‘English wine has been underserved…until now’

In an exclusive interview, the technical director of new wine laboratory Campden BRI, shares why the facility is plugging a major gap in the English wine industry. 

In September 2024 the ribbon was cut on an unassuming-looking wine lab in Guildford, Surrey. Its modest size and appearance belies the serious investment behind it (£4million to £5m and counting), and its big ambitions to leapfrog English wine further up the quality ladder.

No expense has been spared in kitting out the Campden BRI facility with the latest high spec wine analysis tech. One machine – an automated dispensing robot with inbuilt spectrophotometer – cost £65k to buy from its manufacturer in The Netherlands. The piece of kit analyses colour, phenolic compounds, and other important chemical components, and, crucially, has the deciding vote in whether or not a winery is granted approval for English PDO or Sussex PDO status.

Wine chemist royalty

Ahead of its opening last year, Campden also managed to lure over wine chemist royalty Robert ‘Bob’ Pride, from Australia to lead the team. He comes with quite the CV. Having served eight years under Barossa producer Yalumba, he has also completed stints with Pinnacle Drinks, part of the Endeavour Drinks Group, and held the influential role of technical assessor for Australia’s accreditation body, the National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA).

“You won’t find anyone in the UK with the same knowledge of analysis as Bob,” explains Dunn.

Why go to such effort and expense? It’s all part of a bid to bring English wine up to par with its global competitors.

“The English wine industry has been underserved when it comes to lab analysis…until now,” Dr Gregory Dunn, industry development and technical manager, Campden BRI, tells db. “England is a tiny part of the global wine industry but we need to serve it. There’s a lot of learning to be done in the UK wine industry about lab analysis.”

According to Pride, the UK could do worse than learn from Australia. Explaining why quality control is so vital down under, he says: “Australians tend not to complain about a wine, they just won’t drink it again.”

Rubber stamped

Put simply, if you’re working in English wine, you’re going to have to go through Campden BRI to get your wines rubber stamped. As well as being the only facility allowed to grant PDO status, the lab is also the sole supplier of VI-1 export certificates for English wines bound for Europe.

“We are the gatekeepers for UK wine that leaves this country,” explains Dunn.

This gatekeeping involves everything from checking the ABV of a wine — “There’s big money attached to not getting this wrong,” says Dunn — all the way through to measuring sulphur, bacteria, yeast and mould, cold and heat stability and pressure for sparkling wines.

Analysts at the Campden lab can also also detect any allergens, toxins or pesticides present in a wine. “If  someone sprays the wrong thing and the product is picked up in France it can damage the reputation of English wines,” says Dunn.

Shelf life analysis

One of the key pieces of analysis that major UK retailers including Sainsbury’s, the Co-op and Bibendum request from Campden is shelf life analysis to ensure that wines in stores are up to scratch. But despite the sophisticated level of tech inside the laboratory, Pride’s team of analysts still have to physically visit supermarkets and load up a trolley with wines in order to test them.

“Wines on sale in the UK aren’t legally obliged to undergo this analysis. It’s up to individual retailers whether they choose to go down that route,” Dun explains. “But it’s important we retrieve the wines ourselves directly from the shelf to make sure that what we’re testing is what consumers are taking home and drinking. People always say to me “oh, you look like you’re having a good night” when I wheel out a huge trolley full of loads of wine!”

Shaker machine

Campden is one of the few places that offers accelerated shelf life testing for wine in the UK. It does so using a “shaker” machine that simulates the movement of a lorry to see how wine will respond during the journey to a retailer and how the liquid might be impacted. “The machine speeds up the oxidation process,” says Pride. “We also expose the wine to UV light to help us predict what a product’s shelf life will be. A reasonable shelf life is at least 12 months, but an individual producer or retailer might be happy with just six months if it’s a particularly fast moving product.” On the flip side, “some might want up to 36 months”.

Analysts then report back to the retailer on their findings. “We might say ‘we detected x, y and z at 12 months but at six months it was fine’,” says Pride. The onus is then on the producer/retailer to figure out how to rectify the issue, though Campden does offer advice and consultancy on solutions if desired.

With light strike a concern for some retailers, Pride and his team place bottles of wine in a UV light fridge for 24 hours and check how the contents fares. “Light strike can be unpredictable, it’s hard to know when it’s going to occur,” he says, but it can be a sensible option to analyse a product prior to it arriving on shelf.

Cash saver

“All wine samples are analysed at 20 degrees so we can control as many variables as possible,” explains Pride. “We also regularly compare our own analysis against the findings from other labs to make sure it stands up.” This he does via a partnership with the Australian Wine Research Institute, which has labs all over the world. Analysts in each of these labs “test the same samples during the same week,” explains Pride, and then compare notes.

Faults are a key part of what the Campden BRI lab does, but it’s not the full scope by any means. Companies come to Campden when the shit hits the fan and they need a solution fast. Dunn reveals that one insurance company recently contacted the lab as “they’d had a container of thousands of bottles of Champagne freeze on its way into the UK and some of the bottles had burst. They wanted to know whether the non-broken bottles were still viable to sell,” he says. The analysts were able to ascertain that the wines “absolutely could still be sold.”

In this way, the lab’s work frequently saves major players in the wine world significant sums of cash.

Doubling down

And while wine is the main thing analysed by the team, testing is occasionally carried out on grapes (to measure Brix, for example, or assess for smoke taint) as well as winery environments to ascertain why a certain fault may keep appearing in the wines. “We sent off four bottles this week for a winery that’s worried about TCA,” Dunn shares.

New packaging formats, too, come under the spotlight, with the team having recently analysed a new bottle made from pulp to see how the material will impact the liquid inside. As if the team’s to-do list wasn’t long enough, Campden also offers a training programme through The Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA) to teach vintners the basics on faults and taints. “Provided regions can put 15 people in front of us we’ll train them on the basic issues,” says Dunn.

If all goes well during the lab’s first year of operation further facilities could be rolled out across the UK, and the world.

“Eventually we might expand our international footprint,” says Dunn.

But for now it’s hoped that this sizable investment in the English wine industry will pay dividends in terms of what ends up in the final consumer’s glass.

 

 

 

 

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