England's sparkling wine is losing its fizz

Japan Times

2 days ago

I do enjoy a glass of champagne but I often wish I could substitute the experience with English varietals, especially those grown by friends. It's been a struggle.
Growing pains are increasingly evident in the English sparkling wine industry. As with all aspirational consumer products the hype can easily get ahead of itself. It's all too often a rich person's folly, with micro vineyards increasingly popping up all over the southern English countryside in the past decade as the latest show-off toy.
But national pride can only take it so far. More than two-thirds of U.K. wine production is fizz. There are over 200 vineyards producing over 12 million bottles but the average size is just 1.6 hectares. The Champagne region produces more than 300 million bottles per year, with houses such as LVMH's Moet & Chandon selling 30 million alone.
However, venerable grand marques such as Taittinger Cie Commercial, Vranken-Pommery Monopole and Spanish Cava-producing giant Freixenet have cannily built operations in the U.K., a prudent insurance policy against climate change.
For the plucky wannabe winemakers though, the upfront costs of planting a vineyard are staggering; it can take as long as 10 years before a commercial product sees the light, and that's before required bottle-aging. Phil Weeks, head of trade sales at British wine merchant Lea & Sandeman, tells me the industry is still too small to offer realistic economies of scale to make any real impact on the already saturated U.K. wine market. The variety of foreign wines is probably the most sophisticated and mature in the world.
It really doesn't help having higher taxes now measured on alcohol content. The going is only getting tougher for fledgling startups. Overseas sales are growing into Norway, Japan and even the U.S., but in global scale the numbers are negligible. English sparkling is only 4% of its domestic market, about a third of champagne's well-entrenched market share — and not a patch on Italian prosecco, which comprises over half of all fizz sold in the U.K. Kylie Minogue — whose name-brand prosecco has "conquered Britain,' the Guardian told us — has a lot to answer for.
The industry is ripe for consolidation into bigger producers, with only a handful of vineyards shifting nearly 1 million bottles per year and widespread reports of many struggling to sell their production. A greater focus on quality and affordability will be vital, and that means greater specialization too from niche artisanal growers focused purely on achieving the best.
As well as playing with the mix of grape varieties used, innovation is key — as champagne fiercely protects its brand using all the wiles of the European Union single market — then the U.K. industry has to think outside the box, such as adopting more of the cooperative model.
There are shafts of sunlight though. The mercurial grower Dermot Sugrue's 'The Trouble With Dreams' 2009 was the first sparkling wine magnum ever to be crowned in the top 50 wines of the world at the Decanter 2025 awards — seriously high praise and beating off Champagne's finest. A frequent criticism of English wine its its relative high cost on restaurant wine lists compared with often better quality champagne, but winning major competitions is a fine riposte. Of course, sadly it's now sold out.
One model stands out to me — the boutique approach. Not many sparkling winemakers get to be the official in-house tipple of a monarch's private residence but a friend of mine, Nick Hall, owner of Herbert Hall vineyard in Kent, England has that accolade. Not just fit for a King but served by one at his private residence, Highgrove. Small is beautiful, as he produces just 20,000 bottles a year so it's great to see King Charles III supporting truly creative English wineries.
It's been quite a journey for Hall from journalism, to a spell in advertising then working with art galleries — but he gave it all up for the grip of the grape. His sharp turn toward "artisanal fruit farming' — otherwise termed making high-end sparkling wine by the traditional champagne method — also tracks the fortunes of this nascent English industry. His model from the start has been to do it all — from soup to nuts. Which means planting the vines, picking the grapes, doing all the fiddly clever wine-making bits, putting the labels on, hawking his product and running a bar at the winery.
The alternative is the growing band of owners who have clubbed together to form the Surrey Hills vineyards to share the costs of production and increase marketing clout. Several of them serve their produce along with food platters among their vines — it's a neat trick that delivers instant cash flow, vital to help bridge the laborious yearslong process of actually selling your wine for a profit.
It mirrors the bucolic image that British holidaymakers hold of traveling around the French countryside, stopping to try the wines and maybe buying a case from a small grower. Except that reality now involves booking long in advance with stiff entrance fees if my recent experience in Champagne is any guide.
English wine needs to grow up fast, consolidate and also diversify — otherwise it will wither on the vine as just a quirky oddity only bought because you're British. It faces tough competitors who defend their patch with vigor. If English wine could just get a little better and a lot cheaper I promise to do my bit.
Marcus Ashworth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European markets.