The vertical
One law, read at six ages
A wine’s colour is a clock. Young reds are blue-purple; as they age the pigment binds, browns and settles, so the hue turns from violet toward brick, garnet and finally amber. Our range is that arc, poured out in order.
Chalk Bacchus sits off the arc: a white carries no anthocyanins, so its colour never travels. The exception →
The estate
Forty acres of chalk, one family
Marledon sits on a south-facing shoulder of the Ledbourne Vale, where a thin soil over deep chalk gives small crops and slow ripening — the conditions England makes its best wine on. The family planted the first Pinot Noir here in 1979 and has farmed it since.
We work forty acres by hand, pick late, and press gently. Everything is grown, made and bottled on the estate, and most of it is drunk within a few miles of it.
More about the estate →
Why the colour turns
A wine browns as it ages, and it does it in order
The purple of a young red comes from anthocyanins — free pigments that hold a blue edge at wine’s acidity. Time binds them to tannin into larger, steadier molecules, and the wine slowly browns. So the hue rotates from violet toward brick, then garnet, then tawny, while the colour loses its brightness.
Nothing on this site invents that path. Every wine here is shown in the colour its age actually produces — which is why the range reads, left to right, as one long turn.
Come and taste
The cellar door is open Thursday to Sunday
Walk the vineyard, taste the vertical from nouveau to library, and take a bottle home. Tastings are led by the family, £15 a head, redeemed against anything you buy.
From the journal
Notes from the estate
- The cellar
Reading a wine by its colour
Tilt the glass against a white cloth and look at the rim. The colour there is the closest thing wine has to a birth certificate.
- Vintage
The 2024 harvest, in one long week
A cool summer and a bright September gave us small bunches, high acidity, and the latest pick we have done in a decade.