Albion Gets Serious: English Sparkling Wine

BY NEAL MARTIN | JULY 08, 2020

“I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humor and English wine.”

–Peter Ustinov, actor

Though English born and bred, in my formative years as a wine pro, I never bought into the fervor for my homeland’s vinous contribution. A mixture of national pride and underdog spirit encouraged some of my compatriots to extol the virtues of what I tasted as ordinary wines that mainstream media would subsequently use as fodder for promoting England as a viticultural Shangri-la. The same old headlines would be wheeled out: “Look out, Champagne! The Brits are coming!” 

Whatever. There might have been 38 vineyards mentioned in the Domesday Book (the Norman conquest did have its upside) and Londoner Dr. Christopher Merret might have made Champagne feasible when in 1662 he recommended using thick glass to prevent bottles from exploding into a frothy mess, but the reality is that while our European cousins nurtured their own sophisticated wine cultures to accompany their sophisticated gastronomy, the English had little incentive to create profound wine to marry with turnips and Spam. Instead, the Sceptred Isle guzzled ale and mead and England became a petri dish for decent wine writers: we couldn’t make it, so we might as well write about it. Sure, a small number of amateurs dabbled with German varieties and hybrids, but the results were at best drinkable and at worst made paint stripper seem palatable. 

This began to change in the early 1990s. Pioneers such as Camel Valley and Nyetimber adopted a more serious attitude toward winemaking, and when their first releases were garlanded with awards, it signaled to others what might be possible. A new breed of winemaker with a professional attitude and ambition began to usurp the old guard of winemaking dilettantes. Albion, God forbid, began producing sparkling wine worth talking and writing about.

My negative attitude toward English sparkling wine has changed because incontrovertibly, the wines have improved no end. When the current pandemic rendered my passport temporarily redundant, my instant reaction was to taste close to home, since I can cycle to my nearest vineyard in 20 minutes. So, I commenced gathering samples with the idea of a summer report, to put a stake in the ground in terms of Vinous’s coverage. This is not an all-encompassing article that strives to review every English estate;  instead, it focuses upon most of the top producers. In the coming months, as we hopefully open up post-lockdown, I may hop in my bike or car to check out more producers omitted from this article.

This spot is about 10 minutes’ drive from my house on the North Downs. The cutaway exposes a band of Cretaceous white chalk –  the same band that surfaces in Champagne. Albury Vineyard lies about 10 meters away.

English Wine 101

Since this is the inaugural Vinous report, I shall give readers a 101 on the English wine scene. I use the word “English” principally because all the wines in this report are from England; however, there are vineyards in Wales, which has its own PDO status (Protected Designation of Origin) recognized by the European Union. While writing this report, I found tasting notes from a visit I made to Wales’s Ancre Hill a while ago, but for some reason never published. I mention the distinction between Wales and England simply because the data and statistics below are courtesy of the official website for “The Wines of Great Britain,” published in May 2019.

There are currently 763 vineyards in Great Britain and 164 wineries. Most of those cluster in the southeast of England, especially the counties of Kent, West Sussex and Hampshire, where it is driest and warmest, and home to the Cretaceous chalk basin that forms the North and South Downs, part of the same band that breaks through Earth’s crust in Champagne. Around 76% of wineries are located in the southeast and another 13% in the southwest. In total there are 3,500 hectares of vines, representing a notable increase of 79% since 2015. Around 1.6 million vines were planted in 2018, mostly classic Champagne grape varieties, although it may surprise you to know that the most cultivated variety is actually red; Pinot Noir makes up 29.7% of current plantings. This is closely followed by Chardonnay at 28.9% and then Pinot Meunier at 11%. After those three, in order of acreage, are Bacchus (a hardy white variety created in the Thirties by crossing Müller-Thurgau with Silvaner x Riesling that became widely planted in the UK in the Seventies), Seyval Blanc and Pinot Gris.