Picture the scene for a moment: London, 2012, the Olympic stadium and glory for a British athlete on sport’s greatest stage. “Break open the bubbly,” somebody shouts, and the new champion, medal hanging proudly around the neck, is doused in a shower of . . . Kent’s finest.

It is a prospect that has persuaded a British producer to set out on the long road to producing a sparkling wine to rival champagne, the sporting champion’s toast of choice, for the Games.

Next month the English Wines Group, the Plus Markets-listed company behind the Chapel Down brand, will start to plant 72 acres of a site near Maidstone with chardonnay and pinot noir vines with a view to producing the first sparkling wine in time for London 2012.

The site is part of a further 116 acres in the North Downs that the Kent-based company, which numbers the property entrepreneurs Nigel Wray and Richard Balfour-Lynn among its shareholders, has bought to cope with the growing demand for English wines.

Frazer Thompson, chief executive, said that the land was ideal for growing high-quality sparkling wine similar to those produced only 250 miles away in Champagne. He said that the company would be planting “exactly the same plants and root stock used in Champagne”.

Mr Thompson said the style of some of the still wine was similar to that produced in New Zealand, another “cool-climate” wine-producing region. “It plays to the growing taste for more fruit-driven, lower-alcohol, zingy, zesty wines,” he said. “Consumers are also more open to locally sourced produce. People are concerned about their carbon footprint and food miles.”

The growth in demand was reflected in yesterday’s full-year results from English Wines, which showed a swing from a pretax loss of £90,000 to a profit of £158,000. Gross profit rose by 28 per cent to £1.04 million and turnover increased by 10 per cent to £2.48 million on the back of an 18 per cent rise in the average selling price and a 5 per cent increase in volumes.

Mr Thompson said that the company was benefiting from its decision to focus on the premium wine market. Its sparkling wines retail at about £20 a bottle, while its still wines cost an average of just over £10.

Its wines are available through Waitrose, Marks & Spencer and in 150 Sainsbury’s stores, as well as niche retailers such as Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason. They are also stocked by D&D London, formerly Conran Restaurants, and in much of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant empire. It supplies a number of British embassies and exports to cities including Tokyo and Hong Kong. Mr Thompson is hoping to start Its wines exporting to Moscow soon.

Last summer’s dire weather helped Chapel Down to produce its best wines. “Although the yield was lower – about 60 per cent of what we normally get - because it was warm as as well as wet the fruit was of a very high quality.”

English Wines, whose chairman is Paul Brett, the former Thomson Travel chief executive, makes its wine in Tenterden, where it has a 25-acre vineyard, and buys in the rest of its grapes from third-party growers.

After yesterday’s acquisition, it will end up with about 500 acres, of which about 20 per cent will be owned by the company itself. It paid about £500,000 for the new land and will spend a similar amount to plant it out.

One section is the site of a former Roman villa and Mr Thompson is trying to find out if it had its own vine – a nod to the story that Julius Caesar brought the vine to England.

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