English Wine: A Quick Guide

13 May 2022

Once upon a time, English wine making was little more than a hobby for a small number of private post-war pioneers. Today, English wine is serious business, making its mark on a world stage and widely celebrated for its incredible quality. When exactly did the English wine resurgence happen? And why?


To answer those questions and more, we’ve put together a quick guide to English wine. It features some of the wine questions we are asked here at Three Choirs Vineyards in Gloucestershire.

When did grapes come to England?

Grapes came to England with the Romans. At first, grapes were probably used as ornaments to remind Romans of life back in Italy; vines were probably grown in England a little later to satisfy the Romans thirst for wine. 


But it was when the Norman nobles arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066 that viniculture really took off in England. 


At the time of the compilation of the Domesday Survey in the late eleventh century, for instance, vineyards were recorded in 46 places in southern England, from East Anglia through to modern-day Somerset. Although much of this wine was being produced to be used as communion wine in monasteries and on ecclesiastical estates. 


Wine production continued in England throughout the Middle Ages and into the 16th century (by the time King Henry VIIIth ascended the throne there were 139 sizeable vineyards in England and Wales). Most vineyards were connected to monasteries and with the Reformation most vineyards disappeared as the monasteries fell into disrepair.


It was not until 1936 when a man called George Ordish planted vines in Wessex and the South of England, that there was a rediscovery of English wines and winemaking. Thankfully, more pioneers followed in his footsteps and thus began a rapid increase in the number of English vineyards, with a particular boom of commercial vineyards in the 80s and 90s. The rest, as they say, is history.

How do you grow grapes in England?

As you’d expect, vines need the right conditions to thrive and grow, which is why not all regions in the UK are wine-producing. Even in the best wine growing regions, such as the south west (where we are based) and the south east, our cooler climate makes wine growing a challenge. England also has one of the shortest growing seasons in Europe, which means we must choose grape varieties that can fully develop flavour and complexity whilst retaining a greater level of freshness and vibrancy in our wines.

a group of people are working in a vineyard

To grow vines and grapes successfully at home (which is more than possible) you need the right spot – your warmest, sunniest and most sheltered corner, ideally south-facing where the soil is well drained. 


We can offer a consultancy service for those wishing to plant vines on a commercial scale.

How many vineyards are there in England?

There are approximately 164 wineries and 522 commercial vineyards in England with 150 vineyards open to the public. We are one of England’s oldest vineyards, and we’re open to the public [Saturday & Sunday] for wine tastings.


Unsurprisingly, the majority of viticulture takes place in the south, where the climate is slightly warmer and drier. Although as temperatures rise with climate change, wine making may begin to proliferate across the entire country. For now, the majority of commercial vineyards tend to be located in the southern strip of England’s coast, from Cornwall to Kent.

What are the most popular grape types grown in English vineyards?

The most popular grapes grown in English vineyards are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Bacchus, as well as Pinot Meunier and Ortega. 


Here at Three Choirs Vineyard, we produce a Bacchus – it’s an elegant, dry and aromatic wine, popular with our diners and our weekend guest. We also produce a gold award-winning classic sparkling wine, Classic Cuvee n/v, shown on the left, made to traditional methods and to exceptional quality. 


Interestingly, sparkling wine still makes up the lion’s share of English wines being produced per year. Still white wine comes in at second, whilst the remaining come from red wines or rosé wine.


We produce two red wines and one rosé wines at our Gloucestershire vineyard: a Ravens Hill, a Pinot Noir Precoce and a Rosé.


We also have a number of white wines: Siegerrebe, Coleridge Hill and Willowbrook 2018.

Where can I taste English Wine in the UK?

With nearly 150 English vineyards open to visitors, it might be hard to decide where to go to taste English wine in the UK. 


At Three Choirs Vineyards not only can you enjoy tasting our English wines in the beautiful, rolling Cotswolds’ countryside, you can also stay amongst our vines overnight.

a hotel room with a view of a vineyard

On site, we have Luxury Vineyard Lodges and Vineyard View Rooms for you to choose from, plus a Brasserie serving the best local food paired perfectly with our homegrown wines. We promise, tasting English wine here, with us, will be a wine experience you’ll never forget.

