Tracking the travels of English wine

It is the change in the culture that interests me. This island has been emptying bottles with enthusiasm since the invention of glass, and amphorae before that, but most of the wine wasn’t ours: part of the rise of England as a great trading nation came via our desire to buy wine and the need to find the wherewithal to do so.

In his 1906 book The History of the Wine Trade in England, André Simon calls the trade ‘one of the most ancient as well as one of the most important branches of commerce’. Our climate largely precluded winemaking – there were vineyards across the centuries, as Simon makes clear, but the wine was probably mediocre in quality and, worse still, insufficient in quantity. Is this the origin of the Anglo-Saxon thirst? And, I wonder, will a welcome into the ranks of acknowledged wine-producing countries assuage that thirst in any way?

It has always been a paradox that the amazing range of the world’s most civilised beverage that comes to these shores has done little to change a national drinking culture that could charitably be described as Neanderthal. So it is heartening to see so many English vineyards opening pleasant places to consume their product – a late development but one that suggests we are coming to understand that drinking is supposed to be fun, not an exercise in cultural inferiority or a desperate attempt to inhale as many units of alcohol as are available in the shortest possible time.

At Ridgeview Estate, there is now a restaurant and rooftop bar where wine flights are served in a charming contraption hung with tasting flutes like baubles from a Christmas tree, accompanied by olives or platters and a view over their vines. Tillingham has accommodation; Chapel Down, a restaurant that is in the Michelin Guide. After the welcome sake at Roketsu, an exceptional Japanese fine-dining establishment in London, the first in a marvellous array of fine wines and sakes that I was offered during a 10-course kaiseki (seasonal) meal was a sparkling from Black Chalk, the 2020 Classic.

It is all a long way from the early years of chaos that Henry Jeffreys describes in his chatty and informative new book on our wine industry, Vines in a Cold Climate. He recounts a story told to him by Peter Hall of Breaky Bottom, now one of England’s most respected makers of sparkling wine. As a rookie winemaker in 1976, Hall took his first grapes to one of England’s few commercial wineries. The winemaker, unused to ripe grapes (and, as he later admitted, a rookie himself) first added water to lower the acidity, then sugar to rectify the resulting dilution, then citric acid and unfermented grape juice to solve the problems caused by those interventions. The result, unsurprisingly, tasted awful. Bob Lindo of Camel Valley in Cornwall tells Jeffreys about mixing the sugar and the yeast for his first sparkling wines using an electric drill, with a sheep syringe to add the dosage at the end.

All that has changed: wine drinkers in England are proud of their product and happy or at least willing, to buy the 92% of output that is sold here, even at the steep prices. And now the rest of the world is getting the opportunity. I wonder if they will take it.

Some interesting examples already have. The House of Pommery makes an English sparkling wine, Louis Pommery, in conjunction with Hattingley Valley and will release the first wine from their own Hampshire vineyards, Pinglestone Estate, next year. So will Champagne Taittinger, whose Domaine Evremond in Kent was planted in 2015. In Paris, Jeffreys tells us, restaurants of the calibre of the Le Bristol and Alain Ducasse’s Spoon have English wines on their lists. But what about ordinary people? Nobody in my Burgundian village drinks Bordeaux, much less wine from across the Channel. So, when Kent winery Gusbourne organised a partnership with Whitcomb’s, the restaurant at new Leicester Square hotel The Londoner, which coincided with my teenage stepdaughter’s arrival from France with two friends, I was inspired to do my bit to offer the next generation of Europeans their first taste of English wine.

First, however, they got a taste of what English wine has to contend with. We couldn’t sit out on the ‘Mediterranean-style’ terrace because the weather was atrocious. These days, the Square is dotted with statues commemorating a century of cinema; it seemed unintentionally apt that the two I glimpsed as I dashed through the downpour were Gene Kelly, singin’ in the rain, and Mary Poppins holding her umbrella.

The girls were happy indoors; they liked the smart décor and loved the food, not least because the menu was heavily French influenced, although the large, flat crispy chips were certainly not French fries and their snails don’t come with a topping of nduja sausage at home. The textured Gusbourne still rosé was a hit, especially with lobster pasta (and especially with me: no insipid blush this, it had depth of both colour and flavour), but it went down far slower than anything I drank at 18, including a great deal of Chateau Rotgut.

It’s not so simple as restraint versus incontinence – one of the friends mentioned that her grandfather in the South of France drinks the local rosé every day, even at lunch, and credits it with keeping him healthy – but there is no sense of desperation. It is almost as if they understand, on a subconscious level, that the kindly vines will ensure they never run dry. That may or may not turn out to be true as the world heats up but for the moment, England is benefitting. As our reputation for making wine changes for the better, it would be nice if our notoriety for drinking it did the same.