On the Other Side of the Table: An Evening at Sugrue's Cellar Raid

There's a particular kind of pleasure in being poured a glass of wine by someone else for a change.

Last week I swapped my usual seat at the head of the tasting table for one further down it, joining a "Cellar Raid" tasting at Sugrue South Downs — a blind tasting pulled straight from the reserve cellar of one of England's most celebrated sparkling wine producers, followed by dinner in their wine barn. As someone who spends most of my time on the other side of these events, running them for Surrey Local Wine School, it was a genuine treat to just turn up, sit down, and be a guest for once.

Wine From the Cellar, Not the Shelf

The idea behind a Cellar Raid is simple but brilliant: rather than tasting through the current release list, you're pouring straight from the library — older vintages, one-off cuvées, bottles that don't normally make it onto a standard tasting sheet. And it was blind, which changes everything. No labels to lean on, no preconceptions, just glass after glass of serious, chalk-soil, barrel-aged English fizz, and a room full of people trying to work out what on earth we were drinking.

Sugrue's wines are built for exactly this kind of scrutiny. These are sparkling wines fermented in old oak, aged on lees for years before release, made in tiny quantities by winemakers who clearly aren't in a hurry. Tasting them blind stripped everything back to what was actually in the glass — texture, tension, that slightly savoury, chalky backbone that keeps surprising people who still think of English sparkling wine as "pretty good, for England."

Dinner afterwards, in the wine barn, was the perfect way to let the wines keep talking. Amazing food was created on site but local chef Sam Lambert with a stunning local lobster dish that is still making me salivate 5 days later. Good food, good company, and bottles being passed around and argued over long after the formal tasting had finished.

Why It's Good to Sit on the Other Side Occasionally

What struck me most wasn't really about the wine itself — it was about the room. Being a guest rather than the host meant I could just enjoy the company of other people who love this stuff as much as I do. No timings to manage, no notes to make sure I'd covered, nobody checking whether I was pouring the right measure. Just conversation, curiosity, and a lot of guessing.

It reminded me why I got into running wine events in the first place. A good tasting isn't a lecture. It's not a test. It's a room full of people learning something together, in a relaxed setting, usually while laughing at how wrong their guesses are. I've been doing this professionally for a while now, and I still learn something new at almost every tasting I attend — last week was no exception. That's the whole point, really. Wine should never feel like a chore, and the best evenings are the ones where the learning sneaks up on you somewhere between the second glass and the cheese course.

Bringing That Feeling to Guildford

That's exactly the atmosphere we try to build at Surrey Local Wine School — relaxed, sociable, genuinely fun, with enough depth to satisfy the curious without ever tipping into homework. Whether you've been drinking wine seriously for twenty years or you just like the idea of an evening out that comes with a decent glass in hand, that's the room we want to create.

With Christmas creeping up, we've got a run of sparkling wine tastings coming up over the next few months — a great excuse for a night out, a good way to sharpen your palate before the festive bottles start appearing, and honestly just a fun way to spend an evening with other people who like wine as much as you do.

Keep an eye on our events page for dates — and if a Cellar Raid has taught me anything, it's that the best wine evenings are the ones where you genuinely don't know what's coming next.