Region & History

Champagne from England sounds like a contradiction, yet French houses have been buying land in Kent and Hampshire for some years now. The Taittinger family acquired a former orchard near Chilham in Kent in 2015 and planted the first vines in 2017. This became Domaine Evremond, a joint venture between the Champagne house and the British importer Hatch Mansfield. Behind the project stand Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger and Master of Wine Patrick McGrath.

The name recalls Charles de Saint-Évremond, a French writer exiled in London who is regarded as the first ambassador of Champagne in England. There's an earlier connection too: as far back as 1662, the Englishman Christopher Merret described to the Royal Society how wine merchants added sugar to their wine to make it sparkle vigorously. The link between England and sparkling wine is thus older than any vineyard in Kent.

The winery in Chilham opened in September 2024, and the first bottles were released in April 2025. They bear the name Classic Cuvée Edition I. Eight years lie between planting and the first bottle, the time it takes for young vines to bear fruit and the wine to mature.

Pommery took a different route. The house from Reims, founded in 1858 as Pommery & Greno, released Louis Pommery England in spring 2018. The grapes from the 2015 harvest came from Kent, Sussex and Hampshire and were processed at the Hattingley Valley winery in Hampshire. According to trade press reports, it was the first English sparkling wine label from a major Champagne house. Alongside this, Pommery bought a 40-hectare site near Alresford called Pinglestone and planted around 30 hectares there between 2017 and 2019.

The counterpoint is Chapel Down in Tenterden, Kent. The company traces back to the merger of the Tenterden and Lamberhurst estates in 2000, is publicly listed, and farms 414 hectares across southeast England by its own account. This makes it the country's largest wine producer. The protected designation of origin Sussex and its houses are covered in the neighboring region.