Heather Dougherty

Dom Pérignon 2003 - a phoenix from the flames?

2012-01-31T13:27:00.000Z

As amember of the wine trade I am fully used to and unembarrassed abouthopping on a tube train reeking of booze and sporting Bride ofDracula-style black teeth. Let them think “God what a lush, andonly lunchtime too, tut tut.”

Today,however, as I rode the Victoria line I wanted to shout out - “Yes,I've been drinking already, but it was Dom Pérignon! Dom Pérignon,everyone!” I have been treated to, not just a tasting, but an“experience”, a “dark revelation” even, of Dom Pérignon'slatest release, 2003.

Forthose in the know, skip this paragraph, but if you're less than fullyau fait with luxury Champagnes, read on. Dom Pérignon is avintage-only luxury cuvéethat is part of the Moët etChandon stable (and, by extension, the LVMH luxury goods empire). There is no non-vintage version and it is only produced in years thatthey feel are capable of living up to its illustrious forebears. Today it wasthe turn of the latest addition to this select band, the 2003vintage.

Itmight seem contrary even to attempt to make Dom Pérignon in such adifficult and certainly atypical year as 2003. It was incrediblyhot and dry – difficult conditions to make any fine wine, butwell nigh impossible, you might think, for a luxury Champagne, whichrelies on high acidity to give it drive, structure and ageingability. In the UK we probably remember 2003 as one of the few hot,sunny summers we enjoyed in the last decade and perhaps think backfondly on those blistering days and balmy evenings. In France,however, recollections are more painful – 2003 was also marked bynumerous deaths of mostly old people in France, due to the extremeheat.

DomPérignon Chef de Cave, Richard Geoffroy, described how 2003 was achallenge and how low the expectation was that they would succeed inmaking a commercial release that year. Yet, as he pointed out, greatvintages of the 20^thcentury, such as 1947, 1959 and 1976 were also a result of hot, dryconditions. 2003 may yet surprise us with its quality and longevity.

Iasked Richard what happens in the years when there is no Dom Pérignonand it seems they get as far as assembling the final blend and onlythen make a go/no go decision. So, contrary to popular belief, theChef de Cave doesn't get a holiday, even if there is no Dom Pérignonto show for it. In reply to the question of what happens to thewines earmarked for DP, when no vintage ends up being made, Richardsaid only “Nothing is wasted.”

Thewine itself is a muscular, vinous mouthful, marked not by the usualhigh acidity, but by what Richard calls “a wall of minerality”which holds it together and gives it structure. It certainly has avery physical presence and makes a great Champagne to drink over anentire meal – if your budget stretches to it!

Wetested its gastronomic capabilities with a range of dishes – asweet-savoury eggy, mousse-y concoction was least successful for me. But the saffron infused risotto and the foie gras (no escaping foiegras with the French around) dishes were wonderfully harmonious. Most interesting was a caviar and hibiscus jelly combination. On itsown it's a challenge to the palate, with the sharp astringency of thejelly fighting with the salty caviar – but good old DP managed tosmooth out all those sharp points to create a harmonious andenjoyable sensation in a way that probably no other wine could do.

WhileI enjoyed tasting (alright drinking) the 2003 today, it feels asthough this monumental wine has barely begun its evolution. Perhapswe will be looking back in 20 years' time to say what a great vintageof DP it was – and is. And I'll be able to say, “I was there”.

More Semillon please, we're British

2011-12-09T16:16:00.001Z

Irecently had a most enjoyable lunch at The Soho Hotel with NeilMcGuigan, of McGuigan wines, the day after he had been votedWinemaker of the Year by the IWSC. We were treated to a verticaltasting of his Semillon Bin 9000 wines going back to 1997, and whattreats they were.

Lightin body and alcohol (most just 10.5 or 11% alcohol), withfloral-tinged citrus flavours which mature into toasty, honied andmarmelade notes over the years, Hunter Valley Semillons are a uniqueand delicious Australian wine style. They are lovely, expressivewines which age beautifully.

The1997 Bin 9000 is still has plenty of life and length, with thecharacteristic mature Semillon aromas and flavours of toast, beeswaxand lanolin. This is great to sip on its own, so that you can giveproper attention to the ever-evolving flavours in the glass.

Moreenjoyable with food is the 2003, which manages to combine thelightness and linearity that you expect from Semillon with plenty ofweight and presence (don't ask me how). The spritzy palate hasplenty of zippy lime fruit which persists on the long finish. NeilMcGuigan thinks this slowly-evolving wine is outstanding and itcertainly still feels like a relative baby.

