English Wine Week

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point. I look forward to consuming Yorkshire’s Lass or Yorkshire’s Lad. We should certainly support our small producers in what is, as I will go on to say, a growing industry in the United Kingdom.

A number of other colleagues have joined me to talk about the wine estates in their constituencies. My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) has mentioned the Chafor vineyard in his constituency, and I see on the Front Bench the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Mims Davies), who plays host to Bolney, and Kingscote in East Grinstead.

English sparkling wine has had a very busy year despite the pandemic. With the current trend to stay local and to buy local due to the pandemic, the industry has adapted well to current restrictions. WineGB data suggests that the industry saw an increase of 30% in 2020 on the previous year, with 7 million bottles sold, and we have a great deal more to look forward to. Dermot Sugrue, winemaker at Whiston Estate, wrote recently that the 2020 harvest is

“in a word: Superb. Best…since 2003 & 2011.”

Peter Gladwin, the proprietor of the Nutbourne Vineyards, told me that he believes in some ways covid restrictions have helped the UK wine industry. Buying local, staycations and the multitude of good publicity have all boosted direct-to-consumer sales.

Wine tourism has also seen an increase in the lockdown, with more visitors than ever heading to our UK vineyards and wineries for their holidays, enhancing—and this is a very serious point—the rural economy and much-needed employment. A recent report commissioned by the South Downs National Park Authority, which itself does an excellent job at promoting English wine, estimated that we have seen 33,000 visitors coming to our 51 vineyards and 11 wineries.

If the authors of a recent report on climate change—another very serious topic—are to be believed, the South Downs wine harvest will only grow. Today, just 0.4% of agricultural land is currently used for viticulture, whereas the report estimates that up to 34% of land could be suitable in the future. This potential is already apparent in the wider country, as 2021 has seen 1.4 million vines planted, and over 5,000 acres have been planted over the past five years.

With restrictions easing, we cannot stop here. We must continue to try to help this great industry grow, and one way to help is through taxation. Wine Drinkers UK explained to me that currently excise duty on a bottle of still wine is £2.23 plus VAT, while excise duty on a bottle of sparkling wine is £2.86 plus VAT. There is literally a bubble tax. Maybe it is the forerunner of a broader tax on carbon emissions, but I have to say it does seem like a really odd place to start.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point there. It is absurd of course because if it is a tax to prevent people from drinking more alcohol, the alcohol content of sparkling wine is rather lower than that of still wine, so it is actually even more healthy for people to drink sparkling wine than still wine.

[Andrew Griffith]

I thank my hon. Friend for his endorsement of the health benefits of sparkling wine, and I am sure he himself is a sparkling example of that as well. In the long term, I am confident that such a change in taxation would be a good deal for the Chancellor.

Another current issue that the wine industry in Britain is facing is the lack of seasonal workers able to come over and help with the harvest. There is currently only one UK college I am aware of that promotes the very highest level of viticulture course, and that is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), which is Plumpton College. Its principal, Jeremy Kerswell, is very engaged in expanding this space and stepping into that opportunity. I believe that, together, we can find a happy balance between gaining seasonal workers, but also encouraging more British people to take up the wonderful career opportunities offered in viticulture.

On the subject of Government hospitality and patronage of home-grown wine, I have tabled a number of written questions in this House, from which I learned that in March of last year English wines made up only 10% of the Government wine cellar. However, I am delighted to report that Government are busy rectifying this oversight. In 2018-19, 49% of wines purchased for Government hospitality were English or Welsh, and that has improved this year to 73%—a commendable direction of travel and one we should really celebrate in English Wine Week.

Since I became chairman of the all-party parliamentary group for wine of Great Britain, the members and I have been pushing the Government to promote English wine as much as possible. It is something I will continue to champion, and I was grateful for the commitment given in this Chamber last week by my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams), as a Foreign Office Minister, that he will encourage all British high commissions and embassies to stock their cellars with home-grown produce. This would help, support and encourage the growth of the English wine industry on a global scale. Boosting exports is a major cause for optimism. Today we drink far more Australian wine than the Australians drink English wine, so there is an opportunity to redress that imbalance thanks to the new outline trade deal agreed by the International Trade Secretary. Such opportunities will be firmly on the agenda, or the menu, at the SussExport event to be hosted by Wilton Park this July for all export businesses in Sussex.

English Wine Week is also an outstanding opportunity to celebrate the community institutions that serve our local English wine—the great British pub. Pubs provide a warm welcome and a safe place to enjoy company, perhaps a glass of English sparkling wine, and often delicious food. Many are cherished and characterful buildings used for hospitality over the centuries.

