Gwin Am Byth

Last year I took a solo holiday to Jerez. Walls oozed with nutty yeast, ceilings were made of dappled muscatel vines and beams of light poured into darkened bodegas with such piercing intensity it almost brought me to my knees. Tabancos served sherry for a euro per glass and every restaurant had a wine list that championed local wines with such knowledge and ferocious pride it made me embarrassed of the list I was working with back home.

The month before I’d been on my first vineyard visit. Ancre Hill is a biodynamic and organic winery based in Monmouth, about a 45 minute drive from Cardiff. Breathtakingly beautiful, with rows upon rows of vines planted amongst rolling Welsh scenery, Italian Cypress trees protecting them from the unpredictable Welsh weather. Their Triomphe Pet Nat was one of my favourite wines of last year; brimming with sour cherry compote, blackberry crumble and dried cranberry acidity.

In my eight years of living in Cardiff it was the first time I’d encountered Welsh wine. We know, more or less, what the deal with English wine is. That it siblings Champagne in both terroir and style and can therefore rival it in taste. But what about Welsh wine? Wales is, to put it mildly, very cold and very wet.

Cold climate regions result in wines with high acid and low alcohol and Wales is no exception to that. Because of the particularly British weather in Wales, winemakers take advantage of micro climates, which vary vineyard to vineyard, but overall mean smaller overall yields. 

So Welsh wine is going to be full of mouth-watering acidity, often to the point where it’ll need balancing out with time on lees or an increase in body, which can be achieved by an increase in alcohol levels. All of these things occur naturally when making sparkling wine in the traditional method which is why sparkling Welsh wine is common, as well as paler, lighter bodied still wines. 

Why then, in a world where eating seasonally and locally is encouraged and wine regions champion their local wines, did it take me eight years of living in Cardiff to drink Welsh wine? The obvious issue of my ignorance aside there are a few contributing factors:

In a city where you can’t move for Tiny Rebel beer and you’re never more than fifty metres away from a Welsh cake, Welsh wine is very low on the ground.

Locality of ingredients are proudly declared on menus, but those dishes are paired with wines as far away as South Africa and as near as France. Why, when acknowledging the importance of farm to table dining for our environment, does our alcohol consumption rarely get taken into account? What would our wine lists look like if Welsh hospitality supported it’s vineyards as well as it does it’s farms?

Both accessibility and availability are huge factors here. As we learnt earlier, Welsh wine is produced on a very small scale, the micro-climate vineyards producing only a small quantity of terroir driven wines. This results in limited numbers of bottles sold at a higher cost. It’s often forgotten with wine that it’s a product that can only be produced once a year; think how much you would like to earn for something that took you at least a year of time, money and effort to make; that’s why wine costs the way it does. Welsh wine is marketed as a luxury, ‘boutique’ product with a price tag to match; table wine is practically non-existent.

It’s also a lazy move from myself to compare Cardiff to Jerez when our drinking cultures are very different. Whereas Old World regions have been making wine for thousands of years, Welsh wine-making only really started to kick off in the 1970s. British pub culture is very different to that of Spanish tabanco culture and both should be celebrated in their own right. But there is something magical about drinking as locally as you are eating when in European countries that I would love to see replicated in Wales.

Until there is a movement to drink as locally as we are encouraged to eat; until bars, restaurants and bottle shops actively seek out and rally Welsh wine, and until those wineries meet them halfway by making supplying easier and providing more economical table wine, this isn’t going to change. But small steps are being made in that direction. 

Welsh Wine Week launched this year to huge success. The 27th of July to the 2nd of August was devoted to celebrating the almost 30 vineyards that are now producing wine in Wales. Articles, interviews, pairings and online tastings showcased what Wales has to offer and how to directly buy and support our local winemakers. For the first time I saw Welsh wine actively discussed and drunk across my timelines. 

‘Welsh Wine Week has done wonders’ says Cwîn y Gwîn, Sara Hobday, ’it’s done more for the Welsh wine industry in the last few weeks than anyone has done in the last ten years’. Sara launched Vin Van Caerdydd this year, an independent bilingual wine company aiming to ‘source directly’ from ‘every Welsh vineyard’. 

Chatting with Sara a few weeks ago I was blown away by her passion and knowledge of Welsh wines. .

“People aren’t going to learn about Welsh wine unless you put it in front of them and shout about it”

Vin Van Caerdydd are doing just that. Starting out with wines from Llaethliw and Parva, Sara aims to add a different Welsh winery to her selection each month, educating customers as they go with fun, accessible videos and informal tasting notes. 

There has never been a more exciting time to get behind Welsh wine. The establishments that reach out and support Welsh wines and educate their customers about them to the extent that Welsh Wine Week and Vin Van Caerdydd are, are going to be part of a really important movement over the next few years. The wineries that meet them halfway by examining how accessible they are to public and trade will be at the forefront of that too. With time, support and the fact that climate change is slowly moving wine regions further and further north, the development of Welsh wine over the next few decades is going to be something to watch.

Trying to practice what I preach we sat down for dinner last week and opened a bottle of rosé from Parva Farm Vineyard in the Wye Valley. It had this gorgeous lactic acidity, giving a creamy body the equivalent of drinking a very good hug; tasted like ripe apricots, baking with rosewater and danish pastries crammed with strawberries and custard. It made me proud to be adopted Welsh.