Surrey

Surrey is English wine's best-kept secret, which is particularly odd given that it sits within comfortable commuting distance of eight million people. The North Downs chalk ridge — the same geological seam that continues east into Kent and west into Hampshire — runs through the county just south of the M25, providing conditions for sparkling wine that the county's proximity to London should, by rights, have made famous long ago.

Denbies Wine Estate, the county's giant at 265 acres on the chalk slopes above Dorking, is England's most visited winery with a visitor infrastructure that rivals French châteaux. The wines are honest rather than ambitious — the Noble Harvest dessert wine, produced only in years when botrytis cooperates, is the clear quality outlier — but for sheer accessibility and the completeness of the tourist experience, nothing in English wine quite matches it. You can arrive by train from Waterloo, tour the winery, eat lunch in the restaurant, sleep in the on-site accommodation, and take home a case. English wine tourism, finally, done properly.

But Denbies is not the whole Surrey story. Greyfriars Vineyard, on the chalk above Guildford, produces a consistently impressive sparkling wine that regularly outperforms its modest profile. Albury Organic Vineyard, biodynamically managed in the Surrey Hills AONB, has built a cult following among London's natural wine community with its skin-contact and pét-nat wines. And Painshill Park's reconstructed eighteenth-century vineyard — planted to the same varieties that once impressed the Duke of Newcastle — is the most historically resonant winery tour in English wine.

The county's fundamental asset is its location. For the majority of English wine consumers, who live in London and the South East, Surrey is the most accessible wine region in the country. That convenience is, slowly, being recognised.

Visiting Tip