OTHER THAN France, Britain is the world’s largest market for champagne, so any attempt to replace the much-loved French bubbly with a homegrown alternative might appear doomed to failure. But a handful of wine producers in southern England are betting that a few years hence, a sommelier might well ask if you would prefer a bottle of Hampshire or a glass of Sussex rather than offering Moët or Krug.
For years, English wine production was an irrelevance, focused on German varietals, which never attained anything like the quality of the real thing. That has changed in the past decade. Now English winemakers produce high-quality English sparkling wine as their sole product.
The most important factors for the quality of any wine are climate and soil. Stretches of southern England can claim to possess near identical geology to France’s Champagne region, which is only a couple of hundred miles to the southeast. Global warming has meant that while the overall temperatures in southern England are still slightly below those in Champagne, there is now enough annual heat to create a competitive product.