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28 August 2025
As August draws to an end, the team at Three Choirs Vineyard are gearing up ready for our harvest. But when is the right time to pick the grapes? We don’t have a definite set date for the annual harvest; it all depends on the weather. This year, it looks likely to start a bit early – probably in the first week of September - because of all the good weather we’ve had this summer. That is about 10 days to two weeks earlier than usual. As the climate is changing, the trend is towards picking earlier than we used to. But the harvest still takes the same amount of time. Generally, we would expect the harvest to last for about 10 weeks, but this will depend on what the weather is like and the quantity and quality of grapes on our vines. Here at Three Choirs, we have 14 different varieties of grapes, and they all ripen at slightly different times. The first grape we will pick is Siegerrebe, which is a pinky orange colour when ripe. Siegerrebe makes a white wine, because, as with most grapes, all the colour is in the skin and not the juice inside. Siegerrebe takes 76 days from flowering until the fruit is ready to pick. The timing really is as specific as that! All of the grape varieties have precise timings, although some of them are longer than others. Thomas Shaw, managing director, said: “It’s been a good year, with lots of sunshine. The grapes are fairly small, but that means they should have a nice concentration of flavours and sugars, which is what we need. We don’t need big fat grapes like you get in the supermarket, because they’re full of water.” It hasn’t just been a warm, sunny year, it has been a very dry one too. Will that affect our harvest? Thomas continued: “There was a lot of moisture in the ground early in the year. The roots of our vines go down 12 to 15 foot, so there is still enough moisture down there for them. “Grapes are different from other crops. Some farmers have been struggling this year because their crops have very small roots, and the ground is far too dry for them.” Picking is all done by hand. Fruit is picked and pressed on the same day. Thomas said: “To maximise the quality, we don’t pick when it’s rainy. If it’s raining, we can get a lot of wet fruit into the winery, which dilutes the wine.” So here’s hoping for a dry harvest! Early indications are that 2025 will be a successful year for grapes at Three Choirs. Flowering in late June and early July is a key time for our harvest, and the weather was just what we needed at that time. September and October will be the final decider if 2025 is a good quality year for our wines.
A lady sipping wine from a glass. Wine Tasting at Three Choirs Vineyard
7 July 2025
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27 June 2025
Three Choirs Vineyards was recently featured in the national media. Not only was it named in the feature 11 of the best vineyard stays in the UK in The Times online, it also had an entire feature devoted to it in the Express online and appeared in the world’s longest running women’s magazine. The People’s Friend is a weekly magazine full of lifestyle, cooking and gardening features, along with short stories and fiction serials. Ahead of English Wine Week (21st to 29th June), we were featured in an article highlighting three UK vineyards – Aldwick Estate in Bristol, Chet Valley Vineyard in Norfolk and, of course, Three Choirs Vineyards, right here in Gloucestershire. The article said there are more than 1,000 vineyards in the UK and that winemaking is one of the fastest growing sectors of agriculture. We’re pleased to say that The People’s Friend said Three Choirs is a ‘top-drawer example’ of an English vineyard, producing around 250,000 bottles a year. The article quotes our managing director, Thomas Shaw, who said: “Three Choirs Vineyard’s focus is the quality of the wines and the visitor experience.” He added: “As the climate changes, more and more varieties can be grown in the UK.” The article shared that most of our wine is sold direct to customers online, to wine merchants or consumed by guests at our brasserie at the vineyard, with a small number of bottles sold to Waitrose. The People’s Friend chose one favourite wine from each of the three producers featured. Its choice from Three Choirs was the Coleridge Hill 2023 – a dry white wine produced from Madeleine Angevine and Phoenix grapes. The magazine said: “With its fresh fruity aromas, especially apple, it’s zesty on the palate thanks to the ripe fruit flavours, and offers a long, crisp finish.”
Martin, the winemaker, stood in the winery at Three Choirs inspecting a glass of wine
23 May 2025
