The grapes are turning purple on tall green vines, which stretch down towards the distant flint-and-limestone tower of Chilham church. These rows of Pinot Meunier, destined for English sparkling wine, are 51% owned by French champagne house Taittinger. “England is now the most exciting wine region,” says host and sales executive Hilary Sharp as she leads me around Domaine Evremond vineyard, which opened its visitor centre last year to coincide with the launch of its first wine.
In his 2023 book Vines in a Cold Climate, drinks writer Henry Jeffreys charts the rise of English wine “from a joke to world-class in 30 years”. The book opens with an alcohol-fuelled scene of vine-planting at Domaine Evremond in May 2017: unseasonably cold, rainy, muddy, with rambling anecdotes from anglophile Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger about “English women encountered in his misspent youth”. The vineyard is named for the exiled French aristocrat Charles de Saint-Évremond, a symbol of hedonistic Anglo-French cooperation. The bon vivant introduced champagne to England and party-loving Charles II made him governor of Duck Island in St James’s Park.
