I was just reading about the launching of the HMS Dreadnought in 1906. The author mentioned that King George christened the ship with a bottle of Australian wine.
Now I can see where they wanted to use wine from the British Empire for symbolic reasons. But it made me wonder why English wine is virtually unknown. Searching online, I see that there is wine made in England. But you never hear about it. You’re always hearing about “discoveries” like Chilean or South African wine. Why is English wine so under-publicized?
The article then goes on to point out that wine production in England is growing and varieties are getting better - but that is a recent phenomenon to say the least. The British are famous wine drinkers - especially fortified wines like ports and sherries, but they’ve never been afraid to import what they’ve needed.
We don’t have the climate for it. ‘British’ wine is often made from imported grape must. If there has been a great summer, in vine terms, the resulting wine can be very good but the small production run makes it very pricey compared to same quality from elsewhere.
£20 for a £7 value bottle.
Also, because of the climate variability and the consequent variable quality, there’s nothing on which to build a reputation.
OK, recently it has got a lot better, but we are hampered by not having the weather for it, so we end up with limited production, some of which is awful, and a bad reputation. So it doesn’t lend itself to export.
To clarify, “British” wine is made in Britain from imported grapes. “English” wine has to be made from grapes grown in England.
I live not too far away from England’s biggest vineyard, Denbies (I regularly go mountain biking around that area) and can confirm that their wines are generally pretty drinkable. The “champagne” (which can’t be labelled as such, of course) is really rather good.
Parts of the North Downs in southern England actually have very similar soil to the Champagne region of France. A regular “silly season” story in the papers over here is how global warming means that Surrey will be the new Champagne. For a time, when we had a run of hot dry summers, that did look slightly less silly, but the past two summers have been hopeless - cool and wet - so we don’t hear so much about that nowadays!
It seems climate change (if that is what it is) is making our winters warmer and our summers colder recently - the worst of both worlds!
England’s climate is obviously not ideal for viniculture. But it can’t be that much worse than Germany’s or New York’s - two regions which have become known for their wine.
Both New York and Germany are continental states… Britain is an island, and has the gulf stream which ensures our climate is actually pretty different to mittel europa.
Central Germany can expect long summers of 30C+, and winters well below freezing; southern england rarely gets past 30C and 0C for more than a day or two at a time.
ISTR that England did in fact have a fairly robust viticulture in the middle of the 1600s due to the global climate situation, but the prime regions then got too cold again and the industry died out. Obviously not completely.
Not really true - average daily maxima in July in Frankfurt, close to the main wine-growing region and about the warmest city in Germany, are only 25C. Winter daily maxima are well above freezing, as they are throughout Germany, except in higher elevations in or near the Alps. Only a couple of degrees warmer/cooler than England, then. It actually rains more often in Germany than in southern/eastern England, maybe that has something to do with it.
