Mousehall / Tidebrook

Mousehall sits between Mayfield and Wadhurst in East Sussex. Gary and Kathy Jordan, who own Jordan Wine Estate in South Africa, found the property run-down and rebuilt it. Their daughter Christy Jordan is the winemaker.

The Tidebrook stream runs through the property and gives the wines their name.

First harvest in 2022

2022 was Mousehall’s first vintage, what they call the Maiden Vintage. The wines we import come from a young estate, but one made by people who have run a winery for thirty years somewhere else.

In 2026 the Staddle Stone Chardonnay 2023 took Platinum and 97 points at the Decanter World Wine Awards, the first English still chardonnay to do so.

The soil is sandstone, not chalk

This is worth stating plainly, because it is often reported wrongly: the soil at Mousehall is sandstone, greensand and clay. It says so verbatim on the producer’s fact sheets for all four wines.

English wine is usually explained by the fact that southern England shares the chalk formation that runs under Champagne. That holds for parts of Sussex and Kent, but not here.

The vineyards face south and sit between 22 and 80 metres above sea level, depending on the parcel.

The Champagne parallel is weather, not stone

The producer’s own harvest report compares the two places on climate, and the numbers are specific: Sussex has 30 to 50 frost days a year against Champagne’s 60 to 80, and slightly more rainfall. Budburst comes about a week earlier, flowering a week later, and picking two to three weeks later than in Champagne.

It is that long, cool ripening that gives these wines their acidity, not the geology.

The wines

The Chardonnay is fermented and aged for ten months in 228-litre French oak barrels, with a portion of tank-fermented wine blended in. The Pinot Noir spends ten months in the same type of barrel. The Pinot Gris and the rosé stay on the lees in stainless steel.

The rosé is called Six Petals after the hexafoils in the medieval buildings on the estate, six-sided marks scratched into the timber to keep evil out.

Most of the wines carry PDO Sussex. The Pinot Noir 2022, however, is labelled Wine of England, so it pays to check the appellation per wine and vintage rather than per producer.

We import them because they show what still English wine can be when experienced winemakers work in a cool climate.