Danbury Ridge

Danbury Ridge was founded by two generations of the Bunker family: Michael and Heather, together with their daughters Janine and Sophie. After several years living in Asia, Michael and Heather returned to Essex in 1987, settling in the village of Danbury, just a few miles from where they had grown up.

A walk with friends across the family’s land sparked an unlikely idea: planting vines on fields long dismissed by local farmers as too lean and arid for cereal crops, useful only it was said, as a training ground for racehorses over wet winters. What looked like a weakness for grain turned out to be exactly what wine grapes need and in 2014 the first vines went into the ground.

Within a few seasons, those vines were producing fruit of a ripeness and quality rarely seen in England. At first, the family sold their grapes to Lyme Bay Winery, and watching the international award-winning wines that Lyme Bay was able to produce from that fruit, the Bunkers realized they should be making the wine themselves. They enlisted winemaker Liam Idzikowski to help them do it, who was already spearheading the ambitious production of premium still wines in the UK, while at Lyme Bay.

While so much of England’s wine boom has been built on sparkling wine, Danbury Ridge chose a different path from the very start: still Chardonnay and Pinot Noir clones that could best exploit the unique Crouch Valley mesoclimate, with the goal of creating still wines.

It’s an ambitious choice in a country known for its bubbles, and one that has paid off and the estate didn’t release its first sparkling wine until 2025, more than a decade after planting, by which point its reputation had already been built on the strength of its still wines alone.

The secret lies in the land. The estate takes its name from the Danbury to Tiptree ridge, a high spine of ground running through this corner of Essex, set between two tidal waterways: the Blackwater Estuary to the north and the River Crouch to the south.

Together, the ridge and the estuaries create a warm, dry, sheltered microclimate, the Crouch Valley, sees roughly 15% less rainfall than the wider East Anglia region around it, a meaningful difference for vines that thrive on long, even, sun-soaked ripening. It’s this rare combination of geography that has made the valley one of England’s most exciting wine regions, and Danbury Ridge sits right at its heart.

The family farms with the same care they bring to the cellar. A winter flock of sheep grazes between the vine rows in place of herbicides, vineyard waste is composted back into the soil, and deer fencing keeps the local wildlife safe while protecting the vines. The winery runs on solar power, and the Bunkers have planted more than 8,000 trees across the estate, including a woodland registered with the Woodland Trust. It is a working farm as much as it is a winery, the two built to support one another.

That craftsmanship hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2025, Danbury Ridge entered into a partnership with Pierre Duroché of Domaine Duroché in Gevrey-Chambertin (one of the top crus of Burgundy), his first winemaking project outside Burgundy, to produce a limited-release single-vineyard Pinot Noir, made at Danbury Ridge by Liam and Pierre together. It’s a rare meeting of old-world tradition and new-world ambition, and a strong signal of how far this young Essex estate’s reputation has already travelled.

Several vintages in, the early ambition is being realized. Critics have already placed Danbury Ridge’s wines alongside some of the finest still wine addresses in the world, a remarkable achievement for an estate not yet fifteen years from its first planting.

For more information visit: https://www.danburyridge.com/