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Gutter&Stars
England5 wines4.1 avg
311
Cambridge's urban winery in the basement of Chesterton Mill, set up in 2020 by journalist-turned-winemaker Chris Wilson: small batches from bought-in Essex, Kent and Oxfordshire fruit, mostly in old French oak.
Chris Wilson started out as a music and newspaper journalist, writing for the Daily Mirror, The Observer and Jockey Slut, before going back to study winemaking at Plumpton College in Sussex in 2010. He has made wine in the Napa Valley, in Germany and in East Sussex, and he still writes about wine for Decanter, The Buyer and Harpers.
In 2020 he set up Gutter&Stars in the basement of Chesterton Mill, a Grade II-listed smock mill less than a mile from the centre of Cambridge that ground flour for the city's bakers from the late 1840s until 1955. The cellar is just 33 square metres, room for a rack of ex-Burgundy barrels, a handful of tanks and an egg-shaped fermenter from Germany, which it bills as the city's first winery.
Gutter&Stars owns no vines. Chris buys fruit the négociant way, from growers as close to Cambridge as he can find: above all in Essex: Missing Gate Vineyard and Creeksea Place in the Crouch Valley, plus Bromley Brook and Lion's Walk, with more from Kent and Oxfordshire. Most of the recent whites are fermented in old ex-Burgundy barrels, and the wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered, in runs of a few hundred bottles that, by the winery's own account, sell out quickly.
