Vineyards and wineries in Derbyshire

A walled vineyard from 1972, and vines on the Peak District’s slopes.

Sir Reresby Sitwell planted a vineyard at Renishaw Hall in 1972, in a walled area a few hundred metres from the house, and Renishaw says it was named the most northern vineyard in the country until 1986. The walls matter: they form a 300-year-old stone-walled structure, and Kieron Atkinson, who took the vineyard over, names their shelter as one of the major reasons the fruit ripens.

Atkinson’s business, the English Wine Project, makes the wine at Darley Abbey Mills near Derby, part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, and sells it as Renishaw Hall Wines; it makes wine for other vineyards too. The Renishaw vines themselves sit on the county’s border with South Yorkshire.

In the Peak District National Park, Hope Valley plants steep slopes facing south-west, 900 feet above sea level and below the escarpment of Stanage Edge, and sends each harvest to Halfpenny Green in Staffordshire to be made into wine. Amber Valley, at Wessington close to the eastern edge of the Peak District, makes its wine on site and presses cider as well.

In the south of the county, vines were added to places with other histories. Scaddows, between Ticknall and Hartshorne, was a Webster family soft-fruit farm from 1987 before viticulture came later, and Sealwood, in the National Forest near Linton, was planted in 2008 around a Grade II listed 18th-century cottage.