English wine guide omits entire region

Popular US wine education blog Wine Folly has published a guide to English wine with one substantial omission – can you spot it?

Tumbleweed blows over the South West in Wine Folly’s Wine Map of England

A post titled ‘All About English Wine’ published on the Wine Folly blog this week includes a Wine Map of England which highlights the winemaking regions of Hampshire, Sussex, Surry, Kent, East Anglia and – that’s it.

Several observers noted the omission of the entire South West of England, home to such wineries as Camel Valley (Cornwall), Sharpham (Devon) and Lyme Bay (Devon).

There are around 110 vineyards in Cornwall, Dorset, Devon and Somerset, around half of which are of a “medium to large” size, according to English wine marketing group English Wine Producers.

Wiltshire and Gloucestershire have around 29 vineyards between them, making a total of around 139 for the entire South West region.

The award-winning Wine Folly site is run by Madeline Puckette, a former graphic designer and qualified sommelier whose wine infographics have helped many thousands, if not millions, of wine novices to better understand the subject since its launch in 2011.

The site has also led to the publication of a New York Times best-selling book.

The omission came as a slight surprise to Sam Lindo, winemaker at Cornwall’s largest winery, Camel Valley, which has been making wine in the region since 1989.

Prefacing his comments by saying that “England is a very small place and it’s odd that people want to have this regionality”, Lindo said: “I would say in the International Wine Challenge there were more medals won [by wineries] in the South West region than any of the other regions…

“If you group all the South West together then we do better than the South East.”

Lindo speculated that there were “not that many people who are actually feeding information into the US”. The Wine Folly article appears to have used the 2010 Guide to English Vineyards written by Stephen Skelton MW.

Camel Valley does export a small amount of wine to the US – including a proportion to Seattle, where Wine Folly author is based.

The otherwise detailed and informative article, which was written by Wine Folly contributor Camille Berry, can be read here.