From England's green and pleasant land

Martin's Lane vineyard in the Crouch Valley, Essex

A status report on our exciting domestic wine industry. Martin's Lane vineyard in the Crouch Valley, Essex, pictured above.

Let no one call England an emerging wine region any more. It has emerged! And rather splendidly with a style all its own. Even if most of the sparkling wines look on paper like carbon copies of champagne, they have their own distinctive crisp, crystalline quality and are likely to age rather better than many of the prototypes at the same price.

The great recent development of course has been the advent of thoroughly respectable still wines from English and Welsh...