The cha cha cha…’Champagne comes to England’

Why cha cha cha?  Well, this is a story of Champagne, chartered surveyors and charting new territory, contained in a detailed report funded by the Royal Insitute of Chartered Surveyors and researched by Chris Foss and David Morris of Plumpton College and Niall Burnside and Neil Ravenscroft of the University of Brighton. 

In a nutshell, it’s a call to arms for chartered surveyors to apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to locate large scale areas for viticulture in south east england.  The research identifies 11 environmental parameters which contribute to the quality of wines (pH, depth to bedrock, soil drainage, organic matter, growing degree days, total annual rainfall, frost days during growing season, average wind speed over growing season, angle of slope, elevation and aspect since you ask).  It also calculates the threshold values for each parameter beyond which viticulture becomes marginal.

And there’s gold in them there hills given the report’s opening premise – “improvements in wine production techniques, allied to a changing climate and to the presence of geological formations similar to those found in the Champagne region, mean that it is increasingly possible to grow and produce such wines in south east England.”

The report is well-timed given the success of Nyetimber’s Classic Cuvée 2003 from Sussex – it was crowned Champion of Worldwide Sparkling Wines in Italy’s Bollicine del Mondo 2010.  Budding sparkling producers and chartered surveyors looking to expand their repertoire can download a copy here.  Gazing into my crystal ball, in future I expect to find them scampering around the southern edge of the Weald in Kent and East Sussex, the southern slopes of the Chilterns north west of London and chalk outcrops in the western South Downs and southern Hampshire, all of which have been identified as prime vineyard areas in the south east.  Though the report confirmed that the majority of vineyards in the south east are located in or close to some of these areas, the potential of others “especially the Sussex coast, north Hampshire and the central Chilterns” is apparently relatively untapped.

The report’s focus is the south east but the south west shouldn’t be overlooked – Bodmin in Cornwall is home to Camel Valley, whose Pinot Noir Brut scooped this year’s IWC Trophy for Best Rosé Sparkling.