Region & History

When Roman troops landed at Richborough in Kent in 43 AD, they brought the vine with them. Britain had only just been conquered. Even so, Roman villas in the south often had small vineyard plots, since a landowner without his own wine was scarcely imaginable. Kent was at the forefront from the very start. Whether vines actually grew there cannot be proven. The clearest traces of Roman viticulture in Britain lie further north, in the valley of the River Nene. What is certain, however, is that the Domesday Book of 1086 recorded forty-five vineyards, all in southeast England, with Kent right in the middle of that band.

Almost all of these estates belonged to Normans or great abbeys. Wine was a matter for the wealthy and the Church. Then came the sudden collapse of English winegrowing. Henry the Eighth dissolved the monasteries in 1536, the climate cooled into the Little Ice Age, and the English vineyard all but vanished from the landscape for a good four hundred years.

It returned by a roundabout route, through apple growing. The Barnes family farmed traditional orchards in Biddenden. In 1969, falling apple prices and a radio programme about English wine gave Joyce Barnes an idea: a trial plot of vines planted right among the old trees. Biddenden has been regarded ever since as the county's oldest continuously worked vineyard.

Two of the largest estates of those early years, Lamberhurst and Tenterden, merged in 2000. A year later, Carr Taylor joined as a third partner. In 2002, former beer executive Frazer Thompson took over management and brought the sparkling wines together under the new name Chapel Down. Within two decades it had become England's largest wine producer, headquartered in a restored oast house in Tenterden.

The final seal of approval came from the competition. Champagne Taittinger bought a former apple and pear orchard in Chilham in 2015. From 2017 the house planted Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier on sixty of its hundred and twenty-five hectares. They named it Domaine Evremond after Charles de Saint-Évremond, a French writer who, in exile in London from 1661, helped popularise Champagne at the court of Charles the Second. The first bottles went on sale in 2025. That a Champagne house would invest its money in Kent of all places is the politest way of saying: the soil here is right.