Nine wine trend predictions for 2016

7th January, 2016 by Lucy Shaw

English sparkling rivals Champagne

This year looks set to be monumental for English sparkling wine as consumers and producers alike wake up to the fact that the quality of the wines coming out of England’s greatest estates is now on a par with top Champagne, as a recent blind tasting put on by Noble Rot proved.

The excitement reached fever pitch late last year when news emerged that Champagne house Taittinger would be the first in the French region to make fizz in England, having snapped up prized plots of land in Kent.

“English sparkling is within a whisper – by which I mean the next two years or so – of being taken just as seriously as Champagne; and the pace at which this has happened is incredible,” says BBR CEO Dan Jago.

“Before the 2009 vintage there was variable quality, but now the 2009, ‘10s and ‘11s are on the market and are looking brilliant. I’m hugely optimistic about what’s going to be possible in English sparkling wine going forward,” he adds.

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3 Responses to “Nine wine trend predictions for 2016”

Jiles Halling says:

January 7, 2016 at 1:59 pm

Forgive me but I don’t find this at all helpful, or enlightening.

Can anyone tell me what ‘ Natural Wine’ is? It seems to me to be a rather imprecise and therefore useless description. Almost anyone and their dog is saying these days that they use sustainable viticulture and minimum intervention during wine-making, but again, what is ‘minimum intervention’? Is there any benchmark or is it just what the wine maker says?
As for savvy wine lovers avoiding wines… ‘where the terroir is masked through bad winemaking’ – haven’t these consumers always avoided badly made wines?

Unless there are some objective criteria for these terms that are increasingly bandied about I fear they will only serve to muddy the waters for the consumers rather than assist them.

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David James says:

January 7, 2016 at 2:30 pm

Been drinking Cremant de Limoux after visiting the winery some 6 years ago, so glad someone else thinks it is drinkable.

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The SEDIMENT blog says:

February 16, 2016 at 3:42 pm

Let’s be honest – these are the wine trends for 2016 as predicted by Berry Bros & Rudd. Who, bless ’em, are not necessarily representative of the wider market. Is the “puncturing” of the prosecco market, or the appeal of lower alcohol drinks, going to happen in Lidl as well as in St James’s?

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