Some thoughts on English Wine

Tomorrow we are at a wine tasting, and everyone gets to bring wine from their country or adopted country. As I don’t have an adopted country, I am bringing English wine. It has a pretty ropey reputation, and a lot of that is well deserved. A lot of English wine is terrible.

It’s not as terrible as British wine, and there is a difference: English wine is made with English grown grapes; British wine is made with the concentrate of the worst grapes grown in other countries. It’s a legal definition which I don’t much understand. But it means anything designated as “British Wine” is best saved for communion services or drain cleaning.

There is a reason why English wine is bad, and it’s not that it’s because it’s made by the English. It’s because of the weather; or more precisely because we’re so far north we really hardly get enough sun.

But, there are other places in fairly northern Europe that make great wine. Burgundy, Champagne and the Rhine valley. And looking at them is the best way of seeing what will make decent English wine. In particular, Southern England has a very similar soil-structure and climate and hill-shaping to Champagne, and because you’re not really looking for sweetness in champagne, and because perhaps the fizziness can mask a lot of other sins, it’s in faux-champagne that England succeeds best. England’s best wines by far are the fizzy ones. But there are other grapes, things along the lines of Sylvaner and Muller-Thurgau from the German side, and perhaps pinot blanc from the French side, which do OK.

And British vintners are working to produce new hybrids which work better still. It’s not a completely lost cause, and the wines are getting better. Because of the novelty value, I think you still pay substantially over the odds, but it’s not all nasty these days.