An exciting visit to Coates & Seely, fresh off the back of being recently voted number three in The Real Reviews Top Wineries of Great Britain 2026. I was invited to Coates & Seely’s Hampshire home along with members of the press and the wider Pillar Hall London team, my first visit to the estate.
Coates & Seely was founded in 2008 by Nicholas Coates and Christian Seely, two old friends who set out with a specific ambition: to make an English sparkling wine capable of rivalling the best in the world. That search led them to the chalk downlands of Hampshire, geology that closely mirrors Champagne itself, and later to the chalk coastline of the Isle of Wight. Nearly two decades on, the estate has won gold medals and trophies across the world’s leading competitions and is listed in royal residences and Michelin-starred restaurants. This is not a young producer chasing credibility, it is an established one with a track record that speaks for itself, still expanding with intent.
I spent the afternoon at the family’s home in Hampshire, meeting Nicholas Coates and tasting through the range with his wife Virginia, who trained under Prue Leith and worked as a private chef before taking on events and hospitality for the estate. Lunch moved from the NV range through to the 2014 Vintage Rosé magnum, La Perfide. Coates & Seely pride themselves on lower dosage wines, and the restraint shows. The name is a nod to “La Perfide Albion,” the old French dig at perfidious England, reclaimed here with the kind of industry humour that only comes from genuine confidence.
Nicholas guided us through the estate’s expansion plans to the Isle of Wight. A new 20 hectare site followed a decade long search for coastal chalk, chosen in part for its lower frost risk, the kind of long-term planning and future proofing that defines how this estate operates.
Joining us on the trip was Des Gunewardena, founder of D3 Collective, along with members of the Pillar Hall team. It was a great opportunity for the whole team to see behind the scenes and understand the history and future of Coates & Seely.
The industry significance of this visit lies in what comes next. Coates & Seely have just released their first ever restaurant exclusive cuvée, created specifically for Pillar Hall, the 30,000 sq ft restaurant, bar and live music destination at Olympia. It is a deal they had never done before and were not going to do unless the fit was right. The wine is now the house English sparkling pour at Idalia, the 300-cover all day restaurant at the heart of Pillar Hall.
Coates & Seely worked with the Pillar Hall team to create a tailored blend, with dosage and texture designed around how it would actually be drunk, at the bar and at the table. The result is dosed at 7g/l for a fuller, rounder character suited to that setting.
English sparkling wine has spent years proving its quality in competitions and blind tastings. What it needs now is exactly this: serious hospitality operators building English wine into their identity rather than treating it as a novelty or a patriotic afterthought. Idalia, opening within Olympia’s £1.3 billion regeneration and led by an experienced restaurateur, choosing to make an English wine its house pour, and commissioning a bespoke blend to do it, signals a shift in how English wine is being positioned in premium hospitality.
Des Gunewardena has described finding in Coates & Seely a winemaker unwilling to chase volume, much as his own team refuses to chase scale in hospitality. That shared outlook, patience over speed, quality over expansion, is precisely the kind of alignment that gives English wine credibility in high-end hospitality settings. Both partners describe this as the start of an ongoing relationship, with further pours planned as Upstairs at Pillar Hall opens later this October.