Thecurrent vintage, 2011, is full of youthful floral aromatics, withfine, juicy acidity that lingers long in the mouth – another one towatch.

Priorto this lunch, my only experience of McGuigan wines was looking attheir serried ranks on supermarket shelves and a taste of one of thebasic reds which managed to combine overripe and confected fruitflavours with excess alcohol and high residual sugar.

Andyet, as Neil McGuigan demonstrated at this lunch, he also has theability to cook up much more compellingly drinkable wines at thebargain end of the scale: The Semillon Blanc 2011 (£5.79 at Tesco)is a straightforward wine with fresh fruit aromatics and a littlemore ripe fruit (and yes, a little more residual sugar) than HunterValley Semillons, being from warmer vineyard areas. But it's clean,fresh, fruity and somehow honest, which is what appeals to me.

Callingit Semillon Blanc gives you a clue that this wine style is somethingof a riposte to New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and so what if manyconsumers pick it up thinking that's what it is? The quality ofwhat's in the bottle is what will drive its continued success.

Sowell done, Neil, on your winemaking accolade. And more Semillonplease, we're British.

A conversion on the road to Reims

2011-12-07T19:05:00.001Z

There are two big problems withspending time in Champagne, sampling the best of what the region hasto offer.

It has spoilt my ability to appreciate cut price fizz – having spent three days sipping nothing but the finest Champagne, I found a glass of Lindauer Blanc de Blancs Brut decidedly below my now elevated standards.
I'm going to have to spend more on my wine glasses. Having finally decided on some classic flutes with nice fine rims, I now find that this shape does not do good Champagne justice, especially if you're serving it with food.

Looks like either my standards aregoing to have to drop, or I'm going to have to up the drinks budget.

My recent trip was the usual jam-packedwhirl of contrasting experiences: early start, touring cold cellarsand trying to take notes with numb fingers; lavish lunch involvingChampagne with every course; more cellars and tasting; anotherassemblage of food and Champagne for dinner; late to bed, up early, aquick, strong coffee at the hotel before piling into the minibus. Repeat for 3 days, then decant yourself onto Eurostar beforereturning to reality. Over the course of the week, my liquid intakewas so dominated by Champagne I'm sure my wee must have been at least80% wine, predominantly from grand and premier cru vineyards.

Our visits included mammoth houses,pint-sized growers and much in between. By luck or good planning,each managed to highlight a different facet of the Champagneexperience, so I never felt that I was going over the same ground.

Here's a taste:

Veuve Clicquot's newly-opened Hotel du Marc in Reims, where invited guests can play the biggest table football I've ever seen, while enjoying a vertical tasting of Veuve Vintages – in magnum, natch. The serious bling side of Champagne. The food is pretty impressive too and Veuve Yellow Label was so much more expressive served in magnum and in these glasses.
The illustration by Violaine at the CIVC of how Champagnes can achieve their vinosity either through long ageing on the lees (De Saint Gall Premier Cru Brut 2002, disgorged 2011), or by barrel maturation (Alfred Gratien Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs Brut NV, also disgorged 2011).
Tasting, nay drinking, Bollinger Grande Année 2002, which has perfect weight, balance and development, at Bollinger with dinner.
From the jaws of defeat – a tasting that turned out to be the most memorable of all, for good reasons. Biodynamic grower Francis Boulard was clearly not expecting a group of 10 people to pitch up at 8.30am, but came round to the idea and treated us to some of the most individual and lively Champagnes of the trip.
Bruno Paillard guiding us through a tasting of his multi-vintage Brut Première Cuvée – four bottles of the same cuvée, all aged for 3 years on their lees, but at varying years since disgorgement. Paillard's is not my favourite style of Champagne in its youth, but tracing the development from 6 months since disgorgement, when it is lean, salty and mineral; to the same wine aged for 14 years post-disgorgement, when the spicy, Christmas pudding fruit, and toasty creaminess, wild mushroom and Comté cheese flavours are beautifully expressive, was fascinating.
A single glass of Pol Roger Brut Reserve NV with dinner – such lively fruit, depth of flavour and elegance – witchcraft surely!
The 109 steps down (and then up again) to the deep cellars at Gosset. Our reward: a tasting of their stylish Grande Reserve, elegant Grand Rosé and newly-released Grand Blanc de Blancs.
Champagne and smoked salmon is hardly an original food match, I grant you, but the transformation of a Mailly Grand Cru Extra Brut NV from an admirable but rather austere Champagne, to something with much more fruit ripeness when drunk with a smoked salmon mousse, was a neat illustration of a great food and wine match.

