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English wine flooded with ‘enthusiastic amateurs’
The romance behind the idea of making wine has led England to be flooded with “enthusiastic amateurs”, according to one key sparkling wine producer.
Part of the immaculate Hush Heath estate in Kent
Speaking exclusively to the drinks business during a recent visit to Hush Heath estate in Kent, owner Richard Balfour-Lynn said:
“There are a lot of enthusiastic amateurs on the scene at the moment. Land owners and farmers have decided that grapes are a better use of their land than apples or pears, then you’ve got the City boys who want to pour their money into making wine.
“People are coming at it from the wrong angle – there’s this romantic vision of walking through the vineyards in the sunshine in a straw hat, but you need to work out how you’re going to sell the stuff, which is a very different proposition.
“We’re competing with good quality cheaper sparkling wines from the rest of the world and if you make the decision to sell in supermarkets then they’re going to drive your prices down.
“A lot of people are busy planting vines in the south of England, but it’s a risk. People presume grape growing is easy and it isn’t. Grapes are particularly prone to mildew and rot in England so you need to understand what you’re doing.”
With a wealth of new players entering the market, Balfour-Lynn believes wine production in England will mushroom over the coming years.
“There’s a bit of a bandwagon effect going on at the moment – every emerging wine region without fail has overproduced and created a wine lake.
“As the market matures, some of the players will realise that they can’t make wine and will stick to growing grapes and selling them off.
“Around 5-6 million bottles of English sparkling wine are currently made a year, a figure I predict to rise to 20 million in the next 10 years – massive expansion is ahead,” he said.
“Over the next 5-10 years a lot of growers will grub up and sell out as the reality is miles away from the romance of making wine.
“At the moment grape prices in England are £1,800-£2,000 a tonne, six years ago it was £1,200 but the price really should be under £1,000 – scarcity has pushed the price up,” he added.
While Balfour-Lynn believes there is still decent land left in England to plant on, he stressed that the microclimate of the individual plots will determine the success of the site, warning that windy vineyards in the southwest were at risk.
“English wine flooded with ‘enthusiastic amateurs’”
Ah – thought you were talking about we writers…
I would have thought that the accusation of amateurism would have been true 30 years ago, when the first vineyards were planted by enthusiastic retired colonels, more in hope than expectation. The industry has professionalised itself massively since those innocent times. It think the English Fizz phenomenon has only just started and we ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s going to be HUGE and go mainstream.
I think this sums up English sparkling wine production pretty succinctly. As stated “you need to work out how you’re going to sell the stuff, which is a very different proposition,” – oh so true, something I am sure it the last consideration sometimes.
So amateur is now a neagtive attribute to UK winemaking and to be critised for not being professional! WOW! The truth is that only through the help of inspired amateurs is their any hope for a future UK wine industry – the examples from other countries are too many to define but include most of Burgundy, Sonoma, NZ and Spain.
I think overproduction should be viewed positively, as an inevitable phase in the maturity of the industry. There’s simply not enough of the stuff at the moment for us to have any meaningful way of differentiating regions, sites and grape varieties. There’s also not enough competition between UK producers. What you saw in those new wine regions he mentions was a period of rapid growth, overproduction of modest quality wine, and then a retreat back to the best sites and the most successful varieties. That’s how people get to understand terroir, by trial and error. At the moment vineyards and producers are so few and far between that nobody can really identify differences between kent or sussex wine, North or South downs or Weald, and so on.