English wine gets serious

As May Day is celebrated and England is looking its most delightful, awash with blossom, it is also awash with its very own wine. All over the world – most notably in Australia, New Zealand, California and Chile – there is a grape glut, causing a fall in the prices paid by wine producers for grapes. Amazingly, to me anyway, this is also in prospect for English vineyards.Admittedly the scale of the English winescape is relatively miniature. Stephen Skelton, the Master of Wine who most actively specialises in English wine, reckons that the total area of England and Wales devoted to commercial grape growing is now around 1,350 hectares (even New Zealand has more than 30,000 hectares). But this represents such a marked increase – with a substantial proportion of these plantings so recent that the vines either only just came into production with the bountiful 2009 vintage or are not yet bearing fruit – that there are real fears of an over-supply of the grapes of Albion. More than 3m bottles of English wine were produced last year, when the total area planted increased by 20 per cent, with a further 25 per cent planted but still to come on stream. More new plantings are expected this year.

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