Oz Clarke - English wine : from still to sparkling : the newest new world wine country

OZ CLARKE
ENGLISH
WINE

The South Downs in the distance, the morning mist in the valley, and Nyetimbers vines waking, ready for another day.

FROM STILL TO SPARKLING

THE NEWEST NEW WORLD
WINE COUNTRY

The obvious title of the book should be British Wine, to cover wines made throughout the kingdom, but this term still refers to wines made from imported juice concentrate. They are usually fairly sweet and of pretty basic quality, so make sure you look for the terms English or Welsh wine on the label. The title of this book is English Wine although I have included a small section on Welsh wines. To say English and Welsh wine several times a page through the book seemed to me to be just too cumbersome, so I have stuck to the simpler English wine. I hope my Welsh friends will understand.

The vineyards and wineries profiled from onwards cover personal experiences and reflections from my years of visiting and tasting up and down the country. This is not a comprehensive handbook full of statistics nor a whos who of top producers nor even a list of my favourites I have tried to be representative and include the obvious big producers as well as some more boutique newcomers and my apologies to the many excellent producers I did not have space for in this book.

Vineyard and winery profiles: Each entry includes a few essential details, to encourage you either to visit or to buy the wines and try for yourself. There has not been room to list all the many top quality tasting and food opportunities now on offer at many of these producers and the extraordinary variety of events and festivals available year round I hope you will go and see for yourself.

Symbols: sparkling and still wine produced.

Oz recommends These are suggested wines to try and my favourites at the time of writing. They may not be their supposedly best wines but they are wines I have enjoyed and found interesting. refers to sparkling wine.

If I were writing this in October 2018 I would be gazing out of my window at bright golden sunshine still bathing the trees in warmth as a gorgeous summer resolutely refused to let go its sweet grip and fade into winter. I would be chatting to happy winemakers whose vats of juice from superripe grapes were overflowing and whose wineries were heady with the scent of wonderful flavours being created. Ah, the joys of climate change. It will be like this every year from now on, wont it?

But Im writing this introduction in a very different October. The skies have been heavy and glum for well over a month, so that theres really no point in holding on to see if a balmy Indian summer will somehow bring back the cheer. There is a little sun peeping through pale, nervous, barely enough to shift the autumn dew off the grapes as the bands of pickers don gumboots and waterproof jackets and trudge out into the muddy rows to judiciously harvest the healthiest and juiciest bunches of this years considerable crop. Ah, the joys of being a marginal wine area, on an island buffeted by weather systems on all sides. No one has ever truthfully said that British weather can be predictable (no, not even the climate pessimists). And if we think that climate change is just about blue skies and record sunshine well, that is part of the story, but only part.

Even if the 2019 vintage was one of the wettest for some time we have had a tremendous run of warm, dry Octobers this century to make up any summer shortfall well, the spring and the summer of 2019 were full of good things. There were no spring frosts to worry about. The vines flowered in good, warm, dry conditions and there were heatwaves that broke records in June and August. I spent quite a bit of the summer travelling through the English and Welsh vineyards and I didnt have one day when the sun wasnt shining, not one day when I didnt think what a glorious country we live in, and what an uplifting addition to our landscape is made by all our vineyards.

But there were also record cold temperatures in June and August, often right next to the heatwaves. And as the hurricane season in the Atlantic built up to being one of the most furious and vicious on record, with Hurricanes Dorian, Humbert and Lorenzo causing destruction on the other side of the Atlantic, the storms tails hit the British Isles with unusual force, blocking out the sun and drenching our fields.

But it shows how far we have come as a wine-producing nation that we were ready for the tribulations of the year and, given the heat of much of the summer, large crops of good grapes could still be brought in, healthier, at higher sugar levels and weeks earlier than would have been possible a generation ago. We now have such a confident bunch of grape growers and wine producers in this country that problems are met head on, and quality is merely different, rather than worse, in most years.

Does this show weve come of age as a wine producer? Im sure it does. The UK is still marginal in climate terms but thats what you need to be if youre going to make great sparkling wine and fresh, aromatic still wines. Cool climate, yes, but warm enough to ripen Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for sparklers, and not too warm to bake away the hedgerow scent of the Germanic and hybrid varieties that still produce some of our most delightful still wines. The greatest marginal cool climate wine country in the world? Could we be that? Yes, we could. The men and women growing the grapes and making the wine here are as talented and passionate as those anywhere across the globe. And the raw material they have to deal with, the grape harvest they bring in each year, is intriguing, unique, sometimes unpredictable but bursting with the potential to make wines unlike any others.

And we must play our part. We must choose to drink English and Welsh wines. If we live in wine-making counties, we must support our local producers. And we must visit them. Wine tourism is of ever greater importance to wineries and vineyards. As more and more people seek experiences, not just the mere flavour of a bottle of wine well, theres no better way to get the best out of a bottle than by visiting the place the grapes are grown and meeting the people who do the work. Thats how you get to love and understand wine. Other countries have made themselves experts at this Wine Experience. Now its our turn, and theres no more beautiful country in the world to do it in than our own.

England probably has a 2000-year history of making wine, but the trouble is that its an inglorious one until now. And for the first signs that things can only get better, we wouldnt have to go back much more than 20 years to find the first flash of brilliance which would transform a woebegone, unconfident and, frankly, unnecessary English wine world into the thrilling place that it is now so full of potential that I sometimes call England The Newest New World Wine Nation.