honeydew melons and boldness in the wines - simply put more interesting flavours going on in the end product. Make a note of this vintage, English wines are going from strength to strength and 2025 is going to be special.
What did I do?
Winemaking is not easy, it’s technical, patient work - and 90% cleaning. Tanks, barrels, presses, floors, grape bins: everything gets washed, sanitised, scrubbed or swept. The rest is the fun part: adding yeast, measuring sugar, transferring juice between tanks, and monitoring fermentation across more than 120 tanks (some up to 50,000 litres).
Integrated into the 20 strong team of harvest interns, the winery operates 24hrs a day during harvest. It’s a beehive of activity - everyone working independently but also smoothly as a team. This camaraderie certainly one of the greatest parallels between my role at Edelman, leading up to a major event or PR launch, and within the winery.
I helped in the onsite Lab where sugar and acid levels in the grapes is tested. I manually crushed grape samples; all 13 varieties grown across the estate and sourced from specialist growers are tested for ripeness to know when to pick. It’s a balancing act, the sugars need to be high but not too high and the acids low but not too low.
I visited some of the 400 hectares (1,000+ acres) of vineyards and I was blown away by the scale, seeing rows upon rows upon rows of vines over Kits Coty, one of the best vineyard sites in the UK on beautifully white chalk soil. A view you’d expect in France or Italy but it was a pinch me moment to overlook the rolling hills of home.
One of my most memorable moments was filling barrels for oak aged Bacchus - Kits Coty Bacchus 2025. Using the barrel spear to fill the barrels to the perfect height - 94% full - required real skill and it took me a few goes to master it. The wine rose really fast and crescendoed up far above my head, a volcano of grape juice covering me head to toe three times. My initiation complete!
I touched pretty much every blend of the 2025 vintage. My three weeks in the winery were reminiscent of the total length of the champagne harvest but here in the UK this extends to mid October in 2025. Brave are the souls who give their all to make what we thought could never be possible; make great wine in the UK. I am incredibly proud to be part of this burgeoning young industry, to make it award winning and put it on the map globally.
My reflections on this once in a lifetime experience
Sparkling wine is an investment of time, money and patience. The 2025 fruit we pressed will be released as still wine next year but the sparkling will spend at least 18 months in bottle for secondary fermentation to create the bubbles and develop flavour, due to be released from spring 2028. The more special and premium sparkling wines are aged for longer, it will be Christmas 2029 at the earliest for these wines, and for some it will be more than a decade! There will be some time to wait before trying my final wines.
There’s something cathartic being so hands-on with the making of a food and beverage product. Through my actions a beautiful cuvée was made - the romanticism certainly not lost on me. In fact, it captured my imagination and I appreciate every single glass from now on knowing the sheer effort and number of hands it takes to get the fruit from the vine and into your glass, the finished product.
Having time for reflection and perspective away from the laptop to realise how special and warranted the work we do really is - without strong successful marketing, differentiating a food and beverage product is impossible.
In my first interview for the role as an Account Manager in the Brand practice, I was told “Edelman is a place full of incredibly intelligent people with entrepreneurial spirit” and they weren’t wrong. Thats to say if you want something, you can do it but you absolutely need to drive it yourself. Be motivated. Rally your stakeholders. Plan ahead in good time and you absolutely can do what I have done. These opportunities are possible. Make sure you’ve given thought to how you’ll make it work for your clients and your team, think of the skills you’ll develop as a result of your experience and have a supportive team behind you. All credit to my brand team and line manager - thank you.
This was my once in a lifetime chance to live a dream, and thanks to the team at Chapel Down and Edelman I lived it, and absolutely loved it. I’ll raise a glass to that.
Annabelle Torr is an associate director in the London Brand team.