English Wine

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 976 Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2014

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

English and Welsh wines are on the up and up, as Sheila Dillon investigates.

Wine production is well known as a risky investment, not least because it is so dependent on the weather. Many UK growers were hit very hard by the terrible summer of 2012. One of our most well known brands, Nyetimber, completely abandoned their harvest for that year. Establishing a vineyard also requires a big capital investment; one adage used to be that if you wanted to make a moderate amount of money the way to do it would be to have a large amount of money and then plant a vineyard. This may be part of the reason why the wine produced in England and Wales accounts for less than 1% of that consumed here.

Despite all of this, the acreage of vineyards in England has doubled in the last 7 years and there are some producers aiming to produce an unheard of million bottles a year. Perhaps more importantly, mentioning English or Welsh wine at a dinner table is no longer likely to attract sniggers of derision. In fact our wine production is now synonymous with quality. As UK wine producers big and small are growing in confidence, Sheila Dillon asks how they can assure their future in a risk laden business, where they are still one of the smallest players on the global market.

Producer: Sarah Langan.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You don't need us to tell you there's a general election coming.
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0:29.0	Newscast, listen on BBC Sounds. For as long as this program has been on air, people have been talking about the
0:46.6	potential of English and Welsh wine, about that moment always just around the
0:50.9	corner when it would turn into a proper business.
0:53.7	Making wines we'd all want to buy, not out of patriotism or moral duty, but because it's good,
1:00.0	just as good as the stuff produced across the water.
1:04.0	Well, finally, that moment has come.
1:07.0	There's a wave of new people running vineyards and wineries.
1:11.0	The acreage under vines has doubled in 10 years. Some have had multi-million
1:17.6	pounds of investment, some just a few thousand, and driving it all international awards and acclaim.
1:25.6	Hello I'm Charles Metcalf, I'm one of the co-chairs of the International Wine
1:30.0	Challenge.
1:31.0	And I'm O'Ls Clark and I'm also a co-chair of the International Wine Challenge.
1:35.0	I feel at the moment we've got to a tipping point with English wine and I think that it
1:40.8	shows in the number of awards we go to English Wine this year
	...

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