A little bit about us

Having left the hustle and bustle of London

and moved to the beautiful area of the Surrey Hills AONB, it was after a day trip to Denbies, England’s largest vineyard, that we fell in love with English wine. Think grape picking followed by a train ride around the estate, and finally a wine soaked lunch - not bad for a first time.

We then started exploring local vineyards and wineries, most of them small, family run businesses. Throw into the mix a couple of Countryfile/Escape To The Country specials and we were hooked. The history of English and Welsh wine is a fascinating topic, and a true testament to the hard work winemakers around the country are putting into

producing the very best, quality bottles.

Yes, it’s all a bit of a passion project, but we couldn’t resist hopping onto the English wine trend and do our bit to help support those who work so hard bringing us local alternatives to our Friday evening New Zealand Chardonnay. With Brexit now lurking around the corner, who knows what might happen to the price of international wines…

The warmer climate means better grapes, and generations worth of gathered knowledge

is seeing English sparkling wines in particular win more blind tasting competitions than any other region. So why not enjoy our own produce and cut down our carbon footprint while we’re at it? The reasons to support and enjoy English wine just go on and on!

So how could we help? A far cry from being wine experts, we decided to take our skills from a past life (think buzzing London startups) and our wine drinkers point-of-view to create a slightly different approach to buying wine: having spent our fair share of time staring at labels, not quite knowing which bottle to choose over the over,

we wanted to make the process a lot more intuitive.

And by translating each wine’s unique flavour into simple visual queues, we feel that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Along the way we’ve also tried to make wine buying more social.

We host tasting events to choose which wines to stock. After all who better to pick out bottles than the very people who will be drinking them! Both on the website and at our Dorking store we share information with you like food pairings, vineyard stories and anything else wine-related we think you’ll find interesting. Have a browse, enjoy and if you have any ideas, suggestions or requests just email us at neighbourlygrape@gmail.com.