It’s time to toast British fizz
English sparkling wines are bubbling up behind champagne – so let’s get the party started
Patrick Schmitt’s favourite sparklers
If one were to draw up a list of stereotypical British traits, self-promotion wouldn’t feature. The fact is, we’d rather stay silent than talk up our successes. Like Hugh Grant in a Richard Curtis screenplay, our charm lies in down playing our achievements, not championing our strengths. This may explain why uniquely English events, from Wimbledon to Royal weddings, showcase foreign food and drink even when home-grown produce is just as good.
However, when it comes to the world of English sparkling, the Brits are going to have to become a lot more brazen. With a national wine scene newly rebranded under the banner Winegb, now is the time to big up British bubbles – and there’s a need to act fast.
Why the urgency? Because such has been the rate of planting over the past few years that in less than a decade’s time the winemakers of Great Britain will be churning out twice the volume of English fizz currently on the market – production is set to double to 10 million bottles, which is more than one third the amount of champagne consumed in the UK each year. To take such quantities from the French will require some forceful promotional tactics – the might of major champagne brands should not be underestimated, whether it’s through their high-profile sponsorships or generous support to secure pouring contracts in hotels and restaurants.
And, although I’d like to say the Brits will grow the sparkling market, the main trend of today is moderation. Whether the cause is health- or money-related, the fact is we are drinking less.
But there’s widespread optimism for our burgeoning English sparkling wine business, and such positive feeling is peaking as I type. This has nothing to do with football, or Brexit, but a long-running obsession for all Brits: the weather. Quite simply, even though we are only a little over halfway through 2018, everything is in place for the UK to produce its best vintage ever.
A disastrously wet end to the growing season is still a threat but the forecast for now is sustained stable weather. Britain may have started 2018 with “the beast from the east” but, since mid-may, dry, sunny and hot weather has created ripe, healthy bunches – and lots of them.
It will, of course, take more than a single great harvest to secure the future sales success for English fizz, so why are Brits so bullish about this product. There’s even investment from Champagne, with Pommery and Taittinger now proud owners of plantations in the UK.
For most, such interest is connected to what’s underground. As producers from Sussex to Dorset will proudly attest, the chalk hills of Champagne dive briefly below the Channel before re-emerging in southern England. Quite simply, this part of GB is
the only wine-producing area in the world that shares Champagne’s geology.
It was this realisation that, exactly 10 years ago, prompted wine personality Steven Spurrier to plant 10 hectares of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, along with a touch of Pinot Meunier – the three main grapes of champagne – on his wife’s sheep farm near Bridport in Dorset. “I took a piece of chalk from the property to Paris and showed it to [leading French wine critic] Michel Bettane, before asking him: ‘Where do you think this comes from?’ He answered, ‘From Champagne, of course,’ and I said, ‘No, Dorset!’”
But what is it about chalk and sparkling wines? For Spurrier, who now makes fizz under the Bride Valley brand, the benefit is twofold. Firstly, he says, “It drains fantastically well.” This is important, because vines don’t like sodden soils and he’s located in a relatively wet part of the UK (most vineyards are farther east in the drier counties of Sussex and Kent).
Secondly, he says that this porous rock brings a particular freshness to his wines (chalk may be alkaline but it enhances acidity in the grapes). “In my view, the chalk shines through the Bride Valley wines, particularly the blanc-de-blancs [a term used to denote a sparkling wine made from 100% Chardonnay]. I love the verticality and precision of my wines.”
Christian Seely, a Bordeaux-based Brit who heads up the wine estates of the AXA insurance group, feels similarly about chalk and Chardonnay-based fizz. He launched his own English sparkling wine brand, Coates & Seely, in 2009. It was his Coates & Seely La Perfide Blanc de Blancs from that same year that came top in the inaugural UK Wine Awards in May 2017. Speaking about such success, he says, “It is pure Chardonnay grown on pure Hampshire chalk, and has a sort of finesse and minerality about it that encourages me to believe that we can make world-class sparkling wine in this country.”
Nevertheless, some of the industry’s most famous and celebrated English sparkling wine brands originate from areas with no chalk. From Nyetimber to Gusbourne, or Cornwall’s celebrated Camel Valley, their prized vineyards are planted on greensand, loamy gravels and slate respectively (even if Nyetimber is now sourcing grapes from chalk-based sites).
Stephen Skelton MW, a leading vineyard consultant for English wineries, mentions analysis of medallists in wine competitions
The most important factor in the UK is the degree of warmth the site gets
worldwide, which shows that a higher percentage of golds have historically gone to English blanc-de-blancs from non-chalk sites than chalk ones.
