A Marathon With Ten Wine Breaks Is Coming To London This Year

If your marathon of choice isn’t a wine marathon, you’re doing life all wrong.

Keen runners and oenophiles may recall that we’ve written about the Marathon du Medoc before: France’s bafflingly brilliant wine marathon. Well, you can scrap the Eurostar trip, because the UK’s very own wine marathon takes place on September 8th, a stone’s throw away from London – and entries are open now!

Boasting gorgeous scenery, an undulating route, and ten glorious wine stops, the Surrey Bacchus Marathon is Right Up Our Street. To be fair, anything named after the notorious party-lovin’ Greek god of “wine, fertility, and ritual madness(!)” was always going to play well with us – but this exceeds even our wildest hopes.

The wine marathon takes place on the grounds of the Denbies Wine Estate, set amongst the rolling fields and woods of the Surrey Hills – and with it being just outside the M25, we can almost claim it’s in London. Come September, the tranquil estate will be filled with the sights of sweaty runners sipping on a refreshing Chardonnay before jogging on their merry way. And with ten wine stops and twelve wines on offer over the full marathon, it’s going to get very merry indeed…

You’ll be sampling the finest English wines during your run, as the decidedly boozy drinks stations give you a combo of runner’s high and nice daytime drunk. Fancy dress is very much encouraged, and there will be bands playing at various points of the course too. Thankfully, if you don’t feel you can hack a wine marathon just yet, the event also offers a wine half-marathon and – new for 2019 – a wine 10km. It’s important to build up to it, you know.

At the finish line, your presumably rather wonky run will be rewarded with a medal, t-shirt, hog roast, and – because you’re clearly not already sozzled by this point – a complimentary drink. We’ll see you at the start line, praying to Bacchus to see us through…

posted Sunday June 30th