COUNTY vineyards have a reason to celebrate after a minister told a city conference the UK is providing healthy competition overseas.

Secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs Elizabeth Truss praised producers at the Oxford Farming Conference on Wednesday.

She said at the Examination Schools in High Street Britain is taking “the Australians, French and Italians on at what was their own game”.

Exports of English and Welsh wine were on course to break the £100m barrier this year, she added.

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Bob and Carol Nielsen, owners of Wallingford’s Brightwell Vineyard, said domestic trade had significantly grown in the last five years.

It opened in 2000 and went from producing one brand of white wine in 2003 to eight today, including England’s only home-produced brandy.

In 2009 it began selling its £9.99 Bacchus white wine to 21 Waitrose stores in Oxfordshire and supplies have risen 12.7 per cent since then.

Mrs Nielsen, 57, said: “Last year went very well for us and what we find is it’s an increasing industry year-on-year.

“We are now exporting some of our wines to Tokyo and in 2013 we exported to Switzerland.

“We’re also in talks with an Indian company to export some of our wines to India.”

Former RAF pilot 56-year-old Mr Nielsen: “English wine really has grown in recent years.

“When we first started in 2000 a lot of people had a knee-jerk snobbery and wouldn’t even try English wine because they thought it would be rubbish.

“The whole industry has changed since 15 years ago and the quality of the product has improved significantly.

“We’re now working with professionals from Spain, France and Germany and have learnt the way to make good quality wine.”

She said: “Industry-wide sparkling wine has got the most acclaim in the last few years, although our biggest sellers are our still whites.

“We currently make what the French call blanc de blancs, which is a sparkling wine made purely out of the chardonnay grape.

“We are looking at planting pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes to make a more conventional sparkling wine in the future.”


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