The Great British Vineyards Guide

2025 will go down as a great vintage – ripe, clean fruit with yields generally as predicted (unlike the the variations we saw in the previous two years). The WineGB harvest report stated that the average ripeness in 2025 was 10.5% potential alcohol, up from the ten year average of 9.5% ABV - and a good reminder of how much ‘chaptalisation’ (adding extra sugar) generally goes into English winemaking. The majority of the fruit we received required no chaptalisation at all, the highest being 14% ABV. And for the second year in a row, we made more still wine than sparkling wine, reflecting the rise in interest and quality of English still wines.

We are now busy bottling last year’s wines - we will bottle over 1 million bottles across our Kent and East Anglia sites both for those who we make wine for as well as some other wineries who send us wine to bottle. This takes a huge amount of winemaking, lab work and coordination. At the same time our disgorging volumes are also growing, as is our storage. We are continuing with R&D projects, the most exciting of which is de-alcoholising wine and we have bought our own unit. We have been running trials to see what the impact is - alcohol carries flavour and ‘mouthfeel’ and the balance between sugar and acidity changes. We expect to mainly reduce alcohol down by a couple of % ABV, taking advantage of the demand for lower alcohol wines as well as the reduction in Excise duty. Below 8% ABV requires different technology and opens up other technical challenges (not least as alcohol is an excellent preservative).

Although there was a slowdown in the rate of planting of new vineyards last year, much needed as English wine production continues to outstrip sales, we have increased demand for our services. We are therefore expanding at both sites. We have also been doing what we can to help our vineyards sell their wine - passing on leads and hosting a ‘pop up’ tasting at the London Wine Fair, doubling the number of English wine producers at the fair.

London Wine Fair

East Anglia

The East Anglian winery is going very well - they have had some excellent grapes and it is exciting to help support an emerging wine region. We have just bought a bottling line, giving us much greater control on when we can bottle wines (up until now we have been relying on a mobile line). The landlord is looking to build an extension to the winery, providing more space, especially for barrel handling and the storage of finished wines.

In Kent we are buying land next to the winery (adjacent to the land previously earmarked for Chapel Down’s expansion), which will provide multiple benefits: an expanded winery; a better bottling and disgorging hall; better press pad; better and bigger barrel hall; plus dedicated stillage and pallet storage. The purpose built nature of the expansion at both sites will mean much greater efficiencies and the opportunity to drive down production costs, helping to make English wine more affordable.

Looking ahead to this year, the warm spell in March and April provided a good start to the growing season and vineyards have been about two weeks ahead of ‘normal’ - vines with their deep roots are less affected by the dry spells than other crops. However the widespread frosts of recent weeks have affected many vineyards, some catastrophically, some not at all. France has also been hit by frost, with Champagne reporting up to 40% losses. But there is still long way to go before harvest!

As ever, everything we do relies on a fantastic team, making wine for great vineyards. We are very lucky with the people we have - and make wine for. Now we just need lots of people to drink more English wine, so do please ask for it next time you are in a pub/restaurant/wine shop and visit your local vineyard!

Henry and all the team