Myown personal epiphany on this trip: I tended to think that I wasn'tmuch of a fan of Blanc de Blancs, but now I realise that I justhadn't tasted the right ones. Oh, and the urban myth that Champagnenever gives you a hangover may just be true.....

Christmas - It takes two

2011-11-27T18:14:00.001Z

Here are some wines that didn't quite make it into the restricted word allowance of my Surrey Advertiser column on suitable selections for Christmas. Here are a couple of reds, both, incidentally, French, which should help the season go with a swing.

Beaujolais- Villages Chateau de Lacarelle 2010 - £6.95 from The Wine Society

Beaujolais seems to have hit a purple patch in 2010. The wines have lovely refreshing fruit with a light touch but plenty of flavour. This lightest of the light-bodied is fresh and simple - great to have alongside one of those festive buffet-style meals. And it's cracking value.

Fitou Chateau de Montmal 2009 - £12.99 from M&S wine online (available in cases of six only)

I have a soft spot for this wine, having visited the vineyard in question a while back. Fitou may be mostly associated with competently made, slightly rustic red wines. The region, though, is a mosaic of minutely delineated terroirs, some of which are capable of producing much grander stuff. This is one such vineyard and the resulting wine is also made in accordance with sustainable practices, making it green - but in a good way. It's a blend of 40% each of Grenache and Syrah, plus 20% Carignan. A real "cup of the warm south".

I'll add more of these as they occur to me...watch this space.

A winemaker back from the Dark Side

2011-10-19T12:27:00.000+01:00

Winemakers are always fascinating to hear from, but this week I listened, spellbound, as Chilean Marcelo Retamal talked us through his wines, labelling some of them "wrong" and "bad". This is the first time I have ever heard a winemaker be so brutal in their judgement of their own work.

What caused this? Marcelo is the winemaker at De Martino, based in the Maipo Valley. Back in 1992 they planted a vineyard of what they then thought was Merlot, but was discovered in 1994 to be Carmenère instead. Luckily, the soils, climate and terroir in De Martino's chosen vineyard, on the site of a former route of the Maipo river, suit the variety perfectly. Their first commercial wine from the vineyard was made in 1996 and we were lucky enough to taste each vintage that was made from these grapes all the way through to 2010.

That first vintage is typical of Chilean winemaking at the time: grapes picked quite early, fermented and aged in old Rauli (a native Chilean wood) foudres, with natural yeasts and alcohol of just over 12%.

Trying the wine now, at 15 years old, it has a lively nose of maturing characters – polish, wax, old furniture,balsamic and soy, morello cherry. And it still has a slight herbaceous, leafy note. The tannic structure is soft, warmed with spice but not alcoholic. It's a light-bodied wine but it has plenty of depth and great length – the finish goes on forminutes not seconds.

From 1997, however, we begin to see the hallmarks of international winemaking creeping in, which accelerates over the subsequent years. Most strikingly, the harvest dates are almost four weeks later. In the winery French oak barrels arrive, of which more and more are new. The old wood foudres are abandoned in favour of stainless steel and fermentation and maceration extend from 20 days to, in one year, 40 days.

2002 marks perhaps the apotheosis (or the nadir, depending on your point of view) of this approach. Grapes are harvested 6 weeks later than in 1996, fermented in stainless steel using selected yeasts and with 30% of the juice run off to concentrate the must, which needed the addition of tartaric acid to correct for low acidity. The resulting 14.6% alcohol wine was aged for 17 months in 100% new French oak barriques.

And what does it taste like? Sweetand ripe, very woody and chocolatey. That sweetness carries through as you taste,but the tannins are odd. Nothing about it feels quite natural orright, and what lingers longest are the tannin and alcohol, though it is a tick the box “good” wine. Marcelo dubbed this a“boring style”.

It takes courage to admit that you are not making the best wine that you can and to change your approach radically. It takes even more courage when those wines are critically and commercially successful.

Yet in 2010, we can see the fruits of Marcelo's change of heart and his retreat from what he calls the Dark Side.

Gone are the selected yeasts, additions of tartaric acid and running off of juice. The wine is still aged for 8 months in new French oak barriques, then 9 months in old barrels, but earlier harvesting means the final alcohol is under 14% and it has so much more life and expression than those bland, international wines of the 2000s, which tasted of glossy oak, sweet fruit and alcohol - but could have been almost any grape variety and come from anywhere in the world.

