Vineyards and wineries in Wiltshire

Vines on ground with a recorded past, from Domesday to the Iron Age.

The Domesday Book records vineyards in Wiltshire at Tollard Royal and Lacock. In 2017 Peter Self’s family planted one in the Avon valley near Lacock: Whitehall, on limestone south of the Wiltshire Downs, which shelter the vines from the worst of the weather.

At Cholderton, near Stonehenge, Bluestone was planted on a farm with an archaeological record. An archaeological survey of the farm was shown to a friend making wine in Champagne, who judged the site capable of sparkling wine. One of its parcels, Roundhouse, holds evidence of an Iron Age settlement; relics from the Stone Age to Roman times, flint arrowheads and pottery among them, turn up regularly, and Time Team came to the site before the vines were planted. Near Devizes, the owners of a’Beckett’s say there is evidence of vineyards in their village, Littleton Panell, from as early as 800 AD.

The ground changes across the county. In the north, Bow-in-the-Cloud, near Malmesbury, sits on cornbrash over oolitic limestone, and three of the vines planted by hand from 1992 are still in the ground. In the south, Domaine Hugo, near Downton, grows on thin, chalky soil, and Liba, near Salisbury, on flint-rich, chalk-based soil. Carvers Hill, the English estate of a family whose wine business began at Bellevue in Bordeaux, planted greensand-over-chalk slopes at Shalbourne in 2021. Quoins grows among fruit and nut trees near Bradford on Avon, and Latitude 51 is outside Calne.

The Wiltshire Wine Trail, opened in 2021, takes in Bluestone, a’Beckett’s and Whitehall.