The English Wine Vintage Guide

A vintage is simply the harvest from one year - the grapes picked, and the wine made from them. In most of the world it's a formality; in a cool, unpredictable climate like England's, it matters enormously. The weather swings so much from one year to the next that two vintages from the same vineyard can taste like different wines entirely, which is why serious English producers date almost everything they make.

Three things matter most: enough warmth through the growing season to ripen the grapes properly (tracked here as Growing Degree Days), low disease pressure - England's damp climate makes mildew and botrytis a constant threat - and dry weather at flowering and harvest, the two points in the season where rain does the most damage. A warm summer can still be undone by a wet September, as 2019 and 2023 both show on this page. The best years, like 2018, 2020 and 2025, had all three line up at once.

Three vintages in the last decade have been exceptional: 2018, 2020 and 2025. 2022 and 2023 both rate as good rather than exceptional, each for its own reason - 2022 on a real acidity problem despite record heat, 2023 on ripeness and acidity both landing below average despite the biggest harvest Britain has ever recorded. The rest were difficult to some degree, or in 2019's case just unremarkable, usually because of frost, disease, or a wet harvest window undoing an otherwise decent season. Use the slider above to see why, year by year.

There are signs 2026 could turn out well: a warm, sunny summer and reportedly good flowering have growers cautiously optimistic. Set against that is a harsh spring frost in April and May, with Stanlake Park in Berkshire losing an estimated 40-50% of its crop and Squerryes in Kent reporting its worst frost damage since 2017, with Kent and Essex among the hardest-hit counties - so the picture will vary a lot from site to site. The vintage still depends on the harvest itself, several weeks away as we write this, and particularly on whether the weather holds dry through picking. We'll add 2026 to this guide once the real data is in, the same way we have for every year here.