The 2010 smellslike carmenere again – finally! It has someof the bright fruit of Beaujolais and has really juicy, slightly herbaceousbut not green fruit. The wine feels roomy and relaxed, comfortable and veryenjoyable to drink with good freshness. There is a slightly oaky note onthe finish and alcohol still a little sticky-out, but altogether this is anencouraging wine and a great sign of where De Martino is heading in the future.

This is just the beginning - from 2011 Marcelo has ditched all the barriques and will use only 5,000 litre foudres from now on. He even has a natural wine project going, fermenting and ageing Cinsault from the Itata Valley in amphorae.

Chile has always been a great place to make wine, but with winemakers like Marcelo, courageously backed by the De Martino family, it can also be a thrilling one.

De Martino wines are available in the UK via The Wine Society (www.thewinesociety.com) and Les Caves de Pyrène near Guildford (http://www.lescaves.co.uk).

Barcelona Supper Club

2011-10-18T15:56:00.004+01:00

Our Indian Summer may have fizzled out, but before it did, I got the chance to indulge in an evening of Barcelona-themed food and drink, courtesy of the Codorniu Supper Club.

Over the course of a single evening, I genned up on Codorniu's range of Cavas, cooked some authentic Catalan food and - the highlight - learned how to carve that Spanish delicacy, Jamon Iberico.

I wouldn't say that I'm now an expert and ready to be let loose on my own whole ham, worth around 400-500 Euros. However, I made a fair fist of producing some wafer-thin slices under the watchful eye of Master Carver Chuse Valvor. The best part, of course, is that you get to eat the ham.

The Master Carver at work

Looking and learning

Iberico is a style of cured ham produced by the pata negra or black pig, which grazes in the cork oak forests which populate just four provinces in west and southwest Spain. Over the winter the pigs snaffle all the acorns which the trees produce and this part of their diet seems to be key in producing the sweet nuttiness of the final ham. Once slaughtered, the hams are cured in sea salt for up to four years, losing over half their original moisture content.

Putting it into practice

Of course you don't need to know all this in order to enjoy the melting, sweet-savouriness of Jamon Iberico. But it does help to give an understanding of why it is so expensive.

Over the course of the evening, our three groups each helped to cook and then serve one course of our Catalan meal. We started with a delicious fresh wild mushroom broth and moved onto a main course of duck breast with pears and spinach cooked with sultanas and pinenuts. My small contribution was towards the dessert of walnut custard cream dessert, which was described by Rachel McCormack, of Catalan Cooking, as rice pudding using ground walnuts instead of rice. You'll have to be the judge of how delicious that sounds, as I had to head home before it was served so that I could catch the last train home.

It wasn't just the food and drink that was Catalan, the timing of the evening meant that we didn't sit down to our first course until around 10pm, in true Spanish style.

If you fancy a go yourself, Codorniu are running a Supper Club open to all at L'Atelier des Chefs on 16th November. For details visit the Codorniu website on www.codorniu.co.uk or go to the facebook page: www.facebook.com/TheBarcelonaClubByCodorniu.

If it swims, serve a fino...

2011-07-18T10:51:00.003+01:00

Wine and food matching, Jerez style. If it swims, serve Fino. If it flies, serve Amontillado. If it runs, serve Oloroso.

What better place to taste sherry, in London at least, than Bar Pepito, the dinky sherry and tapas bar off-shoot of Camino? It's a small but perfectly formed homage to the bustling and cramped bars of Andalusia and provided an authentic place to taste Gonzalez Byass sherries and to test out that Andalusian food and wine matching advice.

We started with a taste of something that most wine drinkers don't get the chance to taste – mosto, or the base wine made from Palomino grapes that forms the departure point of fino, before it is fortified.

Dear reader, you're not missing anything. It did, though, afford me a Proustian flashback to Spain in the 1970s and a family holiday on the Costa Brava. Remember those super-sized oil and vinegar glass vessels (pictured left and called a porron) filled with something loosely called wine, which hapless tourists were expected to drink from? Same stuff.

The fascination comes when you go on to taste Tio Pepe, the final product of this wine, once it has been fortified and aged in soleras under a protective layer of yeast (flor) for three years. The flabbiness and weight have gone and in their place are the crisp freshness and dryness which make fino the finest aperitif. There is also that unique mix of aromas and flavours which are hard to define (apple, almonds, rubber?) but easy to recognize.

Tio Pepe is a benchmark for fino, but our next taste was of his sexier, more flamboyant brother: Tio Pepe En Rama. En rama literally means twig and has the sense of raw, which in this case means that the wine is unfined and unfiltered. Essentially it's fino with the volume turned up, or nothing added, nothing taken away, Shredded Wheat style.

