Vineyards and wineries in Hertfordshire

Young family vineyards, some of them a train ride from London.

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, wanted a vineyard at Hatfield. His gardener, John Tradescant, wrote to an English diplomat in Brussels asking for vine cuttings or plants from the archduke’s garden, noting that the earl had Frenchmen to make it. Four centuries on, several of the county’s vineyards are young family plantings.

At Lokkelebery, a few miles north of Hatfield, the Buisman family’s Lockley Farm grew wheat, barley, oats and beans; after the 2021 wheat came off, the soil was prepared, and the vines went in in May 2022. The vineyard is sheltered by the Mimram Valley, on a south-west-facing slope in free-draining soils littered with Hertfordshire flints, and the farm goes on growing cereals around it.

In the east of the county, near the Essex border, Four Acres was planted in 2012 on a hillside above the Ash Valley at Little Hadham by Platon Loizou, who wanted to get back to his Cypriot roots after a career in travel; his sons and his wife help run it. At Bailey Hills, Eloise and Dylan Ford, who describe themselves as first-generation winemakers, planted in 2018 in Bishop’s Stortford, the town they grew up in, and built a winery beside the vines and their home.

Two of them can be reached by train. Bailey Hills is a five-minute taxi ride from Bishop’s Stortford station, 35 minutes from London Liverpool Street, and Lokkelebery says visitors can alight at Welwyn North and walk through the farm to the vineyard.