Sparkling prospects: The future's bright for English fizz
With good soil, warm sun, and a fresh attitude, English vineyards are starting to surpass the efforts of their French neighbours. Adam Lechmere speaks with Knight Frank’s Head of Viticulture, Ed Mansel Lewis, about sourcing vineland, placemaking for producers and English wine’s winning formula
English wines have changed radically over the past couple of decades. What was essentially a cottage industry 20 years ago is now a multi-million pound business, built on wines of exceptional quality and dozens of award-winning vintages. If French wine was the oenological pièce de résistance of the 20th century, thanks to perfect terroir and mature vineland, English wines may yet claim the top spot in the 21st century instead. As the winemaking landscape continues to change, both French and English luxury producers are actively looking for land in the south of England that’s suitable to grow vines.
With this viticultural land-grab hotting up, could you be sitting on the ideal site for a brand new English vineyard? Put at its simplest, to grow Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier – the three grape varieties that go into sparkling wine – you need a well-drained, south-facing slope with light, chalky soil. Of course, it’s not quite that simple, as Ed Mansel Lewis, Knight Frank’s Head of Viticulture explains.
“You need an average temperature of 13°C throughout the growing season, which is from flowering to harvest, 1 April to 31 October,” he says. “Then, you need to have a slope facing between south-east and south-west in order to maximise the amount of sun your vines will soak up, and also to make sure any frost rolls off. In practice, this requires land to be on a shallow gradient between about five and 10 degrees – any steeper and tractor work becomes risky.”
Until recently, the only way that winemakers could identify appropriate plots of land was through painstaking manual land surveys and experimentation. Now though, thanks to Mansel Lewis’s team, producers like Chapel Down, who retain Ed as a consultant, are pulling ahead in the race to identify and secure perfect vineland. “We have a mandate to help them with their growth plans,” says Mansel Lewis.
Like prime vineland, his relationship with Chapel Down has evolved gradually over several years. Mansel Lewis approached Chapel Down in 2017 about developing a way for landowners and vineyard operators to collaborate. Then, in January 2022, when Andrew Carter took on the role of Chapel Down’s CEO, Mansel Lewis and his team were brought in as their preferred land search partner, fulfilling a critical part of the business’s target to grow revenues and increase sales.
To seek out the most promising land for vines, Mansel Lewis uses state-of-the-art satellite mapping technology adapted by Knight Frank’s in-house geospatial analytics team. Dubbed the ‘Knight Frank Vineyard Finder’, this bespoke tool uses digital map hosting platform ArcGis, and is capable of identifying the altitude, exposure and soil type of any given parcel of land in the UK.
Vines take four to five years to mature. Most vineyards are at their most productive for around 35 years
“When you look at the screen, you see a satellite base map, programmed so I can overlay layers that show important criteria like elevation and slope direction,” he explains. “It’s a quick and powerful way of seeing what sort of land we're dealing with. Using one screen, I can identify suitable land quickly and accurately, and then overlay a land registry map to show me who owns that land.” From there, Mansel Lewis will simply call up the landowner and suggest their land would be ideal for vines. “They might ask which field I’m talking about and I can say, ‘the top field up by the copse’ – it demonstrates credibility, that I’ve looked at the site in depth.
“Given English wine’s healthy upward trajectory, if the said landowner is interested in selling, key to the negotiation is the “curiosity around vines” in the UK. Even more importantly, vineland is at a premium due to its high demand. “Arable land is typically £10,000 per acre, whereas vineland is going for up to £18,000 per acre,” Ed says. “Some buyers have paid more than £20,000 per acre.” The value of the land increases depending on its position – if it can be seen from the landowner’s house, for example.
Mansel Lewis, who owns the Stradey Estate in Wales, with its stunning Grade II* Georgian Orielton House, also has first-hand experience of how to make a big estate work: at Stradey he and his wife, Nia, an architect and interior designer, have diversified into weddings and hospitality. With this experience to hand, he helps winemakers increase their business’s desirability by using what Knight Frank calls “a placemaking approach” – clustering several like-minded businesses around a single core offering.
30 acres of land will yield around 100,000 bottles in a year
In practice, this means attracting a healthy variety of different complementary businesses to the site of a winery or vineyard, tapping into their own customer bases to form a cluster of discrete but like-minded attractions. For example, Mansel Lewis is working with a “high-profile client in the South West” to overlay its restaurant operation with overnight stays and nature walks in the estate’s vineyards, wildflower meadows and woodland. The appeal of tourism to winemakers is obvious – and it’s profitable. Knight Frank notes that the profit on a bottle of wine sold at cellar door can be three times the margin of one sold off-site in retail.
What, then, comes next for English wine? In 2015, Champagne Taittinger bought 174 acres of land in Kent on which it planted Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mansel Lewis was involved in the purchase and continues to act as Taittinger’s UK agent. The first bottles of Domaine Evremond, as the house has called its English outpost, will be available in 2024. Interest from across the Channel will only increase: with warmer summers it’s getting harder for French growers to find the refreshing acidity that is at the heart of Champagne. In the future could English winemakers even be able to grow and produce first-class Burgundy? “Perhaps,” says Mansel Lewis.
In the here and now, six major producers are in the market to buy vineland with parcels of over 100 acres, according to Mansel Lewis and his team. The demand for the finest English vineland is only going one way, so there’s no better time to take another look at that south-facing slope of yours – and imagine perfect rows of vines climbing to the horizon.
Adam Lechmere is consultant editor of fine wine and spirits magazine Club Oenologique