 Over the years, I've had a troubled relationship with English wines. No other country has provided so many candidates for my list of all-time worst bottles, nowhere else has commanded such a high average price per unit of pleasure.  and yet I've continued to believe in English wine, and not simply out of a misguided sense of patriotism. The hit rate may have been low, but there were always bottles - generally sparkling (which now accounts for more than 50% of total English production), but also distinctive aromatic whites - that proved it was possible to make good, maybe even great, wine in the damp and chill of England.  What's more, every year the proportion of good bottles has increased. It's not quite got to the stage where I expect a bottle of English wine to be competently made and drinkable but, with the exception of red wines, I've long since passed the point where I'm surprised if it turns out to be enjoyable. In the past few years I've even enjoyed some days trips in English vineyards (try the excellent online guide, drinkbritain.com if you want to do the same).  Vines arrived in Britain with the Romans, but winemaking all but died out in the Middle ages and was not revived as a (vaguely) commercial proposition until Major General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones planted his vineyard in Hambledon, Hampshire in the 1950s. It is only since the turn of this century, however, that investment on any serious scale has begun to take root.  French producers, particularly those in Champagne, are, if not exactly worried by the progress made by English sparkling wine, then certainly impressed by the quality produced by top English estates such as Nyetimber and Ridgeview in Sussex and Camel Valley in Cornwall. at last month's annual international wine trade fair in London I lost count of the number of Champagne producers I met who, unbidden, confessed they had been looking to buy land in southern England.  You can see why they might be attracted. Though the South Downs is more than 200 miles northwest of Reims in Champagne as the crow flies, the chalky soil is very similar and the climate only marginally cooler. The effects of global warming suggest that, in the next couple of decades, southern England might become a more suitable place than Champagne for producing the kind of high acid base wines required for quality sparkling wine. and agricultural land in southern England is as much as 10 times more affordable than in Champagne, where the average price of land is more than ? 500,000 a hectare.  So far, French interest in English vineyards has not translated into acquisitions. The scale of English wine remains tiny, too: the total combined area of vineyard in the UK of 1,300 to 1,400 hectares - there are single vineyards in Chile and australia of that size - means there are simply not the economies of scale to keep prices down. and, for all the awards - the latest being the excellent Denbies Chalk Hill Rose 2010, the best rose in the world, according to the International Wine Challenge - there are still too many bad bottles being made.  Still, it's been hard, in an unusually warm and sunny spring and early summer, not to feel optimistic about English wine; harder still to av 