Is English wine cursed with bad (G)luck?

June 13, 2007

For years English wine has been the butt of many jokes from wine snobs and has come in for a lot of criticism.  Recently however English (and Welsh) wines have been enjoying a renaissance and have been winning many awards.  With experts commenting on the soil in areas of Southern England being almost identical to that of the Champagne region, English sparkling wines have been doing particularly well counting wine buff Oz Clarke, local food champion Rick Stein amongst their many fans (Cornwall vineyard Camel Valley supply Rick Stein’s seafood restaurant).

Have we all been sucked in by the hype?  Despite a sparkling wine produced in Surrey winning a Gold Award at the 2007 International Wine Challenge, beating competition from thousands of foreign producers, wine writer Malcolm Gluck is not convinced.  After reading about the so-called success of English wine in the paper, Gluck wrote to the Guardian calling English wines a joke, commenting that saying English sparkling wine is as good as Champagne is “utter poppycock”.  To try and find out more, the Guardian invited Gluck and three other wine experts to do a (non-blind) tasting of English wine.

Read the comments from Gluck and the rest of the Guardian’s panel here.