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Grape growing is on the increase in the United Kingdom as English wine finds its place in the market, announces Jack Shamash. It's an amazingly hot day and from the apex of a flinty hillside, the vineyards with their lines of grapes can be seen stretching out below the early grapes is just beginning to appear on the vines. At a folding table, chilled white wine from the estate is being served to visitors. The wine is straw-coloured, fragile, has a long finish and tastes of lychees and tropical fruit. A few years back English wine was treated as a little bit of a joke. The proven fact that anyone in England produced wines at all came as a great surprise to most members of the general public. Nonetheless the industry is enduring a boom. Production is doubling every 5 years and many growers are considering turning at least part of their estate over to viticulture. Some researchers suggest that Britain is in the same position as Australia or New Zealand forty years back. In those nations, a slot wine industry grew into a global giant.

The estate was one of dozens across the nation that opened to the general public to give tours and tastings for English Wine Week - which occurred from 29 May till six June to celebrate and promote this maturing industry. Frithsden's preferred is a white wine, made of Solaris grape. 'It's a highly good wine, ' he is saying. 'We get high alcohol content (thirteen per cent) with comparatively tiny sun. ‘He also makes a rose wine from Rondo grapes. The vineyard is on a south facing slope. According to Tooley, the flint and chalk help to make sure that the soil is free-draining and also add to the flavor of the grapes. The vines are all trellised with wires stretched from wooden posts (the vineyard has forty thousand meters of wire). No irrigation is required on the site. The grapes grow promptly, though frost can reduce output radically. The other issues are deer, rabbits and badgers, which devour the grapes. The vineyard has its own winery, which has a big pneumatic press for squeezing the grapes, a range of pumps and filters and a sequence of stainless-steel drums where the wine ferments. There's also a bottling room, where the bottles are filled, capped and labelled.

Last year the vineyard produced around five thousand wine bottles. The wine sells for pounds nine a bottle. Out of that, Tooley has to pay excise duty, VAT and all his costs. Tooley admits the vineyard isn't making profits so to help in the reduction of the losses - and to sell the wines - the vineyard offers cream teas, lunches, fetes, open days and company events. Tooley is usually hopeful about the future: 'We reckon that we shall double our production over the following one or two years and we should start to come out quits just after that.

‘Growing industry

There are presently around four hundred vineyards in Britain - and there are roughly one hundred wineries where wine is produced commercially. Plumpton College is the sole Brit varsity teaching wine production. A number of them have their wine made under contract by a local winery. Others have their own wineries and make the wines on the estate.

‘Morgan reckons that vineyards should be at least 4ha to be commercially feasible. Below this size, it is too expensive to use mechanised methodologies for cropping the grapes. Setting up a vineyard is a dear business. The grower can expect to spend pounds 25,000 per hectare on planting, trellising, preparation and drainage.

The grower also has to find the best site. Ideally it should be free-draining, not subject to frost and southward-facing. If the grower wants to build a big winery, the building and gear will set him back around pounds 250 thousand. Britain now produces around 3m wine bottles a year. This represents around 0.02 percent of the planet's wine production. But most mavens expect that production will reach 5,000,000 bottles by 2015. Against this New Zealand produces 3 % of the planet's wine.

English wine looks to be increasing in popularity. Assisted by a significant promoting effort from the selling group English Wine Producers, restaurateurs, shops and customers are beginning to get the message that England makes some top flight wines. At present most English producers are focusing on fizzy wines, because these can be sold for higher costs. Cava represent about 1/2 English wine output.

The firm has a turnover of pounds 2.7m and produces three hundred thousand bottles a year. Over the following 2 years, it expects this figure to rise to five hundred thousand bottles. Around forty % of its out- put is sparkling and sixty per cent is still. Its wines are available in Waitrose, Morri- boys, Marks & Spencer and the Majes-tic Chain.