A French champagne house owning a vineyard in Kent might once have raised eyebrows. Not any more. Taittinger holds 51% of Domaine Evremond, near the village of Chilham, and poured its first wine last year when the visitor centre opened. The debut cuvée, Edition I, earned a 16/20 "distinguished" from Jancis Robinson, and King Charles III served it at a state banquet with Emmanuel Macron. English wine, as drinks writer Henry Jeffreys puts it, has gone from a joke to world-class in three decades.
The operation itself is worth the trip. A Channel Tunnel contractor excavated 25-metre-deep cellars here — the UK's first subterranean winery — with room to age 1.5 million bottles in the cool chalk. Taittinger's vineyard director commutes over from Champagne on Le Shuttle and praises the flinty Kentish soils, which in places mirror those of her home region. Tastings run Wednesday to Sunday (£12.50 a glass, £55 a bottle), with tours year-round, and there's a terrace with long rustic tables looking over the vines towards Chilham's flint church tower.
The vineyard is a half-hour walk from Chilham village through orchards, plum groves and hop-filled hedgerows — a lovely loop that takes in Perry Wood and the River Stour. Chilham itself is a rewarding stop: a Grade I-listed Jacobean castle with Capability Brown gardens (now planting its own vines), a medieval churchyard on the old pilgrims' route to Canterbury, and the Woolpack Inn, freshly renovated, where bedrooms are named after Kentish vineyards and doubles start at £140 B&B. Their "Woolly cheeseboard" pairs well with local Shepherd Neame beer or the house cuvée.
The bigger picture: Kent now has 120 commercial vineyards and over a quarter of Britain's vines, with last year's harvest topping five million bottles. Domaine Evremond helped found the Wine Garden of England, a group of Kent wine estates, and August 2026 saw the launch of the Kentish Wine Way, a tourism route promoting the county as England's largest and most awarded wine region. Climate change is a real driver — south-east England now resembles 1970s Champagne — though it's worth noting the region's growers are also running earlier harvests as summers heat up.
If you want to extend the trip, there are four more estates within easy reach: Balfour Winery (free vineyard maps, a shuttle from Marden station, 20% off for car-free visitors), Biddenden, Kent's oldest vineyard dating to 1969, Chapel Down near Tenterden — England's biggest producer — Simpsons' Wine Estate near Canterbury, complete with a helter-skelter slide out of the tasting room, and Westwell on the Kent Downs, known for wild-yeast pet nats and Friday pizza nights.
This one's for slow-travel types: walkers, wine drinkers and anyone who likes the idea of a car-free weekend built around tastings, village pubs and orchard paths. Trains from London St Pancras start at £16 each way, and Chilham's station puts you within walking distance of everything.