In the last twenty years, British sparkling wine (or its longer, English & Welsh sparkling wine) has gone from a curiosity for wine people in-the-know to a growing industry of at least 270 wineries whose wines are drunk at large. The quality level has in fact risen to such a point that even the English are saying it’s good.
Throughout its existence, one thing hasn’t changed though, and that’s the question of what on earth to call it.
From the uncomfortably Francophilic (“Méthode Britannique”) to the downright silly (“Celebritain”), most of the proposed generic names for British sparkling wine haven’t seen much use in the wine industry, nor have they caught on with the general public. Though the blandly descriptive “English Sparkling Wine” seems to be the term most widely used by winemakers and the press, it’s been criticized as “too literal,” “bland,” and “pedestrian,” not to mention exclusive of the budding category of Welsh sparkling wines.
The effort by some winemakers to create a single brand for British sparkling wine has prompted debates about whether such a brand should exist in the first place, and if so, what wines it should include? Should proposed generic terms focus on individual counties? England as a whole? England and Wales? Just traditional method sparkling wines? Or all of them regardless of method? And would having a unified category help solidify British sparkling wine’s identity as a quality product, or drag quality producers down with cheaper ones?
It’s tempting to write off the naming debate as industry infighting or an effort by journalists to drum up novelty headlines [ed. including this publication of half a decade ago]. But though there’s still little consensus on naming conventions, we can learn a lot about the state of British sparkling winemaking—with producers variously looking to distinguish themselves from competitors, create region-wide quality standards, connect their wines to British culture and tradition, or establish a familiar profile wine drinkers can recognize—by looking at which terms have stuck around and which haven’t.
I hunted down generic terms for British sparkling wines that have seen some level of adoption in the wine industry and spoke to British winemakers about them. The number of proposed names are far too many (and most far too irrelevant) to list, so I’m limiting the roster to names that have been put forth by trade associations, appeared on wine bottles, or generated substantial press. We’re probably not going to see Verve, Brubbly, or BritPop on shelves anytime soon, so it’s probably best to move on from that group.
British Fizz
Though the U.K. Vineyard Association (now part of the British wine industry association WineGB) applied for PGI status on the term in 2017 just prior to Brexit, the association seems to have abandoned the effort, and the term is now absent from WineGB’s public-facing materials. While the phrase has appeared in the Telegraph and the Washington Post, among other newspapers, the vast majority of its use in the press appears to be informal – that is, with a lowercase F – and probably intended to avoid the headline-elongating “English (or British) Sparkling Wine.”
Merret
Proposed by the late Mike Roberts of Ridgeview Estate in the early 2000s, this term references Christopher Merret, a 17th century English physician and glassmaker who described the practice of adding sugar to wine to produce a second fermentation in England well before its 19th century adoption in Champagne. Though Roberts had originally hoped for “Merret” to become a generic term for English sparkling wine (and it was included on some Ridgeview bottles) it never caught on with other producers, and Ridgeview eventually stopped using it on their labels.
Reached for comment, a Ridgeview representative stated that the change was intended to avoid confusing their branding: “We redesigned our labels in 2018 [and] deliberately left off the word ‘Merret’ as we felt it was confusing with too many names related to Ridgeview and we wanted Ridgeview to be the strongest brand. [I]f we did want to develop ‘Merret’ as a generic brand for English sparkling wine it [would need] to be more generic and not so tied to Ridgeview. Ridgeview still retains the naming copyright to the word ‘Merret’ and would be open to industry conversations if it was decided that this was a name that the industry was keen to adopt.”
Britagne
Hampshire sparkling wine producer Coates & Seely coined this term (which is apparently pronounced, “Brittania”) when they released their first wines in 2011, though the winemakers state that they’ve never explicitly called for the word to be used as a generic term. Thus far, it hasn’t seen use by anyone but its originators, who have since stopped printing the term on their bottles. During its short lifetime, the term seems to have garnered some of the same criticisms county-wide PDOs have, with Cornish winemaker Bob Lindo of Camel Valley commenting in Decanter that his winery has “spent 20 years getting to where we are today, and we wouldn’t want to be lumped together with wines of varying quality.”
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