The colour is deeper and the flavours are more pronounced and it feels weightier, making this a great food wine. The only downside is that limited quantities are available each year, following a small bottling run in the spring. This year's stock is no longer commercially available, having been already snapped up, mostly by people in the wine trade.

Moving up a level of maturity, we tasted Viña AB Amontillado. Amontillados start their life in the same way as fino, maturing in barrel under a layer of flor. At Gonzalez Byass they then leave casks destined for Amontillado to their own devices. Over time evaporation means that the level of alcohol becomes too high for the yeast to flourish – eventually it dies off completely. Once the flor has gone, with it goes protection from oxygen and the wine undergoes oxidative ageing, giving it a darker colour and very different flavours.

Ten years old, still bone dry, and retaining some of the appley character of fino, but with flavours of caramel, golden syrup and nuts and a hugely long finish. Wonderfully balanced and a great companion to some jamon iberico (jabugo if you can stretch to it). It's still only 16% alcohol, which seems to contribute to the lovely poise and balance.

Del Duque 30 year old Amontillado is essentially the AB left to age in solera for a further 20 years. The wonderful aromas evoke Christmas: nuts, grilled almonds, dried fruits, beeswax and something floral. Length, poise and power.

The first thing anyone learns about sherry is that it is aged in solera, where small amounts of younger wines are continually added to the older barrels, resulting in a blending process which means that sherries are always based on an average age of the wines involved.

Now I discover that they set aside a number of butts each year which never get involved in the solera system, producing something I thought didn't exist: vintage sherry.

We were treated to a taste of Añada 1982: gorgeously fragrant, with nutty and mouthwatering complexity.

Apostoles 30 year old Palo Cortado and Matusalem 30 year old Oloroso Dulce are two old friends from my days at Oddbins. One of these would always be available for tasting in the run up to Christmas – and we had to taste along with the customers, rude not to.

Palo Cortado is a sherry style with myths surrounding it – that it started its life as a fino, but somehow veered off the usual path during ageing and transformed itself instead into an Oloroso.

The truth is, of course, more prosaic. Sherry producers know what they are doing and if they want to make a Palo Cortado, they will. Essentially it is the lightest style of Oloroso which often smells like Amontillado but tastes more like Oloroso.

The Apostoles has wonderful smoky, Tia Maria notes on the nose. The palate is sweet (sweet wine from PX grapes is added after ten years in cask) and it is apparently a great match for pheasant.

Sometimes sherry is so good, it's almost obscene. Just sniffing the Matusalem made me sigh inadvertently. Need I say more? Oh OK, sweet-sour combinations of bitter chocolate, savoury meatiness and a finish longer than January.

At the extreme end of sherry are the Pxs – intensely sweet, dark, sticky sherries made from the Pedro Ximenez grape. If you want to try one, don't muck about and head straight for Noë 30 year old Pedro Ximenez. It's like a crazy cocktail of soy sauce, treacle and the best, most expensive balsamic vinegar. It has a mind-boggling 400 grams of sugar per litre, so don't tell your dentist.

Recommended retail prices

Tio Pepe Fino - £9.99

Tio Pepe En Rama - £11.99 (not available until next year)

Viña AB Amontillado - £11.99

Gonzalez Byass Añada 1982 - £70 (not commercially available)

Apostoles - £16.49 (37.5 cl)

Matusalem - £16.49 (37.5 cl)

Noë - £16.49 (37.5 cl)

Chocolates for summer?

2011-07-07T09:03:00.001+01:00

Seasonal and local – if food can't manage at least one of these, they're just not cool. Chocolate is never going to manage the local bit, but what about seasonal? Still eating the same chocolates now that you were tucking into at Christmas? Well, yes, frankly, I am.

Over at La Maison du Chocolat though, they have released a summer collection of chocolates, Chiberta, with flavours hailing from the Basque country of southwestern France, designed to be eaten in the warmer months.

The ingredients include things that we are used to finding in chocolates: honey, almond paste and praline. Plus there is the now obligatory chilli, or piment d'espelette – though here it has a definite flavour of the whole chilli pepper itself, rather than just the heat of chilli oil.

High quality chocolate, not overly sweet and intense flavours make for a classy product.

But don't even think of holding on to them until the winter...

More information: lamaisonduchocolat.com

Venice comes to Cobham

2011-07-06T12:01:00.000+01:00

Carluccio's wine dinner, part of their Veneto food and wine festival

Being handed a glass of prosecco on arrival never puts you in a bad mood, so the evening started pretty well, with some Ruggeri Santo Stefano Prosecco.

