Your Essential Guide To UK Wine

We’re entertaining a golden age of homegrown wine, with the UK now home to 770 vineyards. Here’s the lowdown on how this remarkable transformation came about, and where you can buy and enjoy the best bottles

- Tony Naylor

Right now, UK wine is fizzing with energy. Pioneering sparkling wine producers have turned a former joke, English wine, into an internationally award-winning force, the success of which is attracting new producers as UK vineyards grow rapidly.

According to industry body, WineGB, Britain is now home to 165 wineries and 770 vineyards. Their output is not huge, yet: around 9 million to 16 million bottles annually, in a country which drank 1.7 billion bottles last year, reports IWSR Drinks Market Analysis. But what this craft industry lacks in size it makes up for in quality.

Last year’s International Wine & Spirit Competition named, not a French champagne house, but Dorset’s Langham Wine as the world’s best sparkling wine producer. That did not surprise Charles Carron Brown, sommelier at Simon Rogan’s Henrock in Cumbria, one of many top restaurants now taking English wine seriously. “English wine,” he says, “is entering a golden age.”

Supermarket sales back that up. UK rosés and reds are flying at Waitrose. At M&S, another early supporter, UK sparkling wine sales are up 89%.

THE SPARKLING WINE EXPLOSION

Remarkably, in 2017, French champagne house Taittinger opened a vineyard in Kent. It confirmed what UK producers had long maintained that, with its mineral-rich soil and short summer, southern England (home to 94.5% of UK vines), is as suitable as northern France for growing chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes, to make traditional-method sparkling wine, aka, champagne.