A new threat to English Sparkling Wine?

Or a storm in a coupe? Brexit bonuses, Aussie wine lakes and bubbles

If a single flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane, then Brexit is a whale-fart tsunami of unimagined consequences from which one ripple is now lapping at the toes of English Wine producers.

The latest chapter in the long-running saga that is Britain’s post-Brexit wheeling-and-dealing (Downturn Abbey, with barely a sunlit upland in sight) is a free trade agreement signed ‘in principle’ with Australia in 2021. Australia has much, much more wine than it can sell. The oversupply is, as Felicity Carter recently wrote in Meiningers, “the worst crisis faced by the Australian wine industry for decades”.

Who’s going to drink oceans of Chardonnay? Nobody. Who, though, in the age of the only true mass-market success story category of recent times - Prosecco - might drink cheap bubbly Chardonnay?

The Brits!

Cue, then, a proposal in the to allow the UK to import wine from elsewhere, carbonate it here and sell it as “Wine of X, carbonated in England”.

“The conservatives want to get a free trade agreement with the Aussies, knowing [this proposal] was something they needed to allow. As I understand it a bit of lobbying by the WSTA [The Wine and Spirit Trade Association] was done in support”, says ex-WineGB board member Dominic Buckwell. “The [UK wine producers trade body] WineGB response was that so long as it was clear where it comes from, and says carbonated or re-fermented in the UK, it would be OK.”

The consultation, put forward by DEFRA (the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) is now in its third phase, after reforms which have already resulted in the ability for English Sparkling Wine producers to abandon foils and bottle in pint-sized bottles. The May 2023 consultation document from DEFRA points out that, aside from the economical benefits to the UK bottling industry, shipping still wine in bulk into the UK and carbonating it here has environmental benefits:

Turning still wine into sparkling wine in Great Britain would allow our businesses to add value to imported still wines and offer increased consumer choice of products on the market. It is not efficient to transport sparkling wines in bottles long distances, due to high shipping costs and CO₂ implications. Shipping wine in bulk is estimated to reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 40% when compared to wine shipped in bottles.

DEFRA Wine reforms consultation, May 2023.

Not everybody is happy, though; the problems for producers of Traditional Method sparkling wines in England follow on from concerns that other ways of producing English bubbles - the Charmat (tank) method used for Prosecco, or straight carbonation - could be confusing for consumers. The term ‘English Sparkling Wine’ can only be used for Traditional Method Wines made from English grapes, whereas the country of origin - i.e. ‘Wine of England’ - can use the Charmat method or carbonation.

Traditional Method wines, though, are always markedly more expensive (not to mention rather different in flavour). “I’ve always said that I don’t think that Charmat method is dangerous and that the Traditional Method is protected by its price point”, says Fergus Elias of Balfour estate in Kent. “My bigger worry is that you’ll be able to import from anywhere, sweeten, alter acid, Charmat, then label as sparkling wine of ‘country’ carbonated in England….it still has ‘England’ clearly on the label. That could be hugely damaging”.

A new threat, or not?

The waters, though, become a little muddier when it becomes clear that the ability to ‘transform’ - ie change from still to sparkling - an imported wine was theoretically available previously (at least until the loophole was closed just before Brexit). Lucy Pantan from the WSTA (Wine and Spirits Trade Association), makes this clear:

“A number of the measures will re-establish provisions that were previously open to transform, in the UK , wine and grapes from the EU and extend those provisions to wine and grapes from non-EU countries.  It will be essential that consumers are informed as to the nature of any transformed products e.g. ‘Aerated Australian wine carbonated in UK’, or ‘wine made in the UK from imported grapes’.  There should be no confusion with English and Welsh wine and sparkling wine.” 

Buckwell confirms this. “Pre-Brexit we had the same rules as the EU, which did allow for wine to be shipped from one EU country to be shipped to another as base wine to be carbonated. This was an exemption that the Germans wanted because of the sekt industry - the ‘Country of Origin’ could be the place where the second fermentation happened. Nobody was doing it but we were always a bit worried that the rules could be abused here”.

