2016 saw the addition of a new wine to Digby’s range in the form of Leander Pink. This non-vintage rosé was developed in collaboration with the Leander Club, the world’s oldest open rowing club, which has nurtured some of Great Britain’s finest talent. Bearing the club’s distinctive pink hue and hippo motif, Leander Pink offers an energetic, elegant but more laid back interpretation of the Digby house style. A proportion of sales from each bottle goes to support the Leander Academy, helping to produce the next generation of champions. The current release is an 80/20 blend of 2017 base wine and reserve wines. It was disgorged in October 2023.
The grapes were hand-harvested from vineyards primarily in Dorset and Kent starting the second week of October. The bunches were whole-bunch pressed primarily to stainless-steel, though 6% of the final blend was fermented and aged in neutral French barriques. The rosé color is achieved through judicious blending of white and red components. Malolactic fermentation is now fully carried out whereas the earlier bottlings it was blocked. The current vintage wine is then blended with 20% of older wine that has been aging in tank. The wine was bottled with a coarse filtration and fining and then hit with the liqueur de tirage spending a little over three years on lees aging and gaining complexity. The wines are disgorged to order and hit with a 12 gram dosage before aging for an additional six months on cork prior to release.