Two decades ago, I gave a PowerPoint presentation on Champagne in Champagne. At the end, there was a ripple of applause that fell decibels short of ‘polite’ on the clapometer. No one asked a question. Instead, one of the attendees stood up and volunteered a less laboured account of Champagne’s primacy, one that did without slides of chalk sedimentology and mapped patterns of light interception across the Montagne de Reims.

‘You know, the things you say,’ he paused to fix my gaze. “Some of them may be correct. Some. But the reason why people drink Champagne is they want to have sex!”

That was me told. Truth bombed. Man to man. Parisian contre Londoner.

What! Hadn’t he heard of English Sparkling Wine and climate change, the carrot and stick that were being prepped and harnessed a few degrees of latitude and longitude north and west of Reims? The world was changing.

‘Hang on. We have chalk and we’re Champagne’s biggest export market.’ I countered in my head. But the room was emptying. The kid had owned me.

Our domestic wine industry has suffered plenty of false starts. One of the things the Romans failed to do for Britannia was to get its tribes drinking better. What was produced did a job of sorts. A combination of low alcohol and high acids meant the wines were a dependable anti-microbial chaser for putrid garrison rations, keeping the legions regular and in step but nothing more.

Skip two millennia and Denbies Estate, near Dorking, was bannered as the biggest new vineyard project in Europe when it was planted in the 1980s. Liebfraumilch was popular at the time, so it seemed sensible to stick with the Blue Nun praktische blueprints for grape varieties and rootstocks. However, by the time the vineyard came into full production the nation had shifted its loyalties to Australian Chardonnay and Shiraz.

Nyetimber also chose the close simulation route. Traditional method sparkling wine seemed a good bet given the UK’s 100-year love affair with Champagne, though you could equally argue the market was already at saturation. The gestation phase proved long for the Sussex-based estate. There was a churn of owners and winemakers, but in blind tastings the wines held their own against the giant Marne brands even if there was no guarantee that an emptied bottle would get you to first base or beyond.

And that’s the issue. Seventy percent of Champagne is gifted. It’s sexy and intimate. You can drink it standing up, you can drink it lying down, but the protocol insists on eye-to-eye contact. The coy formalities of the table are dispensed with.

Then there’s the Grandes Marques to contend with.‘ Veuve Clicquot’. Order two glasses at a bar and your partner may just be fooled into thinking you can speak passable French. It’s the same with Moët, even if in my part of the world we drop umlauts like we drop our aitches.

As the wine guy, I always felt pressured to take something interesting along to dinner invites. It turned out to be my burden alone. I remember arriving at some friends’ house, two by two, and it was the couple in front of us who’d turned up with the Veuve that got all the kisses on the doorstep. My Meursault Premier Cru was parked up next to the Oxford Landing Chardonnay, by the cooker. Depressingly, the bottle was returned on the home leg of the dinner party back and forth, wrecked by two years exposure to heat and light.

The Montagne de Reims tops out at 280m, a hill even by southern England’s modest elevations, yet it’s proved a treacherous mountain for UK wine producers who wanted to plant the Union Jack at the summit of bottle-fermented production. Around the turn of the millennium, English wannabes foregrounded climate and geology in their communications, earnest stuff that resonates with nerdy Burgundy-drinking types but is largely irrelevant to fizz drinkers ordering at a bar. Much was made of the continuous chalk strata that connects northern France to south-eastern England when the reality is that the white stuff is so plentiful creationists claim it as evidence for Noah’s great flood of 1,800BC.

The tough lesson for English Sparkling Wine producers is that even good copies rarely overcome first mover advantage. I mean, why would you buy a SEAT if you’ve  got a VW in the drive already? Throw in Paris and the fact you’re up against some of the world’s most recognisable luxury brands and those chalky gradients above Aÿ and Avize you chose to challenge rear ever steeper.

The financial pain has intensified because size and scale were deemed part of the legitimisation process for successful sparkling brands. Broad distribution and high visibility underlie Champagne’s marketing success; hence the precedent was established early on for hefty, front-loaded investment. Nyetimber, Gusbourne and Rathfinny aren’t big by LVMH standards, but with UK consumers proving loyal to Champagne and exports struggling it’s all too easy to become the unloved backyard multinational.

Ergo all the rumours that many of the big sparkling wine estates in the UK are up for sale. The prolonged period of bottle-ageing required for traditional method sparkling wines means stock holding will always exceed annual depletions. If sales and demand remain flathowever, then the current healthy ratio of sales to reserves may scare away potential investors two to three years down the line.

What wasn’t anticipated in all this scaling up was the panoptic effect of online search engines. High spending consumers value exclusivity. If you’re exceptional the market will now come to you. There isn’t an additional requirement to appear on every garage forecourt and every supermarket shelf to feel seen anymore. The optical resolution for discovery is so much more detailed than it was 20 years ago when people were first drafting their business plans.

A big problem for simulated me-too brands is that their origin stories lack a sense of authenticity; identity is always partial. UK producers’ early clamour to associate their enterprises with Champagne was an attempt to plug gaps. In the original Bladerunner, the replicant Rachael carries photos of her creator’s niece with her in lieu of memories. Rachael’s on-screen dilemma is part of English wine’s real-life predicament. Huge investments are impersonal. Madame Bollinger and The Widow Clicquot are integral to the success of their respective brands. Maybe the domestic industry needs to downsize and get back to tried and tested storytelling around people and places, with estates growing a chapter at a time. What isn’t in doubt is the potential of the UK to produce great wine, though perhaps not in the volumes that wealthy entrants aspired to and planned towards.

Not that happy endings are ever guaranteed. In Champagne, Burgundy and Bordeaux, the diversity between sites is given a qualitative ranking. Most fruit is processed by co-ops and fed into supermarkets along some very grumpy supply chains. Climate isn’t a leveller. It’s a threshold beyond which the sifting of the best from ordinaire can commence.

The overused concept of experiences is appropriate to wine, and it is one area where English producers outscore the Grandes Marques. More people visit Champagne’s war cemeteries than they do producers. The wine routes in Napa Valley and Sonoma are an inspiration, particularly for a country where wealth, population density and vineyards overlap.

Wine tourism isn’t a panacea for all the industry’s woes, but it does allow producers to make a case for their wines in isolation, away from a bar setting and free of competitor brands.

Now is not the time to visit a UK vineyard. The stripped bones of last season’s growth intensify the cold and wet, and any footwear will turn into brothel creepers with a 3” wedge clay sole. Wait until June and July when leaves and fruit heighten the mid-summer feel.

Hospitality wasn’t necessarily the business model people had in mind when they started out on their wine careers, but some have proved rather good it. My daughter recently returned from a weekend stay at Tillingham Vineyard with more enthusiasm for wine than I’ve managed to instil in 25 years of swirling and spitting. Their wine reached parts that my Meursault and St Julien missed. Go see for yourself.

Photo by Heather Wang on Unsplash