Explosive interest in winemaking in the U.K. has stoked interest in a relatively new kind of property type for the country: the British wine estate.
Britain is currently the fastest-growing wine region in the world, according to Knight Frank’s viticulture experts. Across southeast England, demand for vineyards as well as undeveloped land suitable for viticulture, is increasing at an exponential pace from international producers down to hobby oenophiles.
This summer, California-based wine giant Jackson Family Wines—owners of the flagship brand Kendall-Jackson—became the first major still wine producer to invest in the English viticulture sector. The American company, which owns more than 40 wineries in the U.S., Australia, South Africa, Chile, France and Italy, will initially produce sparkling wine at a contract winemaking facility in Kent, but it has also acquired 65 acres of land in Essex, where it plans to plant chardonnay and pinot noir vines with a view to producing super-premium still and sparkling wines.
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“It’s generally been existing wineries looking to expand their acreage under vine, but recently we’ve seen some quite significant new entrants,” said Ed Mansel Lewis, head of viticulture at Knight Frank, who brokered the Jackson Family Wines purchase. “Most people are making premium sparkling wine, but these are the first people to make £60-plus (US$75) bottles of still wine in the U.K.”
So far, the properties trading don’t necessarily compare to classic French vineyard sale that includes a chateau surrounded by its own grape vines, said viticulture expert Will Banham, Strutt and Parker’s director of estates and farm agency.
“But buyers are beginning to broaden their searches to include sizable country properties adjoining land suitable for planting, “with a view to creating something that’s more akin to the British version of a wine estate,” he said. “It’s something that’s a relatively new occurrence in the market that we’re just starting to see over the last six to 12 months.”
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A Burgeoning Industry
Wine has been grown commercially in Britain since the 1960s, but for decades most producers grew German grape varieties, which are suited to a cool climate. This changed in the 2000s, when the first English sparkling wines began to win awards and attract international attention. The sector’s growth started to ramp up significantly from 2015, when Champagne Taittinger purchased 171 acres of land in Kent from which to launch their premium English sparkling wine brand Domaine Evremond.
“Off the back of the 2015 purchase, suddenly everyone thought, ‘Well, if the French are doing it then it must be good,’” Lewis said.
The market for land suited to cultivating grapevines has developed “very rapidly indeed,” Banham said, with inquiries about buying or establishing a vineyard tripling in the past year.
When the 2015 Champagne Taittinger purchase occurred, “we were selling good-quality farmland at a slight premium over agricultural value,” he said. “Standard farmland was worth £8,000 an acre and land for a vineyard might have been £12,000 an acre. Now, we’re at a point where standard farmland might have grown slightly to £10,000 an acre, but land suitable for vines is probably more like £16,000 to £20,000 an acre.”
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The price of establishing a vineyard has also increased in recent years, due to the rising cost of labor and materials. He estimated the cost of planting and establishing land at £15,000 an acre, with a wait of between five and eight years to begin seeing a return on investment.
This means that while many established vineyards are seeking suitable undeveloped land in order to expand their operations, some new entrants into the market prefer to buy established vineyards. Although to date, very few have changed hands, “more are starting to be sold,” he said. “Quite a high proportion are sold off-market because vendors are often quite private.”
Amid growing demand, prices have risen for established vineyards, too. “For quite a long time £25,000 to £30,000 per acre was kind of the norm for a good vineyard, but now £35,000 to £40,000 isn’t out of the question for a really decent acre of vineyard land,” said Chris Spofforth, director of farms and estates and the head of viticulture at Savills.
As demand continues to expand, so does the range of buyers.
“You can hardly name a country, or at least a continent, that hasn’t spoken to us,” he said. “We’ve got South Africans coming in, Americans now coming in. There’s been some significant investment from the Far East over the last few weeks, actually, so there’s a lot going on from overseas.
But the majority of demand, especially for smaller- and medium-scale investment, still comes from fellow Britons.
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Climate Change Is Aiding the Boom
As farmers and landowners become more aware of the value of land suited to wine production, deals are increasingly conducted off-market. What this means for buyers seeking a vineyard is that patience and a good agent are both key. The best sites for viticulture are located less than 100 meters above sea level, with free-draining soils, gentle south-facing slopes with high average temperature and sunshine hours and shelter from strong winds and late frosts.
“If what people want is the classic minimum of 15 to 20 acres over chalk, then clearly in large part, they’re restricted to the North and the South Downs in Kent and Surrey and East and West Sussex, and there is always going to be a limited amount of that land that will be available for purchase either on the open market or privately,” Banham said.
But as climate change raises temperatures in Britain, the market is evolving.
“What you will find is that the demand for land will start expanding further out from the southeast,” Spofforth said. “Certainly East Anglia is very popular. Essex has been popular for a while, but that is growing into Suffolk, Norfolk, places like that. There’s absolutely no reason why Oxfordshire and Berkshire shouldn’t become increasingly popular, and there are grapes and brands moving further west and into Wales.”
Projections from Strutt and Parker’s Summer 2023 Viticulture Report predicted that by 2040 England’s existing 10 wine-growing counties are expected to almost triple to 27, including Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, the East Midlands, the Severn Valley, Southwest England and South Wales.
The Importance of Placemaking
Demand for a vineyard with a true country home at its core is likely to grow as winemakers seek direct-to-consumer sales, assisted by a restaurant or bed and breakfast.
Investments in vineyards and wineries in the U.K totaled almost £480 million over the past five years, Strutt and Parker’s 2023 report estimated. There are now over 900 vineyards in the U.K.—up 80% in the last five years and almost triple the number 20 years ago. As new businesses proliferate, a nascent trend is beginning to emerge with vineyards looking for ways to sell directly to consumers, maximizing their profits per bottle.
“When you look at that £480 million figure, a lot of that is made up of land purchases, vineyard establishment, new vineyards and significant acreage coming into productive life that’s been planted over the last three to five years, and one of the things that people are conscious of is the need to have a viable route to market,” Banham said.
Direct-to-consumer sales comprised just 19% of wine sales in 2022, Wines of Great Britain’s report found. As the industry grows, vineyard buyers are beginning to look not just for land but for properties suited to establishing a café, restaurant or tasting rooms to complement bottle sales, Lewis said. “It should form a part of every wine producer’s strategy to encourage people to come to their winery, so I think we should see people focusing on the quality of the place in which they make and trade their wine.”
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