Vineyards and wineries in Greater London

City wine, from grapes grown outside the city.

Before London Cru opened in 2013 as London’s first urban winery, it planned to truck 22 tonnes of hand-picked grapes from Bordeaux and Languedoc-Roussillon to an old gin distillery near Earls Court. Since 2017 it has used only English grapes, and since 2023 it has grown its own at Foxhole, near Bolney in West Sussex. Its winemaker told Decanter in 2020 that getting the fruit to the door was the hardest part, though an hour in a truck on a cool September morning did the grapes no harm.

The other city wineries work the same way. Blackbook, in a railway arch in Battersea, owns no vineyard and buys fruit from named growers. Renegade London, under a railway arch near Bethnal Green when Decanter visited in 2020, trucked whole bunches chilled to 2°C from vineyards as near as Sussex and as far as Puglia; it moved to Walthamstow in 2021. Numbers, in a former umbrella factory on Vyner Street, trucks in grapes from growers including Lavenham Brook in Suffolk, and Vagabond makes its wine inside a bar at Canada Water from vineyards within two hours of London.

Vines do grow inside the city. Forty Hall, in Enfield, is the first commercial-scale vineyard in London since the middle ages: ten acres on an organic farm run by Capel Manor College, with the wine made in Sussex by Will Davenport. Château Tooting is made the other way round: grapes picked in back gardens across the city, made into wine by Halfpenny Green in the Midlands.

London Cru is in SW6; Blackbook and Vagabond are south of the river, Numbers and Renegade in the east. Forty Hall, on the northern edge, has three stations nearby — Enfield Chase, Enfield Town and Turkey Street — and the 191 bus stops at the bottom of Forty Hill.