The complicated history of English wine

Hugh Johnson’s classic World Atlas of Wine, first published in the early 1970s, is now up to its eighth edition. My edition, the sixth, was published in 2007. It is 400 pages long and has exactly one page devoted to the wine of the United Kingdom. The latest edition is 16 pages longer but it, too, devotes only one page to British wine.

Wine has a long history in the British Isles. Like so many good things (q.v. Monty Python’s Life of Brian), wine was brought by the Romans, who planted vines wherever they could grow (and some places they couldn’t). The Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s big tax-planning guide, lists 40 vineyards in England.

Of course, the medieval diet was largely washed down with beer and ale, but what wine they drank came mostly from local vineyards. That changed after Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 and brought Bordeaux under English suzerainty.