In 2020 half of all sales for English wines were direct – from the cellar door or producers own websites – but Thorpe says that feedback from producers with whom he has spoken is that “in 2021 they, too, experienced very strong growth.”
The figures build on a very successful 2020 for the Great British wine industry, when sales rose by 30% to reach 7.1m bottles.
Nyetimber, one of the pioneers of the English wine renaissance, said that sales of their sparkling wines hit records levels in 2021, rising by 55% compared to the previous year. The producer, whose headquarters are in West Sussex, also achieved a record production in 2021 and says it is on track to make 2 million bottles of sparkling wine a year by 2030.
Thorpe stopped short of predicting that we might experience a shortage of English wine this summer, saying that historic bumper harvests like the 2018 vintage, in which enough grapes were picked to make 13 million bottles of wine, mean that some producers still hold reserves.
“A shortage is a bit of a stretch. While sales are growing strongly, production is lumpy because it’s so dependent on vintage; and if you average out sales over the last four years and production over the last four years there’s more production.”
But individual producers like Harrow & Hope in Buckinghamshire, which is owned by Henry Laithwaite, do often run out of certain cuvées. And others say their wine is already in such short supply that it is being sold on allocation.