Terrible Tillingham

The owner of Tillingham Wines (who shall remain nameless, see next sentence) claims he wants to champion English minimal intervention wines. On the basis of these two wines I will not suggest he needs a serious intervention because there are laws in this country about incitement to commit violence.

Let us get this over with shall we? I assure you it is far more hideously repulsive for me than it than it will be for readers sensitive to disgusting imagery.

Two abysmal wines from TillinghamCol 2018, Tillingham

This is a standard Champagne-blend that has been made in an ancestral method (ie. undisgorged sparkling wine).

Pouring this has something of the jumentous piss-quality to it. If you put a glass under a horse with a kidney infection relieving itself you would get something as cloudy and bubbly as this.

It stinks. Some perverse blend of stale scrumpy, pongy brown ale that been left exposed to the elements in a glass for a couple of days to attract wasps and water from a pond that doubles as a sewage overflow. It is disgustingly volatile and prolonged exposure to the aroma brings a bad taste to the back of your mouth.

That hint of a vomit taste is strangely more appealing than the palate of this wine. Let me try and get it over with by saying it is vaguely like a mixture of rancid, sparkling, rough cider, and moudly bread that an attempt has been made to clean up using malt vinegar.

It expands and redefines the limits of horribleness that wine can express.

Pinot Blanc, Tillingham

There is no vintage on this wine. I would guess from the lot number (L-2018-7) that this is from 2018, but we just do not know. We are told this is made from, “Low density Pinot Blanc vines grown in Essex. Aged one third in oak casks, one third in qvevri (ceramic jars buried in the ground) and one third in stainless steel. Bottled with no filtration, fining or added sulphur.” This does not inspire confidence.

Pouring it is a similar infected urinary tract horse pissing in a glass-experience. It has re-fermented in the bottle – an appalling fault. It also smells in the rancid cider-meets-sewage spectrum.

The palate is a repellent blend of stagnant water and hydrochloric acid (which tastes of vomit, if, during your tender years, no one at your school ever topped your lemonade bottle up with the stuff they had purloined from the chemistry lab). The pH is so low (ie. the acidity-level is so high) I am almost impressed they managed to keep it filthy enough to referment.

Worse than Col 2018.


In my opinion, natural winemakers are conmen who use artsy labels and heavy bottles to trick people out of large sums of money to subject them to the dubious pleasure of drinking faulty wine.

These people have perverted the whole discourse on fine wine. I first wrote about the filthy micturition-merchants back in February 2012.

They have purposefully rejected all the advances made in winemaking over the past couple of hundred years. The sole reason for doing this is to swindle people with some pseudo-leftist bullshit into buying their badly made and invariably flawed wines.

This is the most conservative opinion I hold.

I am personally offended to have been presented with these travesties of wine with the expectation that I am stupid enough to do anything other than abuse them.

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