is rising

season much like 2022, it saw a huge step change in the quality of Pinot Noir in particular, instilling a new sense of confidence in growers about the potential for the variety in southern England.

While the benign conditions of the season may have played their part in 2018 (and in 2022, where some Pinot has come in with potential abv up to 14.7%) other factors have been just as important in shaping the improvement in English Pinot that has taken place since. The vines themselves have matured, that extra vine age bringing greater concentration and depth. Winemakers, too, are now much more likely to set aside specific plots for red wines, as opposed to thinking of these as a sideline to their sparkling production. Finally, expertise, as in all forms of winemaking in the UK, has vastly improved. There’s a sense that winemakers have a much better idea of what they want from their Pinot and where and how they can go about it.

Among the producers setting the tone for high-quality still English Pinot are Gusbourne, Balfour/Hush Heath, Simpsons Estate, Oastbrook, Danbury Ridge, Martin’s Lane, Litmus and Lyme Bay – although it’s not just reds. Many producers are also making great still blanc de noirs wines, with recent star performers including Litmus White Pinot and Simpsons

Derringstone Pinot Meunier.

The discreet charm of charmat

One of the more divisive issues in English and Welsh wine over the past five years has been the emergence of charmat as a genuine alternative for sparkling wine production.

The trend kicked off back in 2018 with the launch of two charmat-method sparklers, both of which claimed to be the first in the UK: a rosé from Flint Vineyard in the Waveney Valley in south Norfolk and the Fitz brand from Sussex. More recently the charmat supply has grown significantly with the emergence of Kent’s MCDV, notably with its Harlot brand, but also with the Bramble Hill own-label that its sister firm Vineyard Farms produces for Marks & Spencer.

For English charmat advocates, the position is clear. There has been a vast expansion of the English vineyard over the past couple of decades, with a 74% jump to 3,924ha in the past five years alone, with a further 400ha going in the ground this year, and with an expected total of 7,600ha by 2032. On current trends and consumption patterns, supply is very soon going to outstrip demand: there are, according to this view, simply not enough people in the UK with the will or the cash to pay the premium prices that traditional-method sparkling wines require if producers are going to break even. Moving into charmat, and possibly even carbonisation, is the best and only economically viable way of diversifying and picking up consumers at lower (circa £15), if not rock-bottom prices, while also offering consumers a greater stylistic range of English sparkling.

However, for many of the established English sparkling brands, who had bet the house on traditional method and have spent years developing the image of English fizz as a premium product that rivals Champagne, and with a price to match, the arrival of charmat was about as welcome as a late-spring frost, and their initial reaction was no less chilly. Charmat wines are doing nothing but diluting the brand, in their view, in a way that would simply not happen in Champagne. Hence the focus on creating the Classic Method hallmark for bottle-fermented, PDO wines, which was introduced in late 2020.

As more and more charmat wines have emerged, however, with the prospect of many more to follow, there is a sense that some of the heat has come out of the debate, with Wine GB now explicitly presenting the idea of a two-tiered sparkling scene, divided between “the main style” of Classic Method and “other sparkling wine styles” that “make best use of more aromatic varieties and illustrate the diversity and innovation of wine production in Britain today, providing different entry points to wine drinkers new to our industry”.

Sussex PDO, but the way is Essex

Another issue that has sometimes generated rather more heat than light over the past few years is the development of a PDO for Sussex. After years of wrangling, led by leading Sussex producers Rathfinny, Ridgeview and Bolney, the appellation was finally rubber-stamped by Defra and introduced last summer, marking something of a step-change for English wine, and granting the wines the same status as Stilton and Jersey Royals.

The PDO covers wines from both East and West Sussex, and both still and classic method sparkling (but not, as you may have gathered from the section on charmat above, other styles of fizz), with rules stipulating, among other things, permitted grape varieties, minimum alcoholic strength, yields and sulphur levels.

While some Sussex producers celebrated, however, others thought the move was a retrograde one that makes little sense as a means of communicating quality. They argue that Sussex is a purely administrative boundary, and a somewhat arbitrary one for wine, with a wine grown on chalk in Sussex having more in common with a wine grown on chalk in Hampshire, for example, than it would with a Sussex wine grown on one of the county’s other soils (such as greensand). Lending weight to their argument, they give the example of Nyetimber, still arguably the leading sparkling wine producer in the UK (and, indeed, Sussex) but which sources its grapes from three counties.

If there is to be a greater focus on local provenance in English wine, many Sussex PDO critics believe it should be based on terroir, such as the chalk of the North and South Downs, or on much smaller geographical units, such as Essex’s Crouch Valley, described by Jancis Robinson as England’s Côte d’Or, which is fast emerging as the best place in the country for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

For their part, the Sussex PDO producers are sticking to their guns, pointing to the precedents of Burgundy and Champagne, both of which are wide administrative areas encompassing many different terroirs, and arguing that the PDO is all about pushing the idea of “provenance”.

Arguments about the merits of appellations? Inter-regional beef? If nothing else, the Sussex dispute shows that English wine has ever-more in common with wine in the rest of Europe.

A green and orange land

Making organic and biodynamic wine anywhere in the world is not the easy choice; making it in the marginal climate of the UK is something close to masochistic. As English and Welsh wine matures, however, an increasing number of brave souls are now employing the methods – with many also bringing their natural spirit to the winery, adding greatly to the stylistic diversity available on these shores.

Among the organic pace-setters are Davenport in Kent (organic since 2000), Oxney Estate in East Sussex (which currently has around a fifth of the total organic vineyard in the UK), and the biodynamic pair Albury Organic Estate in the Surrey Hills and Domaine Hugo in Wiltshire.

For natural wines, it’s hard to look past the pioneering funky work and quirky range of Tillingham in East Sussex, but over the past year the variously sourced, meticulously made work of Daniel Ham of Offbeat Wines has stood out, as has Battersea urban winery Blackbook’s skin-contact Slow Disco Sauvignon Blanc.