Lyme Bay Winery

The story of what happened to Lyme Bay Winery at the 2025 awards season requires some context. Lyme Bay is a Devon winery. It is located at Uplyme, near Axminster, close to the Jurassic Coast. It is better known in many quarters for its Jack Ratt mead and its fruit wines than for its grape wine programme. It is not, by any prior reputation, the kind of producer that the English wine establishment would expect to find at the summit of both the IWC's white wine and red wine national trophies simultaneously. But that is precisely what happened: in 2025, Lyme Bay's Martin's Lane Chardonnay 2020 won the IWC National Trophy for Best English White Wine, and its Pinot Noir 2021 won the IWC National Trophy for Best English Red Wine. No English producer had achieved both in the same year. Burgundy eat your heart out, said the IWC judges, and they were not being ironic.

The Martin's Lane Chardonnay is made from grapes grown on the estate's own sites and sourced from contracted growers across Devon and Dorset, fermented with the kind of Burgundian care, partial barrel ageing and careful lees management, that produces wines with texture and weight alongside the freshness that Devon's cooler conditions naturally provide. The WineGB awards in 2025 confirmed the IWC's verdict, giving it Best Still Wine, Best White Wine, Best Chardonnay, and the West Regional Trophy. The Pinot Noir's DWWA Silver in 2024, making Lyme Bay the only English winery to win Silver for this particular vintage, set up the IWC Red Trophy the following year.

What distinguishes Lyme Bay from most English producers of equivalent quality is the breadth of its operations. The winery is one of England's largest producers of mead, with the Jack Ratt range covering everything from dry to sparkling mead and various fruit wine expressions. This commercial diversity gives the winery a financial resilience that purely grape-focused producers sometimes lack, and it allows investment in the estate wine programme without the existential pressure that a single-category focus would demand.

The cellar door offers tasting and tour experiences in a working winery environment, and the wines are distributed widely through retailers. For visitors exploring the Jurassic Coast, the Lyme Regis area, or the Axminster hinterland, Lyme Bay represents one of the most surprising and rewarding wine discoveries the West Country offers.