The UK’s booming wine-growing industry has been compared to “California in the 70s”, with annual production more than doubling to 12m bottles a year, according to a report.
There has been a boom in the number of smaller growers driven by high-flying City workers taking early retirement to try something new, while well-known wine houses from elsewhere in Europe have snapped up English vineyards or blocks of land to plant vines, in part to mitigate against climate risks, said Will Banham, a partner at the property company Knight Frank in charge of viticulture.
