English winemaking’s changing landscape

In late 2022, Knight Frank’s Head of Viticulture, Ed Mansel Lewis, was faced with a challenge. A new Kentish winery, Domaine Evremond, owned by French champagne house Taittinger, needed to acquire a very specific parcel of land on which to plant Chardonnay vines. “They needed land with very, very good chalk soil,” explains Mansel Lewis. “It had to be south facing, it had to be on a decent slope, it had to be very warm. It also had to have a tractor’s drive from the winery.”

This brief might sound like the proverbial needle in a haystack, but, for the past two and a half years, Mansel Lewis and his team have brought to bear a unique advantage – the bespoke digital mapping service, dubbed the ‘Knight Frank Vineyard Finder’, designed by Knight Frank’s in-house Research Analytics Team to support in the identification and securing of vineland for winemakers.

The service covers the entire UK and allows Mansel Lewis and his team to overlay critical information like field-by-field soil type, average temperature, elevation and land registry data. This can then be used to identify a particular plot’s owner and initiate a conversation on the winery’s behalf. The mapping tool is proving critical in enabling several high-profile English wineries to expand – including bold new Anglo-French collaborations like Domaine Evremond. Mansel Lewis and his team secured the requisite 55 acres of ideal vineland for the winery in August 2023.

“The viticultural team at Champagne Taittinger are very particular about the land that will work for the house,” says Evremond’s Managing Director, Patrick McGrath, who is also CEO of Hatch Mansfield – one of the UK’s largest premium wine importers. “Their criteria makes identifying appropriate land very difficult, which is why Knight Frank’s expertise and technology is so invaluable.”

Once all its vines have matured, Domaine Evremond will produce around 400,000 bottles of English sparkling wine each year, drawing on Taittinger’s heritage and expertise, entirely from its own fruit. McGrath, a man who wears many hats within the English winemaking industry, is also one of the founders of a collection of wineries in Kent who work together to promote wine tourism  in Kent, the Wine Garden of England.

“Our founding objective is to promote wine tourism in Kent,” McGrath continues. “One of the initial criteria for wineries to join was that they needed an open visitor centre. We started with seven members and we’ve since expanded to nine. We’re doing a lot of work now to create a ‘PDO’, which is the equivalent of an appellation, to designate areas in Kent that would be classified as perfect for winemaking – rather like other fine regions of the world.”

Knight Frank are the property partners to the Wine Garden of England and the Viticulture Team are playing a role here, too. Their services are shaping the organisation’s placemaking strategy for member wineries.

“We are inputting information that can tell us the income of each household within an hour’s drive of a particular winery, onto the insights from our own mapping service,” Mansel Lewis says. “We can then use this to build a picture of what local communities and consumers look like and geographically pinpoint where pockets of target consumers live. If a winery is marketing to locals this makes it much easier to reach the right people, rather than throwing darts into the dark.”

Over the past 15 or so years, English winemaking has primarily built its reputation in the far south of England through the production of sparkling wines, but this may vary in the decades to come. North of Kent, change is already afoot.

“We’re seeing premiums being paid for land with clay soils in Essex because of its ability to ripen premium still wine,” Mansel Lewis explains. “In the same way that you have people using original champagne clones to make sparkling wine in Kent, you’re now seeing wine producers using original Burgundian clones to make still Chardonnay and still Pinot Noir, in the Crouch Valley and the Chelmer Valley.”

Knight Frank’s Research Analytics Team, the same team that created the bespoke mapping service, has also been modelling how the English winemaking industry could expand in the wake of climate change, as the availability of land appropriate for planting vines in the UK gently inches further north and westwards. According to these models, the number of climactically suitable sites will grow from 71,375km2 in 2024 up to 119,600km2 in 2034.

“An increase to the UK's average growing season temperature over the next 10 years will potentially unlock nearly 50,000km2 of additional vineland, with vast swathes of the East of England and the Midlands unlocked,” says Senior Analyst, James Pryor.

“We’re now an industry that’s taken seriously,” adds McGrath. “Viticulture has become a part of the agricultural landscape in places like Kent and Sussex, and both consumers and our competitors are realising that they need to take notice of English wine.”

That’s not to say that winemaking in England is an easy business – or that planting vines as a landowner is a quick win. “My one word of caution would be that the UK is still a marginal climate for winemaking,” McGrath says. “If you want to plant vines, you need to be very systematic and bring thorough analysis to bear. The professionalism and rigour that Ed and his team have demonstrated is essential to ensure success.”

To be the first to know about the launch of England’s newest sparkling wine, Domaine Evremond, register your interest. For more information about viticulture in the UK, visit Viticulture at Knight Frank.