English wine

Tuesday

Kathleen Willcox

The rise of English wine

Sometimes, I pretend that I worked the wine beat thirty or forty years ago. I picture myself in formal wear, kicking back in gilded settings, sipping perfectly aged first growth, trading bons mots with winemakers. We’d spend hours solemnly considering the slow, steady, seemingly eternal rise of wine culture, and how inevitably it would soften the cruder edges of society. It would be so merry, yet cerebral — but also something we could feel good, even morally superior, about participating in. Instead, I’m in 2024 wearing yoga pants and guzzling mineral water (must hydrate!) by myself holding Zooms with winemakers, sweating over the fact that scientists say climate change imperils up to 73 percent of the world’s current wine-growing regions.

wine

Wednesday

Zoe Strimpel

A sceptic’s guide to English wine

From our UK edition

Being in possession of a well-kept secret is every wine-buyer’s goal, not least because uncorking an unusual find impresses even the snootiest of guests. English wine-makers have long been trying to break up any residual secrecy about the worthiness of their wines. Not quite new world, not quite old world, English wine was always going to fill an odd space in the market.  Confession: I never buy wine from the British isles. Almost anything else has always struck me as both better value and nicer to drink. And then I met Matt Hodgson. Hodgson runs Grape Britannia, a modest but expert shop and bar in Cambridge that sells only English wine (plus some Welsh and one from the Scottish borders).