The antipasti selection was a real step up from the standard menu at Carluccio's, with the usual suspects of olives and salami joined by a crispy and well-flavoured salt cod fishcake and a red rice salad – a nod to the sea-trading past of Venice.

With the antipasti we were offered a glass of Bertani Soave Sereole. I loved the dry minerality that dominated when drunk on its own. With the food, however, more sweet fruit emerged, enhanced by a juicy acidity.

The main course of spezzatino di manzo, a slow-cooked beef stew with some Venetian spicing, was the kind of homely-looking dish that you could happily dish up at home. But I would also love to see it on the menu here other than for this special dinner.

In the picture it may look like this was served with a side order of scrambled egg, but no, it is that con trick perpetuated on the UK restaurant-going public: wet polenta. Quite how restaurants continue to get away with serving up this tasteless pap – and charging money for it – is one of life's enduring mysteries.

The wine served with this course was a perfectly pleasant Sospiro Valpolicella Ripasso. Plenty of bright cherry-tinged fruit, softly structured but with noticeable acidity. Sarah, who kept me company on the evening, is not generally a red wine drinker, but decided she could drink this – despite what she termed the “dog end” finish (presumably in a good way). I would rather have had this wine with my antipasti and moved onto something more mellow and savoury with the long-cooked spezzatino.

Sadly, the pudding was not a highlight. Crema fritta sounds odd and indeed it is: a kind of lemon-flavoured Findus crispy pancake. We also suspected that more polenta was involved. The wine served with it, however, was a real treat.

Anselmi's I Capitelli is made by the passito method, where grapes are left to shrivel and concentrate before being pressed to make into wine. This gives extra depth, but still with deliciously light, tinned cling peach flavours. More than adequate as a pudding instead of the crema fritta.

Overall the food was tasty and well-prepared and the wines a good reflection of the region. If this is a sign of where Carluccio's is heading, great. I'd love to see some of these things on their menus all the time – just hold the crispy pancake.

Carluccio's festival of Veneto wine runs until 26^th July. Wine dinners cost £35 per person and there are a series of tastings at £10 per person. More details at: www.carluccios.com.

Not wines for alfresco dining

2011-06-10T11:30:00.000+01:00

Back in the heady days of May, when we were having a summer, I was sent some samples of wines for alfresco dining. What a ridiculous idea that sounds now, when I sit nursing a cup of coffee to keep my fingers from freezing and realise the foolishness of wearing Birkenstocks when I know what I really need is a pair of woolly socks and some boots.

No-one wants to contemplate the delights of a chilled skinny white wine in such weather and you would justifiably think I had lost my mind if I recommended anything that might need chilling.

Instead, grab yourself a bottle of Clos de los Siete 2008, £12.99 at Waitrose and Majestic.

This is a Matthew Pinsent of a wine. Pretty supersized, but undoubtedly toned and muscular and never simply fat or out of proportion. An Argentinian take on the classic Bordeaux blend, made by Mondovino pantomime baddy Michel Rolland, it's a blend of Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot (and some Syrah). The fruit is plush and fragrant, but deep and dark and the tannins are pretty assertive, so I'd recommend this with something meaty. Argentinians are famous connoisseurs of steak, so it's a fair bet that this would make a happy companion to sirloin or rump. Or it would be a naughty luxury treat with a lamb chop.

Last minute wines for Valentine's Day

2011-02-11T12:27:00.000Z

A shortlist of wines to accompany your celebration, from recommendations for the fiscally-challenged to the bank bonus flush, there is something for every romantically inclined wine drinker.

Saint Amour 2009, Domaine le Carjot - £10.75, Adnams

Saint Amour is one of the Beaujolais “crus”. Beaujolais, despite its many qualities, is not a favourite with UK wine drinkers – too many bubblegummy Beaujolais Nouveau perhaps. Saint Amour may languish on the shelves for 51 weeks of the year, but, courtesy of that name, this is its time – you'd have to be hard-hearted indeed to resist the name. Inside it's all lip-smacking, cool cranberry fruit that you can enjoy on its own, or sip alongside some salami.

If you want to make a statement, then nothing says “celebration” like fizz - and this is one occasion where pink is definitely called for.

Moscato Freisa Vino Spumante NV - £7.99, M&S

It's pink, it's sweet, it's fizzy, it's cheap. Something of a guilty pleasure, this will tick a lot of boxes for some and I for one am a sucker for this featherlight, grapey, sherbetty fizz, which would go down a treat with a fruity dessert.

