A lovely country house that comes with its own vineyard and winery
Why merely move out to the country when an entire change of lifestyle could be yours for the same price?


As country house price tags go, £1.75 million doesn't often buy you much – particularly in commuter-friendly Hertfordshire.
But at this beautiful spot a few miles north of Berkhamsted, £1.75m gets you far more than just a country house: Frithsden offers an amazing opportunity to take up the running of an English vineyard and winery, with a wine shop and cafe, in the foothills of the Chilterns.
The five-acre vineyard has thrived since 1971, with a brief lull before being replanted in 2006. The wine is pressed and bottled on-site, made from about 6,000 Solaris, Rondo and Phoenix vines, specially developed in Northern Europe to thrive in our cooler climate.
Naturally enough given the price, the brick-built four-bedroom house itself isn't quite as idyllic as the lifestyle that comes with it.
Yet there is still plenty to love about it: the double-aspect living room which opens out onto the gardens, for example, or the dining room with a vaulted ceiling.
Be warned, however: falling in love with the house and deciding not to keep the vineyard going isn't an option. This home is subject to an Agricultural Occupancy Condition – in other words, to live here you have to keep the land going and the wine flowing.
Frankly, we can't see this stipulation being much of a chore for most of the prospective buyers!
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Frithsden is for sale via Knight Frank at £1.75m – see more pictures and details.
Credit: Shutterstock
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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.
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