The slopes of Snowdonia are a long way from Provence, but you can now find a vineyard there growing rondo and seyval blanc.
Pant Du is one of dozens of vineyards now thriving in Wales, more famously the home of dragons and male voice choirs.
It’s down to climate change, which is now serving us homegrown cab franc alongside flood, famine, and fire.
While many traditional wine regions are becoming too hot, rainy Wales is not yet in danger of this.
As of August, there were 59 registered vineyards there, more than twice as many from just nine years ago in 2017, when there were only 24.
You may have already been enjoying some of Wales’ famous bottles, like those from Ancre Hill, which are in ‘every natty wine bar’ in London according to British wine expert Alice Griffiths.
She has just returned from a trip around Welsh vineyards, and told Metro that people tend to ‘forget’ Welsh wine.
English vineyards like Chapel Down, Denbies and Camel Valley are well known, with champagne grape varieties suited to cooler climates, such as chardonnay and pinor noir, widespread in the south east.
But Ms Griffiths said Welsh growers are ‘looking outside the box, with some growers seeing success with grapes like Bordeaux’s cabernet franc, usually a grape for warmer climates, as well as a focus on organic and sustainable farming.
Dr Kate Gannon, who has researched how climate change is affecting British viticulture, told Metro a warming world is the reason we now have a Welsh wine industry.
Grape varieties grow within narrow average temperature ranges, she explained, so can now reliably grow where they couldn’t before.
Across England and Wales, this has allowed planting area for vines to grow ‘exponentially’, even as global wine production slowed to its lowest level for over 60 years in 2023. There are now nearly 1,000 vineyards in the UK as a whole.
‘It’s rare when you’re covering climate change to get a bit of a nice story embedded in there,’ she said – though added that sadly, it’s not all positive.
Many established wine regions are ‘just becoming too hot for the varieties that they’re known for,’ Dr Gannon, of the Grantham Research Institute, LSE, said. ‘At the same time they’re also experiencing other climatic challenges like wildfires’.
The climate of south east England is projected to become more like Burgundy within 20 years, she said, making it hard to know which grape varieties will be best suited for the long term, given planting vines is expensive and you’d hope they would last for decades.
Richard Huws, who founded Pant Du vineyard in 2007, told Metro it would soon be possible to plant different varieties than he thought of when starting out with wife Iola.
Have you started buying British wines?
Not all their grapes thrived, and they planted apple trees for cider as a back-up plan, saying ‘when you’re pioneering, it hurts when you get things wrong’.
But there is ‘huge potential’ for UK wine, he thinks, predicting Welsh and English wine will soon regularly beat sparkling wine from Champagne in blind tastings.
A striking photo of his vineyard in Gwynedd shows vines poking out from drifts of snow, with a mountain in the background.
It looks dramatic, but snow isn’t the real problem, as the vines will be dormant over winter.
More of a problem is late frosts after the growing season has started, or wet weather causing an invasion of pests: both unpredictable weather events more likely now than 100 years ago.
Dr Gannon said this is not a story of despair, as the wine sector does ‘wonderful things’, but cautioned ‘there are no robust opportunities from climate change if we don’t slow the rate of change’.
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