Meet Our Winemaker - Nat McConnell

Meet our winemaker - Nathaniel (Nat) McConnell 

A confessed lover of fields and OS maps, Nat, aged 34, is a Biochemist by trade.

With a large part of his childhood spent on our neighbouring Cholderton Rare Breeds Farm Nat’s boots are firmly rooted in the countryside. But he followed a different career path before returning to Wiltshire to establish Bluestone Vineyards.

Nat was encouraged to pursue a career fighting cancer. Following an BSc in Biochemistry at The University of Birmingham, Nat took a role with a company that had developed a novel technique to help medical teams provide patients with more accurate diagnoses and better determine their prognosis, specifically in myeloma patients. Nat worked with the clinical biochemistry team that looked at improving its accuracy, and exploring further to find new applications for the technology in the diagnosis and prognosis of other diseases.

An emerging entrepreneurial spirit then led Nat to a business course supported by The University of Birmingham, but he was drawn back to the family business where he and his brother Toby decided to build the next phase of the McConnell’s farm-focused enterprise.

Establishing Bluestone Vineyards

With the land prepared and the vines on order, Nat enrolled onto the MSc in Viticulture and Oenology at Plumpton College, the UK’s Wine Centre of Excellence. During his time studying and alongside establishing the vineyard he gained knowledge and skills within the industry through harvest jobs, volunteering and mucking in where he could with any spare time. His most meaningful experience coming from two harvests spent at Hattingley Valley under the tutelage of their then head winemaker, Jacob Leadley, whom he still takes great inspiration from today.

Working as Bluestone’s vineyard manager while his brother Toby studied viticulture, Nat’s first wine from 2015, was a classic blend made with grapes purchased from Hambledon. Tours of the vineyard started in the summer of 2018 and the tasting room and deck were built and opened full-time in 2021.

The 2019 Premier Cuvée is our first sparkling white wine from grapes grown at Bluestone Vineyards.

Influenced by his biochemistry and scientific research background, Nat is always looking to understand how the cause-and-effect relationship of the work in the vineyard and winery impacts what’s in the glass.

Nat says marginal gains are what sets the best wines apart from the rest. “We know we can control some factors to bring about a response to improve the quality of our fruit and/or the quality of our wine. We do the best we can to elicit a positive quality effect, and if it doesn't work, we can trace it back as to why, or would a particular practice have worked under different circumstances. 

“We certainly aren’t as rigid as you would need to be in the lab as there are so many external factors you don't have any control over, such as the weather. We do our best to control, but allow nature to express and imprint on our fruit and our wines, hence why we currently opt to produce vintage wines, which for me helps to tell a story of this melting pot of nature and us as the stewards of nature,” explains Nat.

A vision for Bluestone

As a premium producer of vintage-led English sparkling wine, Nat’s ambition is to get Bluestone’s wines listed by the glass, and bottle, in top restaurants and via independent wine merchants and retailers.

His vision for the estate is for the vines to be a key part of the harvest but not the only part. Inspired by grazing-based viticulture, Nat would like to incorporate cash crops and livestock into the vineyards, improving soil diversity, and reducing the need for herbicides to support the environment whilst producing a range of products making the business more sustainable.

Nat’s ‘wine moment’ was on a holiday in Lanzarote in 2014. A tour of the island’s volcanic vineyards unearthed how terroir is reflected in the wine. Nat was fascinated by the plant biology and the lengths that had been taken to successfully grow grapevines on the volcanic landscape; an incredibly hostile environment.

A huge fan of English wine, Nat and the Bluestone family host regular benchmark blind tastings.

On (extremely) special occasions, his go-to wine is Château Calon Ségur from St-Estèphe in Bordeaux, shared with his wife Emily.