When you think of sparkling wine, the word ‘England’ doesn’t immediately come to mind. However if you look a little more closely at the sparkling wine trade, you’ll soon see that English producers of the drink have boomed within the last decade. What does it say about the English wine industry?
The English wine industry is often the subject of ridicule and derision. It has this stigma as a producer of sherry and nothing more. People often turn their noses up at the very thought of English wine. And luxury wine? Forget about it. There certainly isn’t any on the Ideal Wine Company product list and that’s hardly unusual.
That’s why the two concepts of ‘English’ and ‘luxury wine’ have never really gone together. That’s because when you think of sparkling wine, you think of Champagne, or more recently, Prosecco. Both are the ultimate in luxury, a decadence that you indulge in when you have something to celebrate.
They were two ends of the wine spectrum until now. The English wine scene is slowly overcoming the stigma of its past and has boomed in the past five years or so. As it turns out, experts say that the nation’s sparkling wine trade has formed a large part of that effort.
There’s no two ways about it. The English Sparkling wine trade is hot right now, and we’ve got the data to prove it. The Association of English Wine Producers, which acts as the industry’s promotional body for England’s wine market, recently quoted some impressive figures.
According to the Association, by 2015 there will be five million bottles of English top quality sparkling wine ready for global consumption. An impressive number by any stretch of the imagination. The Association also attached a retail value of £100 million to the sparkling wine. This means that, on average, a bottle is fetching £20 a week on the market.
From here, we see that the English Sparkling wine tradition is already benefiting this country economically, and it’s not hard to deduce that it would never be capable of adding this much to UK economic growth if we weren’t working with a quality product.
At the Ideal Wine Company, we predict a bright future for English Sparkling wine. It’s clear that the industry is changing, as it should, to keep up with modern trends. As English sparkling wine gets more popular, it could change the very mind set people have on the larger English wine industry.
