Vineyards and wineries in Northamptonshire

Vines in the Nene Valley, where the Romans made wine.

The Romans made wine in Northamptonshire. By 2000 a team led by Ian Meadows of Northamptonshire County Council and Tony Brown of Exeter University had identified seven Romano-British vineyards, four of them in the county, and Brown said the Romans had concentrated their winemaking in the Nene Valley, near Wollaston, where the vineyards covered nearly 30 acres. At one Northamptonshire site the team traced nearly four miles of bedding trenches, which they estimated could have held some 4,000 vines. The region’s rainfall sat at the low end of the British range, which would have posed few fungal problems, and its soils were rich and limy.

New Lodge planted on horse paddocks near Earls Barton in 2000, on a south-west-facing slope above the Nene Valley, in crumbly, well-drained loam over ironstone. Ironstone runs under several of the county’s vineyards: Merry Tom, near Brixworth, planted into it in 2019, and at Blisworth, Stonyfield grows on ironstone over Northamptonshire clay, much of it spoil from digging the Blisworth Tunnel and the Grand Union Canal in the late 18th century.

Several of these vineyards send their grapes away to be made into wine. Stonyfield’s go to Halfpenny Green in Staffordshire, and Fleurfields, on a hilltop meadow overlooking Pitsford Reservoir, sends its by truck to Three Choirs in Newent, because owning winemaking equipment would be uneconomical for a vineyard its size. Welland Valley, near Market Harborough, began in 1991 as a research planting and has a small winery of its own.

In May 2025 Stonyfield and New Lodge joined the East Midlands Wine Trail, backed by WineGB, which links vineyards across Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire; WineGB describes the region as well connected via the M1 and A1 corridors.