Persistent investment, highly-skilled winemakers and the warming climate in southern coastal England have powered a native wine revolution. Can English wine go to the next level?

Words: Will Moffitt

 

“This going to sound quite cliché,” warns Alastair Benham, head of wine operations at Gusbourne, when I ask him about the forces behind the English wine revolution. “It’s a persistent small group of people who, in the early years, took a bit of a gamble.” Benham is showing me around the Gusbourne Estate in Appledore, where 60 hectares of planted vines are meticulously cultivated across rolling Kentish fields.

Warmer temperatures have been integral to the success of England’s south coastal grape-growers, but today Gusbourne’s vineyards lie under thick bands of cloud. At Boot Hill, the vineyard’s closest crop, hundreds of vines stand in neat rows, held squarely by thin lines of wire. The vines here are a chardonnay variety – some are 18 years old – and are going through bud burst, an organic process that causes the sap to rise. Flowering typically begins in June, with vines harvested in mid to late September.

Back in The Nest, Gusbourne’s tasting room – which is open seven days a week – Benham invites me to taste four different wines. The first, a blanc des blancs, is crisp and refreshing, with a delicate acidity. “This is the wine that put us on the map,” he says. “It’s the one that we really hung our hats on in the early years, before we released our prestige cuvée.” Established by Andrew Weeber, a South African orthopaedic surgeon, who bought the 200-hectare estate in 2003, Gusbourne released its first vintage in 2010, garnering critical acclaim and numerous awards.

Three years later the winemaker was acquired by former Conservative party deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft in a takeover deal reportedly worth ÂŁ7 million. There are more than 1,000 vineyards in the UK, but the Kentish winery is part of an elite coterie of winemakers including Nyetimber and Hambledon, renowned for their sparkling wines that have earned them comparisons to champagne.

 

Above: Berry Bros & Rudd, Pall Mall

Prestigious champagne houses have even bought up English stock – most notably Taittinger, which purchased a Kent fruit farm in 2015. It’s a far cry from the postwar years, when brave English viticulturists began experimenting with cool grape varieties like seyval blanc and müller-thurgau. Despite decades of long and strenuous production, Hambledon, England’s first commercial vineyard, only came of age in the early noughties, transformed by former banker Ian Kellett.

In 2023 the company was bought by the St James’s wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd and Portuguese producer Symington Family Estates for £22.3 million. “As the birthplace of English wine, their vineyards are in an amazing location, with perfect soil and exposure for ripening grapes,” says Mark Pardoe, wine director at Berry Bros & Rudd. “The result is wines which have a richness and depth of flavour, alongside that striking English acidity that keeps things bright and fresh.”

Pardoe attributes the growth of English winemaking to a blend of unglamorous commercial practicality and romantic dream chasing. “Land owners need to maximise their return from land, and there’s more money in grapes than apples and cherries,” he says. “Other owners with deeper pockets might be influenced by a lifestyle decision; who hasn’t fantasised about living on a beautiful estate, with rolling vines to the horizon?” For Nyetimber CEO Eric Heerema, the acquisition of vineyards located on the South Downs in West Sussex was the realisation of a life-long dream.

Nyetimber’s original founders, Stuart and Sandy Moss, who bought Nyetimber Manor in 1986, had been the first to plant the grape varieties chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier in the UK exclusively for producing sparkling wine. “I recognised that there was an opportunity for Nyetimber to create world-class sparkling wines, to rival the very best in the world, and I wanted to continue its pioneering story,” Heerema says. “[But] we had a long way to go, as two decades ago hardly anyone had heard of the category, and aside from a few standout wines, there was a lot of scepticism from experts and consumers alike around the overall quality that could be produced in England.”

Above: Cherrie Spriggs & Eric Herrema, Nyetimber

Since Heerema bought Nyetimber in 2006, the producer has garnered widespread acclaim for its innovative winemaking. It became the first English producer to release a single vineyard wine (in 2013), the first to release a prestige cuvĂŠe (in 2018) and the first to release a demi-sec (in 2019). In 2018 its head winemaker Cherie Spriggs was named Sparkling Winemaker of the Year at the International Wine Challenge, becoming the first woman and the first person outside France to win the award.

However, like other native growers, Nyetimber has faced challenges, not least from the cold sting of volatile English weather. In 2012 it skipped the year’s harvest, citing the unusually poor weather– exceedingly damp, even for the UK – as the primary reason. One of the great ironies of English wines’ success has been the ambivalent relationship with the weather.

A warming climate in the south-east has helped these delicate vines to bloom and blossom, but the unpredictability of native weather, exacerbated by climate change, is a constant source of anxiety. Frost and mildew – a fungus that thrives in moist, warm environments – also pose a threat to native winemakers. They are capable of impeding, sometimes destroying, once plentiful vines. Another challenge has been the eye-watering levels of investment required to fund such long and labour-intensive projects. This is particularly true of sparkling wines that take longer to grow and mature to reach the level of quality that premium brands require.

For this reason a significant number of the country’s vineyards are loss-making, fighting debt and in search of investors in order to stay afloat or to expand production. Ed Mansel Lewis, head of viticulture at Knight Frank, prefers to take the glass half full perspective. “We have kind of nailed the production side of making wine,” he says. “Now producers are looking for investors to take it to the next stage.” In some cases that means UK wine producers acquiring other wine brands in a bid to reduce their operating costs.

“There are some very, very well-capitalised wine businesses in the country that are specifically looking for acquisition opportunities,” Mansel Lewis tells me. Others are looking to sell shares or leave the game entirely: “A number of well- funded wine businesses are looking towards that eventual exit to the point where they can say to themselves, and to their shareholders: ‘We made the right decision and this is the return that we have to show for it.’

In this shifting economic landscape, Mansel Lewis can foresee a different kind of investor coming to market: private equity houses or venture capitalists looking specifically for businesses in distress. “We’re going to transition in terms of the types of purchasers looking at English wine,” he predicts. “They’re not just [going to be] wine businesses from Champagne.” Another age-old problem for English wine might be its inability to separate itself from Gallic comparison.

At 67 Pall Mall, the private members’ club for wine lovers in St James’s, Max Melvin, the sommelier, recommends that I try a chardonnay by Whitewolfe, a producer from the Kit’s Coty area of Kent’s North Downs. It’s deliciously crisp and slightly lemony, with bursts of almost sour acidity. “The UK market is still trying to sell themselves as being able to compete with Champagne and with France, instead of making it their own,” Melvin says.

Home to one of the largest wine lists in the world – a staggering 5,000 wines from 42 countries – 67 Pall Mall boasts an impressive roster of in-house wine aficionados. One of them is Kathrine Larsen-Robert, European head of wine, who was named UK Sommelier of the Year in 2014. “We have a lot of members and their guests come in to do blind tastings between French and English wine,” Larsen-Robert says. “Lots of people get very surprised. They’re getting it wrong all the time. They keep thinking that the English wine is French.”