Administrative area · Wales
Monmouthshire
South-east Wales, the warmest and driest part of the country and its principal viticultural area.
About Monmouthshire
Monmouthshire and the Wye Valley hold much of Welsh viticulture, benefiting from a rain shadow that makes ripening more reliable than elsewhere in the country.
Disease-resistant crossings such as Solaris, Phoenix and Rondo are widely planted because they cope with damp conditions and ripen in a short season.
No authority delimits this name or attaches rules to it. A political unit — an Italian region, an English county, a US county — used as a wine area because that is how the industry and its readers talk about it, not because a wine authority delimited it. That does not make it less real or less useful — it means nothing legal follows from it, and you will not generally find it on a label as a controlled designation.
Grapes
Wines from here
sparkling
English sparkling wine
Traditional-method sparkling from the three Champagne grapes on southern English chalk — high acidity, green apple and citrus, with bready lees complexity.
white
Welsh white wine
Light, aromatic whites from south Wales, weighted towards disease-resistant varieties that cope with damp conditions.
Climate
Sheltered by the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons, giving lower rainfall and more growing-season warmth than most of Wales.
These are influences on how a wine turns out, not determinants of it. Picking date, yield, vine age and every winemaking decision sit between the climate and the glass.
Soil and geology
Old red sandstone and limestone in the Wye and Usk valleys, free-draining on the slopes and prone to waterlogging on the flats.
WineHQ describes soil in terms of what it demonstrably does — drainage, heat retention, water supply, rooting depth — and not in terms of flavours it is said to transmit. Vines take up ions, not aromas, and no mechanism has been demonstrated by which a mineral in the ground is tasted in the glass. See soil and drainage.
What to eat, and how to serve it
Derived from this region’s signature styles. Each is listed separately, because a region does not have one serving temperature.
Welsh white wine
Serve at 8–10°C (fridge cold).
Try with fillet steak, salmon or salmon in a cream sauce.
English sparkling wine
Serve at 8–11°C (fridge cold).
Try with fish and chips, fish pie or macaroni cheese.
This region’s industry statistics are classed as volatile and are reviewed each year. Any figure shown carries the date it was consulted.
Sources
Sources consulted
- WineGB industry data — Wines of Great Britain (WineGB)
- UK wine standards and GI schemes — Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs / Food Standards Agency