a day ago
England's Sparkling Wine Is Losing Its Fizz
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 UK wine production is fizz. There are over 200 vineyards producing over 12 million bottles but the average size is just 4 acres. 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 SA and Spanish Cava-producing giant Freixenet SA have cannily built operations in the UK, 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-ageing. 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 UK wine market. The variety of foreign wines is probably the most sophisticated and mature in the world.
