Vineyards and wineries in West Yorkshire

Vineyards inside Leeds, where the River Aire keeps off the frost.

The Cistercian monks of Kirkstall Abbey kept vineyards in Leeds, though exactly where is unknown. In 1985 George Bowden, a former chemistry teacher, bought Leventhorpe and began making wine within the city boundary; the vineyard describes itself as the first to reintroduce commercial wine growing to Yorkshire.

He chose the field after a snowy day, when he saw that its south-facing slope had caught the sun and melted before the fields around it. It runs down to the River Aire on light sandy loam over sand and cracked sandstone, at an average elevation of 80 feet, and it rarely suffers spring frost after the third week of April, because of the lie of the land and the water beside it: the river, a canal and a lake.

Across the city, Knotfield Vines, on a hillside above Rawdon, credits the same river: the Aire draws cold air away from the vineyard and cuts the risk of frost. Its vines sit at 180 metres, in clay loam over Leeds’ limestone belt, on a site recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.

South-west of Leeds, in the foothills of the Pennines, Helme Edge began with 50 Solaris vines in a garden above Meltham in 2017, on a steep, west-facing slope of water-retentive clay, and sends its grapes to Halfpenny Green in Staffordshire to be made into wine. Holmfirth Vineyard grows seven acres on a Yorkshire stone hillside above the Holme Valley, on the edge of the Peak District; its owners also run Bay Vineyard on the North Yorkshire coast. Leventhorpe is a 20-minute walk from Woodlesford station.