The wine is so good that at least one champagne house has moved across the Channel from France to invest in an English vineyard and will soon be producing sparkling wines it hopes will rival the great marques of Reims and Epernay.

Helped by a warming climate, new varieties of grapes, modern methods and government grants, production is rising rapidly.

"English and Welsh wines are getting better very quickly, and some of them, English sparkling wines particularly, are already exceptionally good - world class," said Stephen Skelton, author of "The Wines of Britain and Ireland".

Wine has been made in Britain since at least the eighth century and dozens of vineyards are detailed in the "Domesday Book", a land survey and census compiled for William the Conqueror in the 11th century.

For most of the past thousand years, British viticulture has been largely eclipsed by the production of beer and cider, made from the more widely available hops and apples.

"RETIRED GENTLEFOLK"

England's first commercial vineyard since the Middle Ages was set up by a retired army officer, Major-General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones, in the 1950s in the southern county of Hampshire and over the next 30 years he was followed by many enthusiastic, but sometimes ineffective, amateurs.

"Typically," notes the "Oxford Companion to Wine", these 20th-century wine pioneers were "retired gentlefolk with little experience of viticulture or oenology (the study of wine)".

Amateurism gave English wine a poor reputation.

Prime Minister Tony Blair served Welsh whites and English reds at a European Union summit in 2005 to a less than enthusiastic reception among some leaders.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi later sent his Swedish counterpart, Goran Persson, 24 bottles of Italian wine, saying they would help him recover from the experience.

Wine experts say Berlusconi's taunt was unfair.

Since the 1980s, British winemakers, concentrated in the warmer southern English and Welsh counties, have become increasingly professional - many taking degrees in winemaking - and have focused on producing grapes well suited to the cool, temperate climate of northwest Europe.

The most spectacular success has been with sparkling wines, as winemakers have used clones of the French Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay grapes usually used to make champagne.

The chalk and clay downland soils of much of southern England are remarkably similar to some of the best soils in the Champagne region, little more than 200 miles (300 km) to the southeast.

That similarity has not been lost on French wine producers, who are keen to expand but face tight regulations, limited land for vineyards and high operating costs at home.

Champagne-maker Pierson Whitaker of Avize, south of Epernay, has begun planting vines on a 12-hectare (30-acre) farm in the Meon Valley in Hampshire and hopes to produce as many as 15,000 bottles of sparkling wine using the traditional, in-the-bottle fermentation method used in Champagne.

"It will never be champagne - that can only come from France - but we think we can produce an excellent wine from England," said proprietor Imogen Pierson Whitaker.

Warmer weather in northern Europe - whether due to human-induced global warming or cyclical trends - has helped the production of high-quality grapes and better wines.

TROPHIES AND AWARDS

The area under vine in Britain has increased to about 800 hectares (2,000 acres), from only a few hundred in the 1980s.