A History of English Wine

43 AD — The Romans Arrive, and They Bring Vines

The Romans invaded Britain in 43 AD, bringing with them an architectural ambition, a talent for road-building, and a firm requirement for wine. Roman soldiers consumed extraordinary quantities of it — it was safer than water, culturally essential, and logistically simpler to produce locally than to transport amphorae across the Channel indefinitely. Vineyards were established across what is now southern England, as far north as Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire, with sites selected for south-facing slopes and free-draining soils with the same instinct that modern English viticulturalists use today.

1066 — The Normans and the Domesday Vineyards

The Norman Conquest brought a new ruling class with a passion for viniculture that matched their passion for governance. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, forty-six vineyards were recorded across England, most of them concentrated west of London in the river valleys of the Midlands and the South. The great monastic orders — Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians — became England's most significant wine producers, maintaining vineyards at Canterbury, Ely, Gloucester and a dozen other ecclesiastical centres with the institutional patience that monastic life enables.

1152 — The French Problem

Henry II's marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 was, among many other things, a catastrophe for English domestic viticulture. The acquisition of Bordeaux's wine estates — producing claret of a quality and quantity that English vineyards could not match — introduced to the English market a source of cheap, reliable wine that undercut English production for the next seven centuries. The decline of English viticulture was not sudden; it was gradual, inexorable, and perfectly rational from an economic standpoint.

1952 — The General Plants His Vines

Major-General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones returned from the Second World War with a determination to do something useful with a south-facing chalk hillside in the Hampshire village of Hambledon — birthplace, with impeccable English symbolism, of cricket. In 1952, with advice from Pol Roger, he planted Seyval Blanc and established what is now considered England's oldest modern commercial vineyard. His neighbours thought him eccentric. They were wrong.

1988 — Nyetimber Changes Everything

Stuart and Sandy Moss, Americans unencumbered by the British assumption that fine wine required a French address, purchased a West Sussex estate in 1988 and planted something that no English producer had previously dared: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier — exclusively, without compromise, the varieties of Champagne. They made wine by the traditional method, aged it properly on the lees, and in 1992 entered it in competition. The result — a gold medal at the International Wine and Spirit Competition — initiated the modern era of English wine.

2000 — Ridgeview Beats Champagne

Ridgeview's Cuvée Merret Bloomsbury, made by the Roberts family from East Sussex chalk, beat Champagne at the International Wine Challenge to win the Waitrose Trophy. The wine press was surprised. It should not have been; the warning signs had been accumulating for nearly a decade. But wine writing, like most journalism, prefers the dramatic discovery to the incremental development.

2015 — Champagne Invests in England

Taittinger's purchase of 69 hectares in Kent in 2015 — later developed as Domaine Evremond — was the moment the Champagne establishment formally acknowledged what the blind tasters had been saying for fifteen years: that England's chalk could produce sparkling wine of genuine world-class quality. Pommery followed, establishing Louis Pommery England and releasing its first vintage in 2020. The French, as they occasionally do, recognised an emerging reality rather than waiting for it to overtake them entirely.

2025 — The Competition That Ended the Debate

In May 2025, the International Wine Challenge — one of the world's most rigorous wine competitions, with blind judging by qualified panels — awarded its Champion Sparkling Wine trophy to Nyetimber's Blanc de Blancs 2016 Magnum. It was the first time in the competition's thirty-four year history that the award had not gone to a Champagne. The judges scored it 97 points. The Champagne establishment was gracious. English wine was quietly, justifiably, very pleased indeed.