English sparkling wine

England has a claim to the first written word on sparkling wine. In December 1662 Christopher Merret told the Royal Society that London's wine coopers added sugar and molasses to wine to make it "brisk and sparkling", and English glass, made in coal-fired furnaces, was strong enough to hold the pressure. The wine was imported, though, and it was Champagne that turned sparkling wine into what it is today.

The modern industry is young. Stuart and Sandy Moss planted Nyetimber in West Sussex in 1988 with only the three Champagne grapes, and their first wine, a 1992 blanc de blancs, won a trophy at the International Wine and Spirit Competition in 1997. Mike and Christine Roberts planted Ridgeview in Sussex in 1995.

Warmer summers made the growth possible. Across the main wine regions the average growing-season temperature rose about 1°C between 1981–2000 and 1999–2018, and researchers credit that warming with the rush to plant sparkling grapes: UK vineyards grew from 761 hectares in 2004 to 3,800 in 2021. Warmth isn't the whole story. The choice of the Champagne grapes mattered too, and so did money and expertise, some of it from Champagne itself.

Chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier, the Champagne grapes, are the three most planted vines in the country. In 2024, 91% of UK sparkling wine was traditional method; the rest was tank-fermented or carbonated. Producers make brut, rosé, blanc de blancs from chardonnay alone, blanc de noirs from the black grapes, and a little demi-sec.

English is not the same as British. English wine is made from grapes grown in England. British wine is made in the UK from grape concentrate brought in from abroad, and it isn't sparkling wine in this sense at all.

The south east, above all. Kent has the most vines (1,239 hectares), then West Sussex, Essex, East Sussex and Hampshire. The chalk of the North and South Downs was laid down in the same Late Cretaceous sea, and belongs to the same chalk basin, as the chalk under Champagne's best vineyards: related rock, though not the identical beds. Plenty of English sparkling wine isn't grown on chalk at all. What the whole region shares is a cool climate that keeps the acidity high, which is exactly what a sparkling base wine needs. Taittinger planted its own English estate, Domaine Evremond near Chilham in Kent, in 2017, and released the first wine in 2025.

Sussex has its own protected name, registered in 2022: Sussex sparkling wine must be traditional method, hand picked, and spend at least 15 months in bottle before release, 12 of them on its yeast.

The UK had 4,841 hectares of vines in 2024, up more than five times since 2005, and made 10.68 million bottles, 69% of them sparkling. The 2025 harvest was a record, enough for more than 16.5 million bottles. In 2024 the English and Welsh sold 6.2 million bottles of their own sparkling wine, holding steady in a year Champagne's shipments to the UK fell 13%.

Yields are low and swing a long way from year to year, the grapes are picked by hand on some of the most expensive farmland in the country, and the good wines spend two to three years ageing before anyone can sell them. Duty adds its share: £30.62 per litre of pure alcohol from February 2026, about £2.76 on a 75cl (750ml) bottle at 12%.

Non-vintage English sparkling is made to drink within about three years of release, which is Ridgeview's advice for its own. Vintage wines are built to keep for years.

These are the windows Barello runs on for a vintage bottle, counted from the vintage. Tell it where the bottle is kept and it moves them to match; a non-vintage bottle has no year to count from, so it gets none.

8 to 10°C: the cooler end for a fresh non-vintage, 9 to 10°C for a wine with more age on it. Straight from a kitchen fridge a bottle is about 4°C, so give a good one ten minutes before you pour.