AN INTERVIEW WITH... WILLIAM LOWE MW
A wine making innovation
Nisha Hartelius interviews William Lowe MW, the world’s first Master Distiller and Master of Wine and co-founder of Fractal. “Today’s traditions are just yesterday’s innovations” William Lowe MW is no stranger to innovation. His gin producing and supplying company Cambridge Distillery, which he runs with his wife Lucy, regularly pushes boundaries and creates new gins of world class quality, winning international awards along the way. So when he and a winemaker friend, now at Defined Wine, decided to collaborate on a venture you knew something interesting was going to happen.
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What is unique about how Fractal Wine is made? We came across the idea for Fractal by accident. Several years ago we started a company to make English sparkling wine from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier grapes sourced from the best sites around England. We were tasting our base wines in a blending session and kept being blown away by their quality, but we struggled because our intention was to make a sparkling wine, not a still. In the end we decided to go with it so in addition to our sparkling wine, which will be released in about four years, Fractal Wine was born. However, we wanted to push the innovation one more step. To us, today’s traditions are just yesterday’s innovations. With sparkling wine production in mind we took the still base wine and put a proportion of it through secondary fermentation in bottle. We took some sparkling wine and blended it back, putting parts of it through oak and the remaining in stainless steel. The result was a multi-varietal, multi-vintage and multi-regional wine that has a spectrum of complexity. Our obsession is quality, not as a marketing tool, but as something that is measurable and definable in our wine.
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Why was your first wine sold as a pair of bottles? We did this so one bottle can be opened now and the other in five years’ time. The reason is twofold, firstly so you can compare and contrast the wines evolution and secondly because we do not make paperweights, we make drinks and the idea of making a wine that cannot be opened and engaged with straight away is heartbreaking. We do not want to describe the profile of the wine, except to say it has the steely acidity you would expect in English wine, but we would like for you try it yourselves and let us know your thoughts. What does the name Fractal Wine mean? The name is a play on chaos theory, mathematical algorithms that play out like the butterfly effect. That is how we see Fractal Wine, the intersection between chaos and precision. Our grapes are from unique vintages between 2010 to 2020 meaning we are not dependent on the usual vintage cycles. For this wine we only had enough liquid for 360 bottles and we could not help thinking of the mathematical significance of that number. We therefore decided to incorporate this into our bottle label. Each bottle is numbered 1 to 360 and the design is of a fractal shape that is rotated by one degree clockwise from the previous bottle making each label unique. As we sold the wine in pairs, we made sure each pairing had at least 20 degrees difference on the label so you could see the shape rotating.
“We do not make paperweights, we make drinks” Where can you buy Fractal Wine? Sequence 001 was launched as a ballot. People that registered their interest on our website were notified when the wines went on sale and they could then place their order. The sales were better than we could have hoped, and all the Sequence 001 wines have now sold out except for a few bottles that we are holding back for Michelin Star restaurants in and around London.
You can head to www.fractalwine.uk and register your interest for the release of Sequence 002
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