His view is that, ultimately, the quality – and commercial viability – of an English sparkling wine is much more reliant on the climate than the soil type. “The most important factor in the UK is the degree of warmth the site gets. The warmer it is the better the grapes will be because their acidity is riper,” he says. Indeed, he believes that wines from the UK generally have too much acid, which must be reduced during the growing season or else softened by long ageing – a luxury for a start-up English sparkling wine brand in need of cash-flow. “The overriding fact is that in the UK we are just too cool at some sites to make great wine, so anything you can do to increase the heat will make things better for both still and sparkling wines.”
Certainly, if one is to continue the comparisons with Champagne, in general terms, summers in southern England are around 1.5 degrees Celsius cooler than they are in the famous French wine region. And the UK is less sunny, too, in contrast to Champagne’s less cloudy, semi-continental climate.
But he also identifies a problem with linking the English fizz story too closely to chalk. “A lot of the problems with chalk downland, such as you find in Wiltshire and West Sussex, is that it is too exposed; it is either too high up or too near the coast – it’s good for arable, not fruit.” Rather, Skelton is reassured of the grape-growing potential for any site if it was once used for apples, or hops, and so chose a site in Kent that once grew both for Taittinger’s UK vineyard – called Domaine Evremond.
Similarly sceptical about the need to have chalk for making high-quality English fizz is EX-RAF pilot Bob Lindo, who founded the aforementioned Camel Valley in 1989. “I’ve made wine using grapes from every wine-producing county in the UK, and we don’t tend to buy grapes from chalk because it’s too meagre,” he says. “I understand the obsession with chalk, because many want to be Champagne lookalikies, but I wouldn’t look for chalk if I was planting.”
warm soils
So what would he search for? “I like sandy loam. It’s free-draining and it’s warm,” he says. “Clay is too slow to warm up,” he adds, referencing another common soil type in English vineyards – and Champagne, too.
But there’s a further issue that can limit an English vineyard’s potential for greatness and profitability, and that is the wind. One person who is happy to confess that he underestimated its impact on the grapes is Rathfinny’s Mark Driver, who, with his wife, planted the UK’S biggest single-wine estate in 2010. It currently comprises 85ha of vines near Alfriston, in Sussex, but he plans to increase that to 140ha, which will make Rathfinny significantly bigger than Surrey’s
Denbies Wine Estate – one of the nation’s largest today with around 90ha. “Because we are so close to the sea, we have a lot of wind and, when it gets over about 17km per hour, the stomata on the leaves close, which means that photosynthesis stops; the vine stops working – it’s the plant’s response to reduce evapotranspiration,” he records. This slows ripening and has meant that Driver has had to plant extensive windbreaks.
THE RAIN DRAIN
The other major factor in viticulture in the UK is rainfall, which not only obscures the sun but can dilute the grapes and promote rot – dramatically reducing the amount of berries that can be used to make wine, fizzy or not. Skelton records, “Commercially, the east of the country is better, because it is quite difficult to grow quantities of grapes and get them to ripen disease-free in a county with one metre of rain in the growing season every year,” he says, outlining the challenge in the south-west.
It’s the variability in weather conditions, particularly during the final stages of the growing season, that can affect whether the vines in England will produce enough grapes to cover the costs of maintaining a vineyard. By way of example, looking back, Spurrier expresses his concerns over the levels of production at his site. “Over the past six vintages we have averaged just under one quarter of a bottle per vine and not even Romanée-conti can survive on that,” he says, referencing Burgundy’s top domaine and source of the most expensive wine in the world. He adds that half a bottle per vine is the minimum necessary to break even at his property, and three-quarters the ideal.
Nevertheless, while yields in England are lower and more variable than those in Champagne, the cost of land is much less this side of the channel. Arable fields in the southern UK cost around £30,000 per hectare but a vineyard in Champagne would set you back around €1m for the same area and almost double that if it were located on the best chalk slopes of the region.
With that in mind, one can see why the Champenois are eyeing up opportunities in the UK. Not only do we have the same geology but we have plenty of relatively low-cost farmland to plant on, even if much of it is too wet or exposed to produce great grapes reliably. And, although conditions do vary widely year on year, certain vintages, such as 2009, 2014 and, it is expected, 2018, too, prove that we do have the climate to produce top-end fizz. Then there’s the market. The Brits love bubbles. We may be drinking less alcohol but the trends suggest that premium, branded sparkling wines are in vogue, a development favouring English fizz – a category of strong names, focused on quality.
Spurrier sums up the sentiment of many who, like him, have backed such potential. “It has proved a longer-term investment than I had planned but I’m very pleased I planted a vineyard,” he says. As for the increased future supply, Driver says that we shouldn’t assume it will all be consumed in the UK. “I do feel that looking ahead that a good proportion of that eight to 10 million bottles will be going overseas,” he states.
This latter point is important. While the sparkling wines of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and beyond may not be seen as de rigueur among the British, for everyone else they represent intriguing high-quality gems that deserve exploring. So, maybe the producers of English fizz won’t have to promote themselves after all – the rest of the world will do it for them.
Patrick Schmitt MW is editor-in-chief at
The Drinks Business