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Or you can... Order by telephone or fax quoting card number and expiry date. Order by post quoting card number and expiry date, or send a cheque.
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The Vineyard
The monks planted the 'greate' vineyard of about 10 acres and the 'lyttel' vineyard of about 4 acres. It is this smaller site that was replanted with vines in 1986. Life in the monastic vineyard of the middle ages was clearly not all meditation and devotion. In 1492, two abbots visiting the Abbey reported that 'infamous women have mostly entered the monastery to the greatest disgrace of the said monastery'. Forty years later, when King Henry VIII ordered the Dissolution of the monasteries, the last Abbot of Warden Abbey wrote that he had almost totally lost control of his monks. One of them had spent the night drinking in Shefford (the local town) and had not come back till morning matins. Other of his monks were described as 'common dronkerds'. In 1846, the Bedfordshire Times wrote of the site of Warden Abbey
One hundred and forty years later, the answer was 'yes' for in 1986 after a fact finding tour of the Bordeaux Region, Jane Whitbread planted 4 acres of vines on the site of the 'lyttel' vineyard. Our first vintage was 1990 and every year since then one or more of our wines have won awards including several from the prestigious International Wine Challenge (for which more than 5,000 wines from all over the world are entered). We also won the Country Landowners Association English/Welsh Wine of the Year Award in 1996 and 1998 and the East Anglian Wine of the Year in 2003.
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The Cistercian Abbey of Warden was founded in 1135 by Walter Espec as the daughter Abbey to Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire which he had founded three years earlier.