If only the real thing will do, then Champagne it is. For reasons I still do not fully understand, you always pay a premium for the rosé version of Champagne. However, there are occasions where it isn't becoming to come over all Scrooge-like and this is one, so hang the expense and splash out a little.

Champagne Oudinot Rosé NV - £24, M&S

Around this price point there are some rather unpleasant pink Champagnes, but this got my vote for its delicate pale salmon colour and elegant, redcurrant fruit.

Bollinger Grande Année Rosé 2002 – £85,Selfridges....

If only the best will do, then I would have to recommend this, the best pink Champagne I've tasted. It's definitely a pale salmon rather than pink and invites you in with lively strawberry fruit and hints of rose petals. But as you savour this delightful drink you begin to appreciate the depth of flavour, courtesy of the pinot noir grapes that dominate the blend. It has a certain “grip” which makes it a great food wine as well as one to sip on its own – so no need to serve anything else when you eat. And frankly, how could you possibly top this?

Jacob's Creek at 28-50

2011-02-02T20:12:00.001Z

I wouldn't have chosen the name myself. Because, confusingly, 28-50 is located at 140 Fetter Lane – but who am I to give them business advice when, clearly, the place is doing just fine, thanks very much.

28-50, the latest venture of Xavier Rousset, of Texture fame, calls itself “Wine Workshop and Kitchen”. To the uninitiated this might suggest a bit too much hands-on involvement from the customers, as though you are supposed to concoct your own wine and get stuck in to food preparation before sitting down. But fear not, ye lazy gourmands, there is nothing more strenuous involved than negotiating the stairs down from street level.

Essentially this is a restaurant, with a focus on interesting wines, many by the glass, which you can pair with a simple plate of charcuterie, or with a regular restaurant menu. Anyone who has set foot in Terroirs, aka the wine trade canteen on William IV Street, will be familiar with the set-up – and this place looks set to be just as popular with the wine cognoscenti, if the Twitter buzz about the place is to be believed. Our starter of dorade with puy lentils in a lemongrass velouté and main course of onglet with fat chips were good examples of unfussy, restaurant-hearty fare.

I was there to taste through the newly-launched Regional Reserve range from Jacob's Creek. Jacob's Creek Semillon-Chardonnay and Shiraz-Cabernet were some of the first New World wines that I ever tasted – and I'm sure I'm not alone, as they continue to be one of the strongest global brands to come out of Australia.

However, like many an early infatuation, I moved on to pastures new and now rarely find myself reaching for a bottle of Jacob's Creek as I trawl the wine shelves. So it was high time I spent an evening in its familiar presence – even if it was only for old times' sake.

Bernard Hickin, recently promoted to head winemaker, but part of the operation at Jacob's Creek for the past 30 years, laid out his stall right from the word go, with a delicious glass of Steingarten Riesling 2005. The fruit for this wine is mostly from the famous Steingarten vineyard in the Barossa, planted in 1962 and is still incredibly fresh, with great lemon 'n' lime acidity and a deep vein of minerality.

My favourites from the Regional Reserve range were the Riesling 2010, which comes from the Eden Valley zone of the Barossa. The wine is still not a year old and has a youthful lime blossom and citrus aroma. Those of you who fear Riesling = sweet, calm down dear, this is bone dry and finishes with a lemon sherbet freshness. It bemuses me that UK wine drinkers can't learn to love Riesling, when it shares many of the same characters with our current white fave, Sauvignon Blanc: bright, almost pungent fruit and racy acidity. But Riesling ages so much better and is infinitely more interesting as a variety.....have I convinced you?

The best red, for me, was the Shiraz 2007, also from the Barossa. Barossa and Shiraz go together like bottle and screwcap and this is a great example of a wine that tastes of where it's from, but is also extremely easy to like. It has aromas of a deeply fruity cake, the palate is fleshy, with soft tannins. But it is not a simple fruit bomb and it has good balance and great freshness too.

The Regional Reserves range also includes, from Adelaide Hills, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, as well as Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon. All retail for £9.99 at tesco.com and Tesco Wine Club. Sainsbury's stock the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for the same price.

No matter how big a wine company they work for, all the winemakers I've met can't resist the opportunity to get their hands on high quality fruit and lavish attention on it in order to show off their skills – and things are no different at Jacob's Creek.

St Hugo is made from a selection of 30+ year old vines in Coonawarra and the 2004 vintage has just started developing some maturing coal tar and capsicum flavours in addition to the vibrant, leafy cassis fruit. It's a cabernet, so there are tannins, but they're fine-grained and just add a welcome texture.

