English
Sparkling Wine: Effervescence and Reserve

BY ANNE KREBIEHL MW | FEBRUARY 10, 2025 Green and Pleasant Albion 

“O, for a draught
of vintage! that hath been 
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, 
Tasting of Flora and the country green…”

John Keats’ words are an apt opening to this report on English Sparkling
Wine. What debuted in 1997 as a curiosity, with Nyetimber’s first release of
their 1992 Blanc de Blancs, took just three decades to grow into a proper category.
What is even more extraordinary than the rapid expansion of vineyards—an almost
five-fold increase since the late 1980s—is the professionalism of this young
but growing industry. Established players jostle with newcomers, presenting an
exciting and delicious spectrum of traditional method sparkling wines that have
come a long way, especially in the past decade. So let the corks pop and dive
in.<img alt="" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.vinous.com/uploads%2F1739207890179-Vinous_English+Sparkling+Cover.jpg">Across the Gardens of England 

While England’s sparkling pioneers all centered on the southeastern counties
of Kent, Sussex and Surrey, &nbsp;with a far western
outpost in Cornwall, &nbsp;the wines I tasted for
this report hail from the west in Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire,
stretch north of London to Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire along the Thames
Valley, and reach as far east as Essex and the Suffolk Coast. There are currently
4,209 hectares of vines in the UK, most of them in England, with Kent, Sussex
and Hampshire the leading counties. In 2023, sparkling wine made up 76% of the UK’s
total wine production, 91% of which were traditional method wines. Thus, it
does not come as a surprise that the most planted grape variety in the UK is
Chardonnay (32%), followed by Pinot Noir (27%). Both varieties shine, especially
Chardonnay. Many of the top-scoring wines in this report are Blanc de Blancs.
In fact, the vast majority of sparkling wines in the UK are made from the three
principal sparkling varieties, namely Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier,
with Pinot Gris, Seyval Blanc and even Pinotage only making tiny contributions
to the usual triumvirate.

Chalk, Greensand and Clay

When English Sparkling Wines first burst properly on the scene in the
early 2000s, much was made of the chalk soils, drawing every possible parallel
to Champagne. The fact that the Cretaceous chalk of Champagne dives below the
English Channel and proudly greets visitors as the White Cliffs of Dover made
this a particularly memorable illustration. But there is far more to England’s
terroir than various kinds of chalk, as indeed there is in Champagne. In
England, you find greensand (a kind of sandstone that’s also from the Cretaceous)
and various clays. Having said that, I cannot tell the piece of soft, crumbly
chalk I picked up in Avize (Côte des
Blancs, Champagne) apart from the one I picked up in a Sussex vineyard. Site
selection is key to ensure flowering and ripening in these northerly latitudes.
In this respect, climatic factors are as decisive and often more important than
subsoils.A Burgeoning Industry

There is no doubt that English sparkling wine is a burgeoning category. In
fact, “Viticulture is the UK’s fastest growing agricultural sector,” according
to Wine GB, the industry’s representative body. But the buzz surrounding it
needs context. Of those 4,209 hectares planted, 3,230 hectares are in
production, i.e., actually bearing fruit, as there are many planted that are
not yet productive. But even if we go with the bigger figure, that takes us to
a nicely rounded, generous 4,300 hectares, or just under 11,000 acres. This is
still smaller than Napa Valley’s Atlas Peak AVA (11,400 acres) or its Coombsville
AVA (11,074 acres) and amounts to just 12.57% of the size of Champagne with its
34,200 hectares (84,510 acres) of vines. What is impressive, however, is the
speed of growth in UK plantings. In 1989, when the public vineyard survey
became compulsory, there were just 876 hectares of vines across 442 vineyards
in the UK. Today, there are 1,030 vineyards and 221 wineries, with the biggest
growth spurt occurring over the past decade. In terms of sales, sales of English
sparkling wine totaled 6.2 million bottles in 2023, compared to the 299 million
bottles of Champagne that sold in the same year. Context is indeed everything.Eureka! Sparkling! While the mild, moderate and maritime climate of England’s South Coast had long favored apples and hops as key crops, a few determined—if not to say bloody-minded—landowners and farmers persisted in growing grapes to make wine. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, these growers clung mostly to hybrids like Seyval Blanc or Germanic crossings like Reichensteiner, Huxelrebe, Bacchus and Ortega, counting on their ability to ripen on this cool, northerly island to make often off-dry, white Germanic-style wines. These wines were, I suppose, pleasant enough but could never really compete at an international level. It took two Americans, Sandy and Stuart Moss, to change the game. The Mosses purchased the Nyetimber estate in Sussex in 1986 and were the first to put two and two together, deciding to plant Chardonnay and Pinot Noir specifically for sparkling wine in 1988. This was England’s Eureka moment. Nyetimber released their first wine, a 1992 Blanc de Blancs, in 1997. The rest is history.<img alt="" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.vinous.com/uploads%2F1739213270881-Vinous_Sugrue.jpg">Foreign and Local Investment

