Glassware

With a Kit's Coty from Chapel Down or a Gusbourne, you're rarely handed the narrow sparkling flute anymore. Experts now almost unanimously recommend a tulip glass with a wider bowl, the kind usually used for a full-bodied white wine. The reason lies in the long lees ageing. Traditional bottle fermentation, practised by almost every serious Kent producer, creates fine bubbles as well as toasty notes of brioche and roasted bread, and those aromas need room to properly unfold in the glass and give the wine more complexity. In a narrow flute, they stay trapped.

With still wines made from Bacchus, the opposite is true. The grape has an intense scent of elderflower, gooseberry and freshly cut grass, and that aroma dissipates almost instantly in too wide a bowl. A slim white wine glass that tapers slightly toward the top instead concentrates the aromas right where the nose can pick them up. The comparison with Sauvignon Blanc is no coincidence.

Straight from the fridge, Kent's sparkling wine is almost always too cold. Six degrees suppresses every hint of brioche and leaves only the acidity coming through. Eight to ten degrees shows considerably more, and just fifteen minutes out of the fridge is enough to get there. Bacchus tolerates a similar temperature, perhaps one or two degrees cooler than the sparkling wine.

The pour also deserves attention. A sparkling wine glass should only be filled up to its widest point, otherwise the foam spills over the rim the moment you pick up the glass. In a typical tulip glass, that amounts to barely a hundred millilitres. Above that, there's room left for the perlage and for the aroma, which releases from the glass only gradually.