Corking English Wine

The English have always had a reputation as a nation of drinkers. Switch on the news and you’ll invariably hear a story about youngsters’ intolerable drinking patterns, usually coupled with a still image of a woman with her knickers over her face. “We are a society of lager louts,” Jon Snow will boom.

Well, I went to see whether I could change this. I was to embark on a mission to learn to respect alcohol and more specifically wine, English wine. Beer sales have declined 5% since 2003 with wine over taking it as the nations favourite beverage. England, it seems, has become not just a nation of drinkers, but also a nation of wine drinkers. Every year we knock back an intoxicating 1.16 billion litres of wine – almost a quarter of a billion bottles. But out of this mind-splitting figure, English wine sales account for only 1% of the domestic market. What was wrong with English wine? I went on a three-day discovery into the heart of English winemaking to see whether I could become an English wine expert and then put my new skills to the test.