Rows of vines stretch across the rolling hills of rural Dorset.

Currently waist height, they appear bare against a bleak spring sky.

Up close, you can see they are already dotted with tiny woolly buds as they exit their winter dormancy for a new growth cycle.

Come summer these rows will be laden with chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes, ready to make the latest batch of English sparkling wine from the Langham estate near Dorchester.

Although it was only 2009 when the first vines were planted here on former arable farmland, the estate has already produced award-winning wines that beat established European rivals.

“It was always at the back of my mind, as a way of diversifying and expanding the business, and doing something a bit more fun and interesting too,” says the estate’s owner, Justin Langham, standing in a barn on site.

“When I’m making wine, the output per acre is many multiples of what we grow in wheat.” Growing grapes in Britain on a commercial scale has been made possible by new growing methods and a shifting climate.

“I don’t think we would have been doing what we’re doing going back 40, 50 years,” says Langham.

Yet the climate crisis also presents a host of challenges for the UK’s burgeoning wine industry, including unreliable, rainy summers like that of 2024, where moisture leads to problems including mould and disease and causes wide variation in vintages.

Vines were first grown in England during Roman times, but vineyards can now be found from south-west England to Wales and as far north as Yorkshire and Scotland.

More than 1,100 are now registered in Britain, according to the latest figures, most of which are commercial operators rather than hobbyists.

While Britain remains far down the list of global wine producers – behind countries including Uzbekistan and Tunisia – it is the fastest-growing wine region in the world, according to the property group Knight Frank.

It reports the area of planted vineyards in the country has quadrupled since the turn of the century.

Langham’s estate is part of this boom, almost tripling in size since 2009 to span about 34 hectares (84 acres) of the 1,000-hectare site.

Increased wine production means the company has outgrown the converted farm buildings it was using to store barrels and bottles and it has just invested £2m in a new winery which should be completed by the summer.

Similar expansion across the UK has led to a surge in wine production.

Yet yields remain unpredictable and there can be large differences in wine made one year compared with the next, making it hard to produce a standard product.

A hot, dry summer in 2025 helped English and Welsh producers to their second-largest harvest of the equivalent of 16.5m bottles, or 124,377 hectolitres.

This was more than triple the 5.3m bottles produced in 2017, less than a decade ago, according to the industry body WineGB.

It was, however, lower than the bumper harvest of 21.6m bottles recorded in 2023, as some vines were still recovering last year after the cold and wet 2024.

Changing weather patterns are also hitting traditional wine-making regions – including Spain, Italy and southern California – where harvests are predicted to plummet.

However, if climate change does end up driving winemaking farther north, producers are unlikely to be able to match the....