Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [59]
Is English wine any good?
THE ANSWER TO this question is yes—and some of it is very good. It is primarily white and sparkling, and there is not very much of it. England and Wales have fewer than 3 square miles of vines for winemaking. Even in England, only a minuscule proportion of the wines on sale are English, and outside of England, you are likely to encounter English wines only when you attend a reception at your local British embassy.
The relatively cool English climate and its often cloudy weather are the reasons for the skepticism implied by the question. Winemaking in the world is largely confined to two belts: from 30° to 50° north of the Equator and from 30° to 50° south: beyond 50° north and south, it is too cold for grapes to ripen, while in the reaches between 30° north and south, there is no cold season to allow the vines to rest. Only the tiniest bit of England, the tip of the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, just scrapes into the vine-growing belt. Yet the temperature is not the most crucial consideration; rather, it is sunshine. Vines normally require a minimum of 1,500 hours of sunshine, with more needed by red than by white grapes. One drawback to growing vines in En -gland is immediately obvious. The other is the propensity to rain all year, in contrast, for example, to the Mediterranean or California, where there are wet seasons and dry seasons. The dry, sunny weather before the grape harvest that is characteristic of those two areas is a gift to winemakers: the weather concentrates the sugars in the grapes, and the subsequent fermentation converts the sugars into a high level of alcohol. A lack of sunny weather means a lack of sugars and a high level of acidity. Too much rain fosters disastrous rots, and if by some dispensation from heaven rot is held at bay, the vines will suck up the rainwater and thereby dilute the grape juice.
Nevertheless, time and again attempts have been made to grow grapes. First came the Romans, who invaded, first in 55 BC and again in AD 43, conquered, and held England for three centuries. They planted vines, possibly for winemaking (opinions differ). In any case, whether they produced it or imported it, they left many Britons with the habit of drinking wine. Later, the influence of the Church was crucial, because all institutions from tiny parish churches to great monasteries required wine for communion. This cultivation of vines was facilitated by the warming of the northern European climate for eight centuries until the mid-thirteenth century, when it began to cool, thereby worsening the conditions for growing grapes. A century later, the Black Death (1348–49) wiped out one-third of the population of Europe, which meant that abbeys and monasteries no longer had access to the necessary labor to continue to cultivate all of their own land, and increasingly leased it out. Tenants wanted to produce fast-growing cash crops, not vines that needed tending for years, and vineyards were grubbed up. King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, which saw the land and buildings sold off or given away, condemned most of the remaining vineyards and ended winemaking on any scale in England. By the late seventeenth century, when the climate had become considerably colder, the diarist Samuel Pepys described the few English vineyards as “brave plantations.”
By the early twentieth century, the commercial growing of grapes for wine in England had virtually disappeared. The man responsible for the new dawn was Ray Barrington Brock, managing director of a firm of scientific instrument makers, who was a keen gardener and who saw the growing of grapes as a challenge. The overall question was how to grow grapes in a cool—and relatively wet—climate. In 1945, Brock founded the Oxted Viticultural Research Station (he lived in Oxted, Surrey),