Why England is the toast of the wine industry

I know we’re long past the point of treating quality wine in Britain as a novelty. It’s decades now, after all, since the first wave of serious English sparkling winemakers – names such as Nyetimber, Ridgeview and Breaky Bottom in East Sussex, and Camel Valley in Cornwall – invited the first comparisons with Champagne. And with more than 1,100 commercial vineyards now planted, covering just under 5,000 hectares between them, neat geometric rows of vines following the gentle slopes of rolling hills has become a familiar, entirely unremarkable feature of the British landscape, especially in southern England.

For anyone who started getting into wine before the domestic scene began to really gather momentum in the 2000s, however, certain things about the development will always be surprising. For this Essex native, for example, hearing serious wine people from all over the world apply that most glamorous of French agricultural words, “terroir”, with an entirely straight face, to the stretch of mundane countryside where I grew up will never get old. There’s a kind of “through-the-looking-glass” uncanniness about a French wine producer treating the Crouch Valley with the kind of respect and reverence people like me reserve for Burgundy’s hallowed Côte d’Or, or a Californian intoning “near Chelmsford” as if it were the San Francisco to Crouch Valley’s Sonoma.

Such moments are getting more common, as foreign interest in British wine grows increasingly serious. According to Wine GB, nearly one in every 10 bottles (9%) of wine produced in the UK is now sold overseas, which, while still rather small in the global context, is nonetheless an impressive jump from the 4% it was five years ago. More striking is the arrival of foreign investors and winemaking talent. Ten years ago, all the talk was of Champagne houses, such as Taittinger and Pommery, investing in the chalky English downloads as a cool-climate hedge for a future when their home region would become too warm to offer the verve and freshness that had made it famous. Other big sparkling names lured from around the world include South Africa’s Graham Beck, whose debut English cuvee was launched this year, and the German group Henkell-Freixenet, which owns Bolney near Haywards Heath in East Sussex.

More recently, however, it’s been the potential for pinot noir and chardonnay on the London clay soils of the Crouch Valley that has been making the biggest buzz, with winemakers from Burgundy (Marianne Duroché and Alex Moreau) and California (Jackson Family Estates) arriving in Essex.

Their interest is easy to understand once you’ve tasted the quality of wines being made there, such as the impossibly graceful Danbury Ridge Pinot Noir 2023 (£40, thewinesociety.com) from a producer who planted their first vines in Danbury in 2014; or my most recent, summer-ready favourite, The Heretics Disobedient Pale Rosé (£32, wearetheheretics.com), a gloriously fine-textured, gastronomic pale pink pinot that is as good as any rosé I’ve tried so far this year.

Other English wines to look out for amid the wave of promotions and events lined up for the industry’s annual celebration-cum-promotional jamboree, English Wine Week, later this month, include still wines such as the summery floral scents and gooseberry fool flavours of Marks & Spencer English Lily White, Surrey 2025 (£10.25), the cut-grass-and-elderflowers of Chapel Down Bacchus, Kent 2024 (£16, or £15 as part of a mixed case of six bottles, majestic.co.uk), and the taut petit-chablis-esque Simpsons Estate Chardonnay, Kent 2025 (£13.50, reduced from £17.50 until June 23, Waitrose).

For sparkling wine, meanwhile, I enjoyed the ripe red apple succulence of Lovington English Sparkling Wine NV (£22, The Coop) made for The Coop by Louis Pommery and the gorgeously pure, graceful, chalk-textured second edition of Taittinger’s “Kentish Champagne”, Domaine Evremond Classic Cuvée Edition II NV (£55, domaineevremond.com. But the luminous depth of flavour and grace of texture of the wines made at Dorset’s Langham Estate, including their Blanc de Blancs NV (£44, thewinesociety.com), means they are still, for me, the fairest English fizzes of all.