Vineyards and wineries in Staffordshire

The Midlands winery that growers from 28 counties bring grapes to.

Growers from well beyond Staffordshire send their grapes to Halfpenny Green. Martin Vickers planted the first vines there in 1983, and Vineyard Magazine reported that the vineyard raised eyebrows for being planted in the formative years of English wine and for being in the Midlands. By 2024 the winery had more than 100 contract customers, and Clive Vickers, his son and head winemaker, put a year’s work at 250 wines from 28 counties.

Position is part of the reason the winery gives. “We are in a good spot here, close to the M6 and quite central,” the winery manager, Ben Hunt, said in 2018, naming contract customers in North and South Wales, North Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire. Stonyfield, at Blisworth in Northamptonshire, sends its grapes there, and Rothley Wine in Leicestershire has its sparkling wine made there. In the county itself, Grove, near Eccleshall, was planted in 2010 on Halfpenny Green’s advice.

Halfpenny Green’s own vines grow on south-facing slopes of light, sandy, free-draining soil. Martin Vickers says they ripen around two weeks earlier than when they were first planted; the site’s records also hold an air frost of six degrees below freezing on 1 June 1976. After he went to Switzerland to investigate Divico, a variety with greater resistance to disease than many older ones, the estate planted three acres of it. Pattingham, on a sandy, spring-fed slope, grows Divico as well, among varieties bred to resist disease with little spraying.

Halfpenny Green and Pattingham are in the south-west of the county, near Wolverhampton, and Grove is in the north. Buzzard’s Valley, on the Canwell Estate at the edge of Birmingham, stopped making wine in 2026 and offered its vineyard for lease. Clive Vickers counts six million people within an hour’s drive of Halfpenny Green.