Vineyards and wineries in Gloucestershire

A medieval vineyard county, replanted around Three Choirs.

In the 12th century the chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote that no county in England had so many vineyards as Gloucestershire. The Domesday Book of 1086 lists vineyard at Stonehouse, where Woodchester Valley has planted one of its three sites, and at Dryhill, outside Cheltenham, the vines grow on terraces the estate says were cut by the Romans.

The modern county grew up around Three Choirs, near Newent. Alan McKechnie planted the first vines on his own fruit farm in 1973, and John Oldacre, who took over in 1984, named it after England’s oldest choral festival. By 2017 it was taking on contract winemaking for many small wineries in the surrounding area and across the border in Wales, Great British Wine reported. Kents Green, planted in 1979, sends its grapes four miles to be made there, and Road Green, at North Nibley, has its wine produced and bottled there. In 2025 Three Choirs joined five other vineyards in Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire as the Malvern Hills Vineyards.

The ground divides the county. On the Cotswolds, Woodchester Valley’s vines at Woodchester and Amberley grow in shallow, free-draining brash over Oolitic limestone, and Larkhill, on the edge of Tetbury, planted a south-facing Cotswold brash slope in 2018. West of the Severn, Kingsthorne farms deep silty loam over red Raglan mudstone at Flaxley, near Newnham, and Kents Green sits in what local growers call a low-rain corridor, sheltered by May Hill, the Malverns and the Black Mountains. Poulton Hill, near Cirencester, has trademarked ‘Bulari’ as a term for English sparkling wine that other producers may use under licence.