The state of the nation

87 new vineyards had been registered within the UK final 12 months bringing the full quantity to 1,030. Surrey Hills vineyards

Anybody within the UK gorging on the Paris Olympics can have been regaled day after day on mainstream and social media with information of the brilliance of Group GB. Group GB completed seventh which was a creditable consequence even when, with 40 gold medals every to Group GB’s 14, the USA and China had been previous the ending put up first by some margin. It’s pure to need to have fun one’s personal nation’s achievements and the identical is true to an extent of English wines. Are we British journalists responsible of hyperbole in the case of the wines of the UK?

The variety of wineries has grown from 209 to 221 whereas the full space below vine stands at 4,209ha.

When Fiona Beckett stepped down because the wine correspondent of The Guardian after 15 years on the weekly treadmill, one journalist criticised Beckett’s ‘extravagant reward for the English wine trade’, saying:

“I’ve at all times felt that our home-grown wines get a straightforward trip from journalists. A number of the finest bubblies and a handful of nonetheless wines are certainly superb, however they hardly ever strike me as world class. Sorry. The costs are sometimes too excessive, the standard blended, significantly in moist vintages”.

Such criticism might nicely ring a bell with wine journalists and customers outdoors the UK who really feel that our wine press can overegg the British pudding.

And but, English glowing wine (I’ll come again to nonetheless) is a relative upstart in comparison with champagne, and so, when it’s in comparison with champagne, few truly imagine that it’s pretty much as good as it may be. The truth is, as distinct from the Olympics, there’s an ingrained inferiority advanced, a cultural cringe for those who like, in the case of evaluating English wine with French. So whereas it’s not solely stunning that there’s no scarcity of mutual back-slapping by the house staff, in fact our wines, fizz particularly, are sometimes an entire lot higher than most individuals, together with the journalist referred to earlier, are ready to present them credit score for.

Final 12 months Chapel Down cheekily organised a blind tasting with locals in Reims within the coronary heart of the Champagne area and so they claimed that 60% of tasters most well-liked the Chapelle en Bas (sure, that’s Chapel Down in French) to the Moët & Chandon it was in contrast with. And this 12 months, England got here second solely to France for its glowing wines on the Worldwide Wine Problem with 88 medals. High quality nonetheless is one factor, identification one other. Can we inform our Dorset from Devon but? In all probability not, however then thoughts you, what number of can inform their Verzy from their Verzenay, their Montagne from their Marne?

Whereas loads extra English counties are producing good wine, that doesn’t routinely create a robust identification. The French system permits producers an umbrella model beneath which they’re free to plough the furrow of their very own particular person manufacturers. Within the UK efforts are being made to forge identities. So now we have Vineyards of Hampshire, Vineyards of the Surrey Hills, Sussex Wine Tourism. These are good initiatives for elevating profile and inspiring tourism, and visits to wineries and tastings will in flip assist to affiliate wines with the lie of the land in constructive methods.

The nascent UK wine trade continues to burgeon. 87 new vineyards had been registered within the UK final 12 months bringing the full quantity to 1,030, a 9.2% rise and gross sales grew by 10% from 2022 to succeed in 8.8 million bottles. The variety of wineries has grown from 209 to 221 whereas the full space below vine stands at 4,209ha. Which will sound rather a lot to English ears, till you realise that it’s lower than 1 / 4 of the vineyards owned by the California wine firm Gallo. In 2023 the UK produced the equal of 21.6 million bottles, up 77% on 2022, a large hike for a single 12 months, however the five-year common is up too, from 10.7 to 12.4 million bottles. Of wine produced in 2023, 76% shall be made into glowing wine, 23% into nonetheless wine.

Desk 1 – Grape Selection and Planting (Supply Wine GB)

Even those that most enthusiastically espouse the reason for English wines must agree that each glowing and nonetheless wines are perceived as costly. And there may be some justification for that. From a vineyard’s perspective, making wine in England’s inexperienced and nice marginal local weather is labour intensive and comes with the excessive value of winery administration engendered by the necessity to cope with spring frosts, mildew and botrytis and yield and classic variability. In opposition to the backdrop of 2020 and 2022, arguably the 2 finest vintages of the previous six years, 2018 and 2023 had been large however extra variable in high quality, whereas 2019 was blended and 2021 forgettable.

In keeping with Stephen Duckett, the founding father of Hundred Hills:

“The place the comparability of potential English customers is to Champagne, and I believe principally it’s for sparklings, then my sense is that it’s not the merchandise themselves that they assume have much less worth, however the manufacturers”.

In Duckett’s view, champagne has earned its pricing stripes not simply within the drink itself but in addition “in speaking clearly around the globe what it’s that they carry to the occasion, when it comes to defining in some small approach the ‘high quality’ of a celebration”.

Comparatively small operations like Hundred Hills appear to have no downside in promoting all the things they make largely as a result of they spare no effort in making the product a part of an expertise that engages with prospects straight.

“It’s that holistic expertise, and the tales related to it, which can be behind our success and I believe instrumental to the way in which individuals expertise our wines,” says Duckett.

At Squerryes, Henry Warde shares this view:

“We want somebody to be saying ‘it’s not simply in regards to the wines however the entire expertise’.”

Wine GB, the trade physique, has declared 2024 because the ‘12 months of progress’, actively supporting the trade ‘by way of focused help for wine tourism, the UK market, and exports’.

“The place the comparability of potential English customers is to Champagne, and I believe principally it’s for sparklings, then my sense is that it’s not the merchandise themselves that they assume have much less worth, however the manufacturers”. – Stephen Duckett

With a couple of exceptions resembling Nyetimber, most UK wineries aren’t investing something approaching the cash put in by the champenois in speaking the model to a wider viewers. You could not fairly want Kamala Harris’s $500 million to be Quantity One, however maybe the abroad corporations which have invested within the UK—Pommery, Taittinger, Henkell Freixenet and, most just lately, Jackson Household Wines—can provide route maps on exhibiting methods to obtain better model consciousness.

It’s no coincidence that some UK wineries are struggling. Some, resembling Bolney and Hambledon, have modified fingers, Gusbourne is up on the market and Chapel Down has indicated the opportunity of a sale, albeit as a way to develop.

“And not using a model you merely can’t command the costs that extremely branded champagnes do nonetheless good your product is,” says Duckett, “however your primary prices of manufacturing shall be very related, so to outlive long run you have to to.”

If this doesn’t fairly sound the demise knell of a nascent trade, it’s value noting that various wineries are increasing capability, or, like Itasca in Essex, Ashling Park in Sussex, Squerryes in Kent, Langham in Dorset and The Grange and Louis Pommery in Hampshire, have constructed or are constructing solely new amenities in anticipation of the Courageous New Wine World envisaged by Wine GB, whose gross sales goal is to succeed in 40 million bottles by 2040.

Final 12 months’s bumper crop meant wineries having to show down grapes for lack of capability. It’s exhausting to argue in opposition to the truth that because the local weather adjustments for the higher (a minimum of from a UK wine perspective) and manufacturing continues its upward trajectory, there’ll inevitably be consolidation and adjustments within the provide and demand equation, requiring UK wineries having to have a look at diversifying whereas re-appraising their advertising and marketing technique at residence and overseas.