There used to be a joke in the English wine business: “How many people does it take to drink a glass of English wine? Four: a victim, two people to hold him down and a fourth person to pour it down his throat.” Thankfully all that has changed. English wine has radically improved in recent years, winning numerous international prizes and tempting even the most discerning of drinkers.
A Brief History
You may be surprised to learn that there is a long history of winemaking in the UK. It’s not surprising, in fact, if you consider that Britain was invaded by both the Romans and the French. However, various historical factors prevented the industry from developing. The current era of commercial English wine growing is said to have started in 1951, when World War Two hero Major-General Guy Salisbury-Jones began planting the first vines at what would become Hambledon Vineyard in Hampshire in the south of England.
Climate Change
The greatest and most constant challenge for British wine producers was the lack of days when the temperature was high enough to allow the grapes to mature. However, according to official studies, the annual mean temperature of central England rose by approximately 1°C during the 20th century due to climate change. This figure refers to temperatures over the whole year, while viticulturists are naturally most interested in changes to the growing season, from the beginning of April to the end of September in the UK.
Yet in this period in particular the changes have been notable, the result being that the grapes mature better and growers can experiment with different varieties. So while ten years ago Britain was producing around four to five million bottles of wine, today that figure has risen to twelve to thirteen million bottles. What’s more, predictions are that in twenty years’ time English wine production will have risen to forty million bottles. The long hot summer of 2018 produced an amazing harvest of excellent quality wine.
A Great Investment
At the moment, most English wine is consumed domestically, but exports are on the increase, with the US being the biggest customer, followed by Australia and Japan and after that the Scandinavian countries. If you also consider that many well-known French wine producers are buying up land in the UK for vine-planting, now could be a great time to invest in an English vineyard!
the brits invented champagne
Thanks to the warmer climate and chalky soil, southern England is the perfect place to produce sparkling wine. And here’s the thing: we tend to think of champagne as quintessentially French and the French government fiercely protects the label ‘champagne’ and even the term ‘champagne method’. However, it was an Englishman and member of the Royal College of Physicians, Christopher Merrett (1614-1695), who first described the method.
On December 1662, just two years after the restoration of the British monarchy and the end of puritanism, Merrett presented a paper to the newly-formed Royal Society in which he described the distinctive ‘méthode champenoise’ in detail. He did this several years before the monk Dom Pérignon began his experiments at the Benedictine Abbey at Hautvillers. Because of international law, English sparkling wine cannot be called ‘champagne’ and it is usually referred to as ‘traditional sparkling wine’ or just ‘fizz’. Neither term does justice to its high quality, so some people have suggested adopting ‘Merrett’ as the official term for the future.
The Biodynamic Vineyard
Of all the vineyards in the UK, one of the most interesting is the award-winning Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard set in the beautiful landscape of the High Weald in Sussex. In 2010 Sedlescombe became England’s first certified biodynamic vineyard, and since then owners Sophie and Kieran Balmer have produced around thirty thousand bottles of vegan-friendly English wine a year.
Biodynamic farming goes one step further than organic farming in both completely rejecting the use of chemical interventions and removing human intervention from the alchemy of winemaking as much as possible. Considering the awards that the vineyard has won, these techniques have had a positive effect on the taste of the wine. Speak Up met with Kieran Balmer. We began by asking him about the reputation of English wine, which was laughed at in the past.
Kieran Balmer (English accent): The big difference now is I think the quality control is a lot more certain than it used to be. And the big issue was never that you just couldn’t make wine in England, it was that, year on year, there was such variation in flavour and quality that the wine industry in the UK was probably seen as just not being quite as slick as it is in other more established wine-producing countries. The curiosity with that, of course, is the fact that you can go back to Roman times in the UK and find evidence of vines being grown here and wine being made here. So it’s not that we don’t have a history of winemaking in the UK, the problem is it’s so fractured and the knowledge kept getting lost for a variety of different reasons and not being passed down from one generation to another.
A DELICATE ART
Improved technology and pest control have also made a big difference, as Balmer explained:
Kieran Balmer: We go through different eras of winemaking in the UK. I mentioned the Romans right at the start and then back around Tudor times, when Henry VIII decided to wipe out all the monks and we lost all the winemaking knowledge then, and then in the 1800s and the phylloxera problem wiped it all out again, but this time round part of it is technology and part of it is the ease with which we can now document, analyse and record things we’ve done and what the outcomes were and where we needed to improve and being able to spot why things aren’t working any more. The advent of technology and the greater level of academic study around things like pest control and soil management, things like that, I think they’re the ones that are having the biggest impact.
GLOBAL WARMING
And he went on to talk about the impact of global warming.
Kieran Balmer: Definitely, climate change opens up avenues of possibilities in terms of varieties that may start to thrive in the UK whereas previously it wouldn’t have. That’s not to say that climate change is a good thing. It is to say that increases in temperatures simply lead to different climactic circumstances and we can experiment with varieties that perhaps we’ve had our eye on for a few years but previously the data has suggested wouldn’t quite ripen because they weren’t getting enough sunlight over the period of the summer that we have in the UK. But it does mean we can play with varieties that wouldn’t, even ten years ago, have been considered. But, it’s exciting to see that people are now prepared to experiment on the back of analysing the meteorological data, looking at the temperature trends over the last two years, the last five years, the last ten years.
AN ECOSYSTEM
Sedlescombe was an organic vineyard for many years and then became biodynamic. We asked Balmer about the change.
Kieran Balmer: The whole idea of treating the entire vineyard as a single living breathing organism where the soil interacts with the vines and the degree of insect life or worm activity in the soil therefore has an impact on the vines. So if we’re making wine that tastes good and people are prepared to buy it, then, if we take a step back from that and say, OK, the processes that you followed to make that wine, are they hygienic? Yes, yes, they are. Are they safe? Yes, they definitely are. Are they a little bit different to conventional wine making? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt, they are. But the benefit to the soil, the benefit to the local environment, the benefit to the vineyard as a biodiverse organism all of its own, I think are benefits that it’s very difficult to overlook them.