It did not take long for this new sparkling Eldorado to evoke
international interest. Attracted by then much lower land prices and climatic
promise, the Champenois started prospecting in the mid-2000s, but the world
financial crisis put a temporary halt to their endeavors. England received its
final stamp of approval when Champagne Pommery planted 40 hectares of vines at
their Pinglestone Estate in Hampshire in 2016. Champagne Taittinger planted 60
hectares to establish Domaine Evremond in Kent in 2017. In January 2022,
sparkling wine powerhouse Henkell Freixenet bought Bolney Wine Estate in Sussex,
and finally, in summer 2023, California-based Jackson Family Wines expanded
into England, purchasing land in Essex for still wine production but buying
fruit from Kent and Sussex to make sparkling wine. Even without this foreign
investment, more and more money poured and still pours into England’s vinelands—so
much so that real estate agents now have viticultural specialists. Within a
short time, the industry has thus morphed from hobbyist to professional, and
the wines have evolved along with it. All the while, the English leaned heavily
on Champenois expertise and equipment—it is, after all, only a short hop across
the Channel—while its own viticultural college in Plumpton in East Sussex is
now a center for excellence that has spawned many star winemakers.ChallengesProbably the greatest challenge of growing grapes in England is the low average yield, requiring similar cost and input as in Champagne but with a lot less grape juice to show for it. Climate is to blame. This is the case notwithstanding the mandatory planting density of 8,000 vines per hectare in Champagne and the generally lower planting densities in England (and assuming the same regimen when it comes to press fractions). While average yields in Champagne range between 50 and 75 hectoliters per hectare, the highest yields in England occurred in 2018 with 47.97 hl/ha (an absolute record), followed by 31.5 hl/ha in 2014 and 28.27 hl/ha in 2022. Even the record-setting year in England did not reach the lowest yields in Champagne. The average yield in England over the past 20 years was 22.25 hl/ha, with huge variations year on year. This volatility is the direct result of the high vintage variation in this still marginal climate.English Reserve 

These relatively low yields meant that most sparkling wines that were
released in the early days were vintage-dated, simply because there were no
reserve wines. It takes deep pockets to keep wines in reserve for blending in
future years, and a large number of estates were dependent on the cash flow
generated by sales, quite apart from the cost of keeping the wines. The poor
2012 vintage convinced many of the necessity to make multi-vintage blends. Bigger
estates have also planted across counties to diversify their supply, while others
purchase fruit from far and wide. Of the 107 wines I tasted for this report, only
30 are multi-vintage blends, as many new entrants find themselves in the same
situation as more established players did a decade ago. 

Green and Pleasant England

Then as now, new releases of the top English sparkling wines are still
vintage-dated, as are the handful of prestige cuvées. Just four wines in this
report are from the 2021 vintage, and a mere nine from 2020, with the majority
from 2019 and 2018. These wines spent a decent amount of time on lees,
affording the wines both balance and finer foam, key elements of quality. Even
England’s warmer vintages (like 2018) come with lovely tension and briskness
that is a real asset. The buzz, if not the hype, is justified. There are some world-class
wines here. The best long-aged wines show the inherent quality of the fruit, with
standouts from 2009, 2013 and 2014. In wines with both pre- and
post-disgorgement age, there is no place to hide, and the brilliance, purity
and youthfulness of these wines fill me with joy. The most beautiful aspect of
this tasting, however, was the sheer diversity of styles, geographic origins
and producers, indeed “tasting of Flora and the country green…”

Readers should note that there are just under 70 hectares of vineyards
in Wales, but no Welsh wines were submitted for this report. I tasted most of
the wines in this report in September 2024. A separate article on English still
wines is forthcoming.© 2025, Vinous. No portion of this article may be copied, shared or re-distributed without prior consent from Vinous. Doing so is not only a violation of our copyright, but also threatens the survival of independent wine criticism.<hr> You Might Also Enjoy<a target="_blank" href="https://vinous.com/articles/albion-gets-serious-english-sparkling-wine-jul-2020">Albion Gets Serious: English Sparkling Wine</a>, Neal Martin, July 2020

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