If you were suddenly to find yourself in a landscape of rolling hills planted with vines of pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot meunier grapes, you might deduce, with the help of a little bit of viticultural wisdom, that you had somehow landed in the Champagne region of northern France. There’s a good chance you’d be right, too. Those are the grape varieties that form the so-called champagne triumvirate used by the region’s winemakers to produce its world-famous sparkling wine.

But the wineries of northern France – household names such as Moët & Chandon, Bollinger and Louis Roederer – are not alone in having mastered the méthode champenoise. There are now producers from as far afield as the valleys of northern California and the mountain ranges of southern Australia making sparkling wine according to the very same method, albeit without the benefit of the official Champagne appellation. And they’ve been joined in recent years by a new pretender to the throne, this one from far closer to home: the English county of Kent.

Enticed by the south-facing slopes, the rapidly warming climate and the fast-draining, limestone-rich soil, a new generation of winemakers is flocking to the so-called Garden of England and buying up land in the hope of creating the world’s next great fizz. Among them are husband-and-wife duo Ms Ruth and Mr Charles Simpson, who invested in two prime plots just south of Canterbury in 2012 and have spent the past seven years setting up Simpsons Wine Estate, which produced its first harvest in 2016 and released its first wines the year after.

“We’ve always had an eye on returning to England,” says Ms Simpson, who, along with her husband, quit her corporate job 17 years ago to pursue the winemaking life in Languedoc. It wasn’t just homesickness and nostalgia calling, but business sense. English sparkling wine, to give it its official designation, has developed quite the international reputation over the past decade, winning multiple international awards and defying critics who have claimed that it’s impossible to make a good wine in England. (In 2008, the food critic Mr Jay Rayner dismissed English wine as “like Belgian rock or German disco: a waste of everyone’s time and money”.)

The reason why it has historically been considered so difficult to make wine in England is simple: the climate. It isn’t warm enough to ripen grapes to the level of sugar content required to feed the fermentation process, hence why English wines are often described as being excessively tart. (It’s still possible to make a good wine in a cool climate, but it requires specialist grape varieties such as bacchus and ortega.) There are, however, a few exceptions to this rule. One of them is sparkling wine made according to the Champagne method, which involves a secondary fermentation stage triggered by the addition of yeast and a dosage of sugared water. More sugar added during the process naturally means that less sugary grapes are needed at the start.

This is why most winemakers relocating to Kent and the neighbouring counties of Hampshire and Sussex in recent years have, understandably, made sparkling wines the backbone of their business plan. That was, until 2018. “Our business model flipped on its head after last summer,” says Ms Simpson. “Like most English wine producers, we’d originally planned to use the vast majority of our grapes for sparkling wine. We’d made a tiny quantity of Chardonnay before, which was very well received, but we didn’t see still wine as a growth area. Not until the incredible conditions of last summer, anyway. After the harvest, more than a third of our yield went into still wines.”

Climate change can’t take all the credit for the rapidly changing fortunes of English wine. There is considerable investment flowing into the sector, too, with some of France’s most established Champagne houses, such as Pommery and Taittinger, future-proofing their businesses against climate change by buying up land in southern England. And what was once a cottage industry dominated by plucky enthusiasts is becoming increasingly professional in other areas, too. Simpsons Wine Estate was conceived from the start as a destination for wine tourism in the style of the wineries of the Napa Valley, and since 2017 has boasted its own glass-walled tasting room on a mezzanine floor that looks out over the winery itself.

For Mr Luke Harbor, sommelier at The Pig at Bridge Place, a boutique hotel opened earlier this year just minutes from Simpsons Wine Estate, placing tourism at the heart of an English wine business makes perfect sense. “Vineyards, generally speaking, are planted in some of the most beautiful places in the world,” he says. “And where we are, just a couple of hours outside London, it makes for the perfect short city break.” He also believes that wine, and English wine in particular, is a subject that benefits greatly from education. “People accustomed to mass-produced wines are often taken aback by the price of English wine,” he says. “We have the opportunity to show our guests exactly what goes into a bottle. Five to six years of investment with no returns, none of the existing infrastructure of the French wine industry, none of its economies of scale.”

The Pig at Bridge Place, which claims to get 85 per cent of all its produce from within a 25-mile radius, joins a growing list of foodie destinations in the southeast of England with a focus on local, sustainable gastronomy, from the Canterbury Goods Shed farmers’ market to the Michelin-starred and notoriously hard-to-book Sportsman pub in Seasalter. It feels like the start of something significant. Which is a good reason, as if you needed another, to book a visit sooner rather than later.