Martin Fowke is Three Choirs Vineyard’s winemaker. Now aged 62, he has been with us for over 40 years, having joined in 1984. He studied agriculture and horticulture at the Royal Agricultural College (now Royal Agricultural University) in Cirencester and went to Three Choirs for some work experience. Martin said he ‘fell into’ the industry. He met a girl, who he has now been happily married to for many years. Her father ran an apple and blackcurrant farm and planted a vineyard in 1973. Three Choirs Vineyard was born… He joined when the company was in its infancy and worked his way up quickly. Martin joked: “I was the only one who knew how to use a computer!” He left Three Choirs briefly in the 1980s to go travelling. On his travels, he went to the wine making regions of Australia, New Zealand and California and picked up some tips along the way. On his return to Gloucestershire in 1989, Martin took over the winemaking side of the business. Martin said: “I wasn’t officially trained, there wasn’t the training that is available to young people these days. I worked with my father in law and learned on the job. I had some very good teachers.” Our winemaker loves his job and says he has never looked back since those early days. English winemaking can be more challenging than in other parts of the world, but Martin’s experience means he’s seen it all before and can adapt and change as needed. He said: “Compared to the rest of the world, the English climate is traditionally less reliable. We have different challenges every year, which gives us the opportunity to do different things every year, and the grapes allow us to make lots of different wines. “Now England is considered a bona fide wine producing country. Climate change means we get more consistency with the weather and therefore the grapes and the wine. “Compared to the rest of the England, Three Choirs Vineyard has mild weather, with protection from the Welsh mountains, Cotswold hills and Malvern hills. We get good sunlight and relatively low rainfall. It’s ideal for vines!” Being a relatively small vineyard, Martin enjoys the opportunity to experiment, alongside producing the high quality wines our customers love. “We have a responsibility to produce consistent wines, but the beauty of what we do here is I also have the latitude to be able to experiment. We’re always trying new things and different things. “Our latest success is an orange wine. This is produced in different parts of the world, but not in England. “We’re always looking to change and develop. People’s tastes don’t stay still, and the market doesn’t stay still, so we’re always evolving.” Of all the wines we produce, does Martin have a favourite? “They’re like children – it’s impossible to choose just one! I’m proud of most of them. The newer wines that come on are always interesting. But the ones I hang my hat on are Bacchus and Siegerrebe.” After more than 40 years of winemaking in the Gloucestershire countryside, is Martin ready to move on? “I’ve got a very good team here, who make my life easier. We’ve got a good succession in place, but I don’t plan on retiring any time soon!”
A bunch of black grapes hanging from a grape vine in the summer sun
25 April 2025
Harvesting our grapes here at Three Choirs Vineyard takes place in autumn. But thinking about the harvest starts around the middle of summer
28 March 2025
Here at Three Choirs Vineyard, we are committed to being as sustainable as possible. However, the vineyard isn’t organic. We do believe it’s not possible to be fully organic in this country, but we do limit our use of pesticides to the absolute minimum. We probably use about a quarter of what we are legally allowed to use. One way we reduce our use of pesticides is by using foliar feeds made from seaweed extracts. Foliar feeds feed the vine directly through the leaf, allowing the vines to absorb essential elements quickly. The theory behind using these feeds is that, if we keep the vines healthy and strong, they will be better able to defend themselves from disease. In the UK, the biggest risk to vines isn’t from insects, it is from mildew. Mildew can slow down the growth of the vines and reduce both the quantity and quality of the grapes. It can also weaken the plants and make them more vulnerable to disease or insects. Grapes like cold weather in winter and warm, dry weather in the summer. But in this country, we have a lot damp, warm weather, which causes mildew to thrive. If we have a year like we had in 2024, there can be a lot of disease, which impacts our harvest. We don’t have any irrigation in the vineyard, so our water consumption is probably lower than you would expect for a business like ours. In fact, we don’t have a huge amount of water available, so we do have to be careful not to use too much. We use water sprays and pressure to clean out our tanks, which clean effectively using a lot less water than other cleaning methods. Glass production and transport uses a lot of energy. This can have a really negative impact on the wine industry’s sustainability, so it is important to us to use the lightest weight glass we can for our bottles. Thomas Shaw, managing director, said: “The problem is there’s a consumer reaction to the weight of a bottle. People pick up a light wine bottle and think it’s cheap, whereas we pick up a light bottle and say, ‘Isn’t that amazing?’” Although the bottles for sparkling wine are always thicker and heavier – they have to be to take the pressure of the secondary fermentation which takes place in the bottle and causes the bubbles.