Vineyards and wineries in Lincolnshire

A young wine county, and a vineyard in a neighbour’s walled garden.

In 2011 Lincolnshire Life counted only two commercial vineyards in the county, and called their owners the vanguard of a young industry. One processed the other’s grapes: that autumn the Solaris picked at Somerby went to David Lofthouse’s Three Sisters Vineyard at Claxby.

Somerby’s vines began with a view from a hotel window. On a driving holiday in Germany, Bill Hobson looked out over a vineyard and was struck by how much the landscape resembled home; back in Somerby, neighbours offered an acre of their walled garden, and the first 150 vines went in in 2006. That vineyard, Monument House, sits on the chalk escarpment of the north Lincolnshire Wolds, over a subsoil of Cretaceous chalk, and the planting grew 60 times over.

Later plantings are spread from the north of the county to the south. Mayfield is on a hundred-year-old family farm near Sleaford, where the fourth-generation farmer Fraser Key planted vines in 2011 after studying viticulture in Dijon. Wressle, in North Lincolnshire, went in in 2020, planted by a family that learned its winemaking in Tuscany and at Plumpton College. Silkstone, at Cawthorpe outside Bourne, was planted only with Bacchus the same year, and its wine is made by a contract winemaker, Haygrove Evolution.