English wine – how does it taste?

Here are the nearly 70 tasting notes I took at this year's English Wine Producers tasting  on St George's Day a week  ago in the distinctly un-English setting of Russian-owned Chelsea Football Club. I would have loved to taste more but these were the wines on the central tables and represented just about all I could manage. 

It was perhaps significant that more sparkling than still wines were shown on these central tables, and certainly the focus of fine English wine today is definitively fizzy.

The picture shows the old and the new in terms of English wine labelling. On...