By Jorn Madslien BBC News Online business reporter

The UK weather has been a boon

Here, amidst Gloucestershire's chocolate box villages, tourists are greeted by a distinctly Mediterranean sight - a vineyard, complete with wine-making facilities and bottling plant.

Row upon row of lush vines have been carefully carved into the valley's gentle slopes, each of them weighed down by a bundle of small, hard grapes.

Traditionalists may scoff at English attempts at making wine, but Thomas Shaw, the managing director of Three Choirs Vineyards, is keen to prove them wrong.

"We have very good weather for growing grapes in England," Mr Shaw told BBC News Online.

"It's a new concept to a lot of people [who] don't think of England as a natural wine-producing area, but we can produce some very good soft, delicate, fruity style wines."

Making money

There are about 430 vineyards scattered across the southern parts of the UK.

A GREAT VINTAGE IN 2003? The vines escaped any frost during the spring Warm weather in late June and early July helped the vines to flower The warm weather was followed by some rain Late July and early August saw very warm weather

And, against the odds perhaps, many of them are serious, profit-making organisations.

Since the late 1970s, winemaking in the UK has grown fast to form a new, albeit relatively low-key, industry.

"Vineyards have been making wine commercially in England for about 30 years," said Mr Shaw.

But it has not always been easy.

"In this country, it's a rollercoaster ride, really, because the weather can make significant differences to the crop from year to year," said Three Choirs vineyard manager Mike Garfield.

Good year?

This year, though, none of Britain's wine makers have voiced any complaints.

A frost-free spring followed by a predominantly dry summer, with the odd shower here and there, preceded a heat wave in August.

"Last year was an excellent year, and 2001 and 2000 were pretty good as well," Mr Shaw said.

"But this year has been superb."

Expensive

And yet, the warm summer and an anticipated decent vintage may well fail to bring about a spike in the income of the UK's wine makers.

For rather than boosting a vineyard's volumes, the good weather's most crucial effect is to bring about better quality grapes.

This should result in better wines, and one might think British winemakers would raise prices as a consequence.

But they do not, according to Martin Knight, whose four-acre vineyard in Hertfordshire yields about 4,000 bottles per year.

"You're against the price all the time, you see," he told BBC News Online.

"You can get some wonderful Australian or Continental wines for �5 or less. For English wines to be viable, you've got to charge �5 or more."

"The difficulty with a small vineyard is selling the wine," Mr Knight said.

"You don't have enough to sell to a chain, but you have too much to sell to your friends and people who pass by."

No subsidies

In the case of the much larger vineyard Three Choirs, which produces 250,000 bottles a year, demand is less of a problem, even though many of its wines appear pricey when compared with non-British rivals.

British wine tends to be more expensive than Continental rivals

Three Choirs already sells all the wine it can make, and 40% of it is sold by its own vineyard shop which is heavily geared towards tourists.

Instead, Three Choirs, which is one of the largest vineyards in the UK, faces a different set of difficulties.

Even if demand for its wine was to rise, it would be tricky to expand in response.

Like elsewhere in the country, farmers here appear reluctant to sell off land, possibly because their acres form a basis for the subsidies they receive from the European Union.

"The land prices all around us are high," bemoaned Mr Shaw.

"We've now planted all the land that we own, and there are one or two fields that we might be interested in, but the farmers who own them want silly money."

"Britain's winemakers, meanwhile receive absolutely no subsidies whatsoever," Mr Shaw said.

Niche

So it seems likely that the UK's thriving wine industry will remain firmly footed on the fringes of the global wine industry.

After all, even large vineyards like Three Choirs are dwarfed by South African, Australian or Californian giants which benefit greatly from so-called economies of scale.

Large volume production means the costs of producing each bottle are much lower.

As a consequence, "English wine will never be massively available, you have to go and look for it," said Mr Shaw, evidently confident that people will.