Johann is a 60/40 blend of Shiraz and Cabernet and shows why these two varieties complement each other so well. The 2005 vintage will be winging its way to the UK this year, but I'd recommend tracking down a bottle of the 2001, which is drinking beautifully now, having developed those chestnutty, truffley and earthy flavours that take over once the initial, almost too-bright, fruit has begun to fade.

28-50, 140 Fetter Lane, London EC4A 1BT, http://www.2850.co.uk/

Jacob's Creek Regional Reserve wines are available at www.tesco.com and Sainsbury's

St Hugo 2006 RRP: £26.20 from Waitrose and Sainsbury's

Johann 2001 RRP: £36.65 from specialst independents

Walk with wine this Saturday

2010-09-07T10:24:00.000+01:00

...or how to Indulge your passion and feel smugly righteous at the same time!

SATURDAY 11^th SEPTEMBER 10.30

Our first "walks with Wine" event will be this Saturday 11th September - meeting at 10.30 am at The Parrot pub, Broadford Road, Shalford, Near Guildford, GU4 8DW. (Tel: 01483 561400).

The walk will be approximately 2 hours and around 7 to 8 kilometres, it will be at a comfortable pace to suit most people and levels of fitness -something more than a stroll but certainly not a power walk. On this particular walk there will be gentle hills, but nothing too strenuous. Please wear comfortable walking shoes/trainers and bring water in case it is hot.

When we return to the pub we will be conducting a fun informative wine tasting followed by lunch.

Our charge for the event is £20 payable upon arrival by cheque or cash to Red White & Rosé which is for the conducted walk, wine tasting and pub lunch.

We hope this appeals to you and we would love to hear from you to discuss further and/or confirmation of numbers as places are strictly limited. PLEASE DO PHONE TO BOOK - 01483 892678

Wine-tasting dinner and sculpture in Bramley

2010-05-10T19:01:00.000+01:00

We will be entertaining and educating guests at Birtley House in Bramley this coming Saturday 15th May in aid of the Surrey Community Foundation.

Birtley House is hosting a month-long exhibition of sculpture and this Saturday evening there's the chance to stroll amongst the art works with a glass of sparkling wine and canapés. Once guests have had their fill of fine art, we will be regaling them at a pre-dinner wine-tasting quiz, with a prize for the winning team. As if all that weren't enough, the tasting is followed by a 2-course hot buffet dinner with wine, plus coffee and mints.

Tickets are just £35 per person and can be purchased from Janet at Birtley House on 01483 892055 or janet@birtleyhouse.co.uk. There is more information about Birtley House, including directions on www.birtleyevents.co.uk. All profits from the evening go to the Surrey Community Foundation.

What have the Austrians ever done to us?

2010-02-10T15:44:00.001Z

Author: Heather D

Well, OK, if you're being picky, there were on the "other side" in the last two world wars, but, leaving those worldwide conflagrations aside for a moment to concentrate on wine....just what do we have against Austrian wines?

The thorny old issue of anti-freeze never takes long to rear its ugly head when I introduce an Austrian wine to a tasting. Yes, it did happen. Yes, it was downright dangerous. Yes, it was a long time ago. Now, can we move on?

The next problem that stops us from buying Austrian wines is that they don't have a clear identity of their own. For most wine drinkers tend to lump them together, mentally at least, with German wines. Anyone in the wine trade is happy to bang on at length about how undervalued sweet German Rieslings are, with their light alcohol, delicious floral-fruity characters and their ability to age. Most UK wine drinkers, however, pay no attention and carry on drinking fruity, off-dry New World wines instead. Being associated with a country which is commercial poison in this country is never going to work in Austria's favour.

I also think we have a problem putting Austrian wine in its context, with food. Compare it with Italy, for example. It's easy to imagine a simple, juicy red Italian wine going with your pizza or plate of pasta - we've all eaten it at Pizza Express often enough. There isn't a chain of Austrian restaurants (Dumpling Express? Schnitzels R Us?) pairing the country's food with its wines. Culturally, Austria is an unknown quantity for us, other than oompah bands, Lederhosen and yodelling.

The mountain that Austrian wines have to climb is a steep one, but they do have some delicious wines to help them in their cause. Here are some of the highlights of yesterday's annual Wines of Austria tasting in London.

Polz "Therese" Sauvignon Blanc 2008 - £15.75 from www.ultimatewines.co.uk

No oak , so the grapes themselves are responsible for all the deeply mineral flavours found here, allied to a lively herbal and lightly floral nose.

Domaene Wachau Riesling Smaragd Singerriedel 2007 - distributed by Alliance Wine and seