Best of British wines

Inspired by the “Best of British” exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Greville Havenhand looks once more at the wines of England and Wales.

I make no apology for returning to our native wines. They improve year by year and they are getting more international prizes, especially , but not exclusively, for sparkling wine.

In an international competition for sparkling wines held in Italy,  Bollinger – a Grande Marque Champagne – won; the third was Deutz – yet another- but between them in second place was a sparkling  white made from Pinot Noir from the Camel Valley Vineyard in Cornwall.

Surprisingly this wine only received a Silver Medal in this year’s International Wine Challenge, but Camel Valley’s still wine Bacchus won a Gold.  In the International Wine and Spirit  Competition the Gold went to Nyetimber’s Classic Cuvee, which has won the Yarden Trophy for best sparking wine in the world on two occasions.

Nyetimber is a beautiful West Sussex Estate, developed as a home for sparkling wine by by Americans Stuart and Sandy Ross. It is now owned by Eric Heerema and has grown to 250 acres of the traditional Champagne grapes.  The soil is similar to the Champagne region and the method of making it is the same. What a pity it cannot be called Champagne.

The same is true of many of the other English sparkling wine  producers, such as Chapel Down and more particularly the Ridgeview Estate. Its owner, Mike Roberts, includes the name “Merret” in the name of all his wines in honour of Christopher Merret who presented a paper to the Royal Society in 1662 outlining the method of making sparkling wine – some thirty years before Dom Perignon was supposed to have invented Champagne.

It is not just sparkling wine. The semi-sweet, floral wines made from Germanic grapes which characetrised  English wines a quarter of a century ago are now a rarity.  Crisp, fruity aromatic whites are the order of the day. Wineries such as Three Choirs in Gloucestershire headed the list of Trophy winners in this year’s English and Welsh Wine of the Year competition, whose judges are Masters of Wine. The Wine of the year went to their reserve Siegerrebe, which won two more trophies and Martin Fowkes of  Three Choirs was voted winemaker of the year.

Three Choirs

Three Choirs is a great winery to visit with a restaurant, rooms, a very informative trail through the vineyard explaining all the different methods of training and pruning vines. What is more they have some of the more affordable wines on the market.

As you will gather from the use of Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier in the sparkling wines, red grapes are increasingly grown, and, usually in good years, there are some very good red wines appearing. Titchfield Vineyard produces a good Pinot Noir but my favourite from the notoriously difficult grape, is the one from Booker’s Vineyard, which has won prizes in international competitions.

The small but growing wine industry is set to benefit from global warming. There are fewer wineries than in some years but a greater area under vine – nearly 800 hectares, with  116 wineries producing around a million bottles per year of white wine and three hundred thousand bottles of red.  There are single properties in France producing more!

Don’t be prejudiced. Follow the international judges and appreciate our indigenous product – and reduce your carbon footprint.