English Wine as Good as Champagne

Wine made in England is no longer a joke. Whether it's due to global warming and climate change, or simply better production methods, English wine is now winning prizes

Someone gave me a bottle of English sparkling wine for my birthday last month. Not too many years ago you would have wondered if this was a joke, a bottle they'd been given and had been waiting for the chance to pass on to someone else. Well, if they had then the joke was on them. I had the sparkling wine on my birthday with some Scottish salmon and it was wonderful. English wine these days has to be taken seriously.

I'm not a wine writer so can't give detailed tasting notes about what this English wine was all about. In fact we were too busy enjoying it to remember the wine-tasting routine we'd learned on a visit to Bordeaux last year. A few years earlier, again for my birthday as it happens, my wife and I had joined a wonderful and fun Champagne Weekend in France, organised by the wine travel specialists Arblaster and Clarke. We traveled by coach to Reims, the heart of the Champagne region, and were sampling the best French champagne at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was one of the best weekends we've ever had, and we did actually manage to take some notes and learned to tell a good champagne when we tasted one.

The English sparkling wine that I had for my birthday this year was every bit as good as some we sampled in Champagne itself. When we poured it into our champagne flutes, saved for special occasions, the bubbles fizzed up from the base of the glass in thick profusion, a good starting sign. They continued to fizz as we stuck our noses in and sniffed. I once went on a wine cruise when the wine expert Jilly Goolden gave some lectures, and 'stick your hooter right in the glass' was one piece of advice that stuck with me.

The English wine smelled good, and it tasted even better. It didn't surprise me to go to the vineyard's website and learn that an earlier vintage of the same sparkling wine won a prize for the Best Sparkling Wine in the World in the International Wine and Spirit Competition in 2005. Now that's impressive!

The sparkling wine that so bowled me over was the 2004 Merret Bloomsbury sparkling white wine from the Ridgeview Wine Estate. The name Merret, by the way, is in honour of one Christopher Merret who was making sparkling wine in England at least 30 years before the French started making it, and 70 years before the first champagne house in Champagne was established. So did the English invent champagne? Who knows – but I'll certainly drink to it.

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To find out more about Ridgeview sparkling wines visit their website by clicking here.

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And to find out more about English wines, and food, check the website for Food from Britain. Food from Britain sponsors English Wine Week and helps promotes English wine and supports English Wine producers all year round. Click on their website here.

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To read about England's largest vineyard, click here.

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