What has changed, then?

It’s not you, it’s me

Before Brexit, Mark Dixon of MDVC ltd (who have planted over 500 acres in Kent and have begun producing Charmat method English wines), shipped English base wine to Italy to undergo the Charmat method before bringing it back in and selling it under the ‘Harlot’ brand. This was a grey area: “He was selling it with the word Sussex and the word ‘Product of England’ on it”, says Buckwell. “I complained to Wine Standards and it created an almighty row. So they took off the word Sussex but they left on Product of England, which was a bit weak”.

Dixon, whose plans for mass-market English Charmat method sparkling hit a hitch with the blocking of his planned winery on the Luddesdown estate in Kent, is the symbol of a new reality for the English wine industry; what was once an entirely domestic, insulated ecosystem immune to some of the larger commercial currents of the international wine trade is now having to swim with the big fish of bulk wine and its associated marketing tricks.

As the English wine brand strengthens, so does the opportunity, skillset and investment available to exploit it. “The number of loopholes that are glaringly obvious is quite concerning”, Fergus Elias believes. The most obvious one appears to be the fact that, as blending wines imported into the UK market is now permitted, producers might legitimately be able to blend, for instance, Australian Chardonnay into a Charmat Method wine and sell it under a brand that looks, and feels, English (or even an established brand, as Jamie Goode pointed out when he wrote about the proposition last year referencing Canada’s troubles with the very same issue).

Simon Stanard from the WSTA pointed out that “a fundamental of food labelling law that the labelling and presentation must not mislead ‘as to the origin or nature of the product’ so this should be enough to prevent products being marketed as English”. It is unclear, though, how tightly this can be enforced: a quick look on the Sainsburys website finds a French Sauvignon blanc called ‘Silver Moki’ , which is a fish native to - you guessed it - New Zealand. It sounds Kiwi, and, together with a bright, ‘New-World’ - style label and the words ‘Cool Climate’ written in bold above the pale type ‘Wine of France’, it would be fairly easy to see this slipping into a few shopping baskets as a New Zealand wine, (Even more confusingly, the same brand appears to exist in different markets but with New Zealand as the fruit source).

Is it so hard to imagine a £10 sparkler, perhaps with a friendly corgi on the label and some cleverly-worded packaging, convincing a good chunk of shoppers on a two-second glance that it’s English Sparkling Wine?

Will it actually be damaging?

There is, perhaps, a controversial take on this proposition; it could be argued that the only wines in the frame for the sort of industrial tweaking the new legislation might allow are ones that might actually be improved by it.

Harsh, perhaps, but making cheap wine from English grapes doesn’t work. Yields are too low, and the fruit style is too quiet and tense - it’s just hard to generate the sort of fruity ease, at scale, that successful cheap wines rely on (at least with internationally-recognised grape varieties). If people are hell-bent on doing it, then perhaps blending in something from Provence, or Australia, might make something nicer to drink.

Ultimately, there is only so much that appellations and laws can protect. If the bottom end of traditional method English Sparkling Wine is not of high enough quality to stand up to international competition, then eventually it will be found out. The same is true for Champagne, as domestic supermarket sales (which are dominated by brands of much lower quality than we tend to see dominating UK supermarkets) go into freefall.

The biggest threat to English Sparkling Wine isn’t to be found in the depths of a labelling consultations. It is, as it has remained for some time, the following:

Shit weather. 2021 and 2023, anyone?

The wrong vineyards. In the wrong places, with the wrong grapes.

Basic winemaking. No reserves, not enough blending resources, not enough ageing time.

English Sparkling Wine is not yet an item of unassailed quality that needs to be put in a bulletproof box, but more an item of emerging quality that has to square up to the realities of retail (and might even come out the stronger for it). The threat to the best producers of proper English Sparkling Wine lies just as much with the worst producers of English Sparkling Wine as it does with Charmat, carbonated or anything else.

As we’re all finding out as a nation….it’s tough out there, right?