Established in 2016 to bring innovation to the sparkling wine scene in England. Fitz is a sparkling wine made in England, created using the same production method as Prosecco to give a fresh fruit driven flavour and easy drinking style.
The winemaking process
The fruit is grown in cool climate England by Fitz's hard working and talented network of English farmers (some of who have been growing grapes in England for over 40 years).
Once the grapes have achieved optimum ripeness, they are harvested in the vineyard into a reusable container fleet then transported from the farms to Fitz's state of the art winery in Sussex. Immediate crushing once the fruit passes rigorous quality control procedures. The grapes are tipped, de-stemmed, crushed and then get introduced to a pneumatic press designed to prevent any oxidation of the must.
The juice is then gently transferred into a fully temperature-controlled tank farm ready for fermentation. Carefully chosen yeasts selected specifically to enhance the characteristics of the different grape varieties are added to the grape must. After that it’s all about time, monitoring the progress of the fermentation and maintaining the must at optimum conditions in order to bring about a successful primary fermentation. Once the batches of juice have successfully been turned into wine, it is tasted, profiled, filtered and blended to create the final base wine.
Once the base wine blend has settled and is ready to be made into fizz, it is transferred into Charmat tanks. A different yeast is chosen to showcase the fine flavours of the base wine and is introduced to the base wine in tank. Temperature and mixing regimes are carefully planned and monitored over this part of the process and the sensors on the tank measure the progress of pressure build up in the tank. Once the wine has reached its target pressure, the wine is chilled down in order to stabilise it and left to settle prior to bottling.