The English Sparkling Wine Category

The modern English wine industry is not a new one, it has been producing wine over the second half of the twentieth century.  However, much of the historic focus was on Germanic grape varieties with unfamiliar names and small, amateurish vineyards.  Over the last five to ten years the industry has seen a very new trend: sparkling wine made with the traditional method and traditional varieties of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier, proven round the world to produce a wine with a high degree of finesse.  This trend is coupled with the ideal growing conditions for these varieties in South East England to produce flavourful grapes for sparkling wine: comprised of the chalky soil that starts with the White Cliffs of Dover and the weather with a long, cool growing season.  These wines are being recognised in international competitions as being world-class, even as the best wines in the world in their categories.

Reasons to enter the English sparkling wine market:

• Small but rapidly growing wine production market: Estimates of the size of the market are just that, estimates, but reasonable figures paint the picture that it was £25 million in 2011, that it grew by a third and that the growth is accelerating as illustrated.
• Small is beautiful (the UK currently has 1,200 hectares under vine, whereas the Champagne region alone has 83,000 hectares and sells £3.4 billion a year)­­—the Company intends to be a big player in a small but rapidly developing industry.  A high level of growth is expected to continue for two reasons: significantly more hectares of vineyard have been planted and English wine accounts for less than 1% of domestic wine consumption.

Summary

Article Name

The English Sparkling Wine Category

Author

Digby Fine English

Publisher Name

https://digby-fine-english.com/

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