To help our hard-pressed hostelries, I have launched a South Downs pub guide to encourage my constituents and visitors to the South Downs back to the booths, benches, beer gardens and bar stools of these local favourites. From the Foresters Arms in Kirdford, to the Thatched Inn in Hassocks, to the Holly Tree in Walberton to the White Horse in Graffham, all points of the compass in Arundel and South Downs are well served by an array of local pubs. I am thankful to Squires garden centre and Harwoods Land Rover for making this guide a possibility. It is not yet quite, as they say, available in all good bookshops, but copies will be available in time for unlocking on 19 July. In the meantime, it is at southdownspubs.com.

I believe that it is important to celebrate and support this growing British industry in any way that we can, from promoting it on the international stage to ordering a bottle or two occasionally for ourselves. It is successful, sustainable and with plenty of room to grow.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this debate given that we have a little more time due to the previous business finishing early. I really congratulate my hon. Friend, and neighbour, the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) on securing it. I am very covetous of his constituency because it includes the best vineyards in the country in the county that has the best vineyards in the country. It is with great pleasure that I endorse everything that he has said about English wine.

I speak with some long-term experience. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as a vacation job, I used to work at the English Wine Centre in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) in the village of Alfriston, where I grew up. In those days, English wine was an altogether different beast. It had been reinvented by Guy Salisbury-Jones down at Hambledon in Hampshire, the home of cricket, and was largely an occupation taken up by retired colonels and the like as a sideline and hobby.

The quality of English wine in those days was somewhat questionable, so we had to think up imaginative ways of trying to promote it. One of those we came up with was having an English wine festival; it was rather more down to quantity than quality, which appealed to those who came. Then, in 1984, we founded the great English wine run, which mimicked the Beaujolais race bringing the new Beaujolais across to the UK. Instead, we took English wine across to a bunch of unsuspecting Parisians, ending up at the George V hotel in Paris. About 100 teams took part. Some were dressed up as famous English generals who had conquered the French in battle; of course, there were many that fitted that bill. We had double- decker London buses, surfboards, helicopters and vintage Rolls-Royces. We appeared, each of us, with our two bottles of English wine that we delivered to the finishing point at the George V hotel to the unsuspecting French who did not really want to drink it.

But today English wine is an altogether different beast. Forty years on from when we had those English wine runs, which we did for four or five years, we can now, with huge pride, hold up a bottle of English wine and it will hold its own with the best the French champagne industry can throw it. As my hon. Friend said, we now have countless vineyards that are winning in blind tastings internationally across the globe against the French, who thought they were the masters of producing sparkling wine. English sparkling wine is better. We have benefited from climate change, we benefit from the same latitude as the champagne district and we benefit from a similar terroir, particularly on the south downs, where the 51 vineyards in the South Downs national park have that chalky terrain that makes the best grapes to turn into English sparkling wine. So it has been a great success story, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I am sure that the odd drop has passed your lips occasionally in the past.

We need to celebrate the industry, and the Government need to get behind the industry a little more. We are now producing 7.1 million bottles on 10,000 acres across the country, mostly in England but some in Wales and apparently on a vineyard in Scotland—with a certain whisky tinge about it, I should think. We have 800 vineyards —and growing—employing many thousands of people and, really importantly, encouraging wine tourism as well. In Sussex, we have something called Sussex Modern, which was invented by the proprietor of Rathfinny, which is probably going to become the largest English vineyard and is a great success story. Sussex Modern combines vineyards with cultural and artistic sites for people coming to have a holiday in Sussex, just as they might go down to the south of France, to Bordeaux or wherever. They can take in some vineyards and some culture, history and heritage as well, and they can do it all in the United Kingdom, regardless of pandemics and everything else.

This is a really important, quality industry, and we want help from the Government. It is more expensive to set up a vineyard in this country, owing to the cost of land, when you are starting from scratch, so some more generous capital reliefs as part of agricultural aid might be something the Government would like to consider rather more generously. It is absurd, now that we are no longer constrained by taxation rules from the EU, that we are paying such a high tariff of tax on English wine. The equivalent tax in France is simply pennies—or euro cents—whereas here it is a much bigger chunk of the cost of the wine. It is also absurd, as I mentioned earlier, that we are paying a higher rate of tax on sparkling wine when it has a lower alcohol content—usually 11% compared with still wine at around 13 or 14%.

I know that, when the Minister replies, she will celebrate this industry—I have seen her taste much of the stuff in her years in this House—but will she have a word with her ministerial colleagues in the Treasury as well? This is a huge success story. It is part of Britain is GREAT, it will help to sell the UK around the world, and it would be nice to get that recognition from the Government with some financial advantage. In the post-common agricultural policy world in which we now live, the world is the English wine industry’s oyster and much of the south downs still can be developed under vineyards in the years to come. Thank you very much for this opportunity, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I look forward to hearing great things from the Minister. We can all then retire to the bar and have a sparkling wine from England.