You'd be surprised...

Finding out that an Indian family from the unlikely environs of South Telford had created a vineyard not a mile from our then home between Telford and Shrewsbury was the catalyst for a little more self-education on a much more local scale.

I already knew about the vineyard at Wroxeter, south east of Shrewsbury, and I was aware of the Halfpenny Green vineyard between Wolverhampton and Stourbridge. I didn’t know that, as a county, Shropshire was in the top 15 wine producing areas of the UK, nor that there were, at that time, no fewer than 10 vineyards in the SY postcode alone. Now there are 11 - and those are just the commercial ones.

I was lucky enough to meet head of the Rodington Vineyard family, Ram Chahal, early on, probably before their first harvest. Rodington is a haven of around 1.6 hectares that slopes gently towards the Wrekin.

Ram was a foundry-man who figuratively ploughed his redundancy cheque into the soil, spent five years nurturing a vineyard that was originally supposed to have been a market garden and was rewarded with an award-winning, slightly sparkling Solaris from his first harvest.

Ram and his family represent a small, family-based, almost DIY brand of wine maker. More recently, I’ve seen the future of Shropshire wine. It’s a future called Hencote and it’s like the Manchester City of viticulture suddenly appeared in the League One of wine making in the county. 

*There are a couple of small vineyards within the boundaries of the SY postcode - there's one near Pontesbury, for instance - which are essentially small private concerns. Not included on the map above are Halfpenny Green, Astley, the Grove Estate, Colehurst Manor and the now-derelict vineyard at Tern Hill, or Carden Park.