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As May Day is celebrated and Britain is looking its most pleasant, awash with may blossom, it's also awash with its own wine. Around the globe most significantly in Australia, New Zealand, California and Chile there's a grape surfeit, causing a fall in the costs paid by wine producers for grapes. Incredibly, to me anyhow, this is also in prospect for English vineyards. Frankly the size of the English winescape is relatively small. The Master of Wine who most actively specialises in English wine, Stephen Skelton, reckons the total area of England and Wales dedicated to commercial grape growing is now around 1,350 hectares 3,336 acres But this represents such a marked increase, with a significant proportion of these plantings so latest the vines either only just came into production with the copious 2009 vintage or aren't yet bearing fruit, that there are real fears of an over-supply of the grapes of Albion.

English viticulture, which was once the preserve of untutored newbies, is now a way more commercial offer. High visibility awards and prizes won by English champagnes in global competitions, and slightly opportunistic media coverage recommending that global temperature rises is sending the Champenois en masse scouting for vineyards in southern Britain , have fuelled major investment in land that may produce English fizz in champagne's image.

Some of the more prominent newbies to the English wine scene from inside the wine business include vet wine writer Steven Spurrier, Christian Seely, who heads AXA's wine division, superstore Waitrose and the dominant mail-order merchant Laithwaites.

In 2006 Dutch businessperson Eric Hereema acquired Nyetimber, the producer that first won heavy awareness for English wine back in the early 1990s after Stuart and Sandy Moss from Chicago made a decision to copy precisely the poor recipe in the center of Sussex. Hereema has been offensively expanding the vineyard area and winemaker Cherie Spriggs is being treated to a new winery in which to keep on a comprehensive aging policy than is practised by lots of other producers of English champagne though at a tasting I pickily found the Nyetimber Blanc de Blancs 2001 too ancient and the just-released Classic Cuve 2005, the sole other vintage shown, too junior. Other widely admired producers of English champagne are Ridgeview, another Sussex consultant in what English vineyards do best, and Camel Valley in Cornwall.

But to judge from the 1st 2 ( 2006 ) bottlings just tasted, there's a promising new name in English sparkling wine, Gusbourne Estate where, quite by accident, our own Richard Hemming worked in the vineyards and sent a collection of reports. South African surgeon Andrew Weeber acquired this property in Kent in 2003 and started planting vines the year after. I liked the mix primarily based on all three poor grapes (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier), priced about £22, more than the all-Chardonnay Blanc de Blancs bottling at £25. These first wines were allegedly manufactured by Mike Roberts of Ridgeview, who is certainly also to be congratulated.

However to judge from last week's English Wine Producers tasting of a representative choice of virtually seventy wines from England's 116 wineries, it still is inordinately hard to produce good still wine in England's green, nice but frequently cold land. Few producers are brave enough to make actually dry whites, obviously praying that a slug of the sweet stuff will distract from endemically high acidic levels, and too frequently the wines simply taste as dilute as off-season Skegness. The often 'crisp' regularly savoury form of English wine, actually, would appear perfectly fitted to screw caps yet most producers endure with corks, at least for their costlier bottlings.

Some producers are making still red wines that owe their deep color to the red-fleshed compound grapes grown to supply them. They don't often have truly appetising fruit personality nonetheless, and there appears to be an inclination to attempt to disguise this with a little bit of unwarranted oakiness. The last time Biddenden Small-scale production and frequently little crops are not useful. Neither is the present excess of bubbly and the quantity of special deals on what many wine drinkers still regard as 'real' fizz.