______ may not be responsible for the ruin of the wine industry in Britain. [br]

It is not surprising that people hardly ever associate Britain with wine and in fact it may astonish you to learn that grapes are grown broadly in England and nearly 200,000 bottles of wine were sold in 1975. It is nothing new in growing grapes in Britain, in spite of the climate. The Romans planted the first vines about A.D. 300 and for a long time people always drank home-produced wines. What destroyed the English wine industry was not so much a change in the climate as the fact that an English king, Henry II, inherited the Bordeaux area of France as part of his dominions since the twelfth century and the imported wine provided a great ’deal of competition. The English wine industry did not disappear, however, until the sixteenth century, when the monks, who had been the main producers in the meantime, had been taken away their estates by Henry VIII. The new owner let the vineyards die out. But now English people, probably due to their memories of holidays by the Mediterranean, drink more wine than ever, and the new industry is now developing at a modest but consistent rate.