Lewes Launches WINELANDS, a New Festival for English Wine

The festival programme went live on June 8, 2026, and if you haven't looked at it yet, you're probably already behind on tickets.

WINELANDS is a week-long series of pop-up events in Lewes, East Sussex, built entirely around English wine. Tastings, producer meetups, outdoor sessions, the kind of thing you can do on a Tuesday evening without booking a flight. It's new, it's local, and it's happening in one of the most productive wine-growing patches in the country.

I'll be honest about something: when I first saw "wine festival" attached to a town of 17,000 people in East Sussex, my first thought was village fete with a Pinot Gris tent. I was wrong to think that. Lewes sits in the middle of a cluster of producers that have been quietly building a serious case for Sussex as one of England's best wine counties, and WINELANDS seems to exist specifically to let those producers speak for themselves, in their own county, to the people who live nearby.

Why Lewes, and Why Now

Sussex wine has been earning proper recognition for a few years now, but the conversation about it has mostly happened in London. The press tastings, the restaurant listings, the merchant recommendations, they tend to centre on the capital, which means people living 45 minutes from the vineyards sometimes know less about them than a sommelier in Shoreditch does.

WINELANDS is an attempt to fix that. The format, a week of scattered pop-up events rather than one big ticketed day, is smart. It keeps the cost of entry low, it lets different producers and venues anchor different sessions, and it means you can pick the bits that suit you rather than committing to a full Saturday.

The Sussex angle matters here. This county has Ridgeview, Bolney, Bluebell Vineyard Estates, and a handful of smaller growers who are doing interesting things with Bacchus, Ortega, and still Pinot Noir. The sparkling wines from this part of England have been winning international comparisons since at least 2010, when Nyetimber started appearing in tastings alongside Champagnes costing twice as much. That's not a recent development. It's a track record.

What the Festival Actually Covers

From what's listed on winelands.lewes.co.uk, the week covers producer tastings, outdoor events, and what sound like informal producer-led sessions rather than formal masterclasses. The pop-up format suggests smaller rooms, fewer people, more conversation. That's usually where you learn something, when a winemaker tells you why the 2023 vintage was difficult and what they did about it, rather than reading the back label.

English wine festivals have historically skewed toward the big showcase format: fifty producers, a wine glass on a lanyard, two hours to cover as much ground as possible. WINELANDS looks different. The week-long spread suggests they want people to come back more than once, try different things, and actually spend time with the producers rather than queuing for a ten-second pour.

If you're new to English wine and you've been put off by the price point (and look, a bottle of good Sussex sparkling at £30 to £40 is a real ask), this kind of event is genuinely useful. You can taste before you commit. You can ask the person who made it whether it's worth the money.

My honest answer to that question, having tried a fair few, is: yes, usually, if you're buying the sparkling. The still wines are more variable and some of them are overpriced for what they are. But that's a conversation worth having in person, with a glass in front of you, which is exactly what something like WINELANDS is for.

Getting There and Making the Most of It

Lewes is 50 minutes by train from London Bridge and about 8 minutes from Brighton. It's very easy to reach, and the town itself is worth a couple of hours even if you're not going specifically for wine. There are good pubs, a proper high street with independent shops, and the kind of slightly eccentric local character that makes a day out feel like a day out.

A few practical thoughts if you're planning to go:

• Check winelands.lewes.co.uk for the current programme before you travel. Individual sessions will have different start times and some may sell out.
• If you want to go deeper on Sussex wine before the festival, the Harveys Wine Museum in the town is worth a look for broader context, though it skews toward Bordeaux and Burgundy rather than English production.
• The week runs across multiple venues, so pick one or two sessions rather than trying to cover everything. The pop-up format means smaller rooms, and arriving with a specific producer or style in mind will make the conversation easier.
• If you find something you like during the week, ask the producer whether they run their own tastings or winery visits. Several Sussex vineyards do, and finding them is exactly the kind of thing Sommly lists if you want to keep going after the festival ends.

The Bigger Picture for English Wine Events

There's been a noticeable increase in locally-run English wine events over the past two or three years, partly because the producers have more to show people now than they did in 2015, and partly because there's a real appetite for it. The success of English sparkling has opened doors for conversations about everything else, the still whites, the rosés, the occasional red that genuinely works.

What WINELANDS is doing, bringing those conversations into the county rather than shipping the producers up to London, feels like the right direction. It makes the wine geographically real. You taste a Bolney Lychgate Blanc de Blancs and you're ten miles from where the grapes grew.

That proximity changes something, I think. I'm not sure it changes the taste, but it changes how you think about what you're drinking. Which might be worth the train fare by itself.