Wine in Britain — a very long, very interrupted history

Britain’s relationship with wine is unusual among major consuming countries: for most of its history it has been a nation of drinkers and merchants rather than of growers, and that has shaped everything about how wine is sold and talked about here.

Vines were grown in Roman Britain and again in the medieval period, when monastic vineyards were widespread enough to appear in Domesday. Cultivation declined through the later Middle Ages, and the reasons are contested — a cooling climate, the dissolution of the monasteries, and above all the simple availability of better wine from Gascony once Bordeaux came under English rule.

That trade is the more important story. Three centuries of English control of Aquitaine made claret a British staple, and the pattern repeated: when war with France interrupted supply, Britain turned to Portugal, and Port was substantially a British commercial invention. Sherry, Madeira and Marsala followed similar routes.

The consequence is a trade with unusual expertise and no vineyard behind it. The British wine trade developed the auction market, much of the modern critical vocabulary, and the education system that WineHQ’s own tasting vocabulary descends from.

The modern English wine industry is therefore a genuine novelty rather than a revival of something continuous — a commercial wine sector, built since the 1950s, in a country that had been buying rather than growing for six hundred years.