ENGLISH WINE The Essential Guide

The Study Library · The Cellar Journal

English wine is one of the most remarkable recent developments in the wine world, but describing it simply as a consequence of climate change misses much of the story. Vines have existed in Britain for centuries. The Romans almost certainly cultivated them, medieval monasteries maintained vineyards, and repeated attempts at commercial viticulture appeared throughout English history. What is genuinely new is not the presence of vines, but the combination of climate, site selection, grape varieties, capital, technical knowledge and ambition that has transformed English wine into a serious modern industry.

The change has been particularly dramatic in sparkling wine. Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier planted across the southern counties have given England an international identity that would have seemed improbable only a generation earlier. Yet sparkling wine is only part of the picture. Bacchus, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and several other varieties increasingly demonstrate the possibilities of still wine, while different soils and climates from Kent to Cornwall and East Anglia challenge the idea that English wine can be reduced to chalk and bubbles.

The most useful way to understand England is therefore not as a younger version of Champagne, but as a cool, marginal and rapidly evolving wine country whose greatest strength has come from learning exactly where vines should be planted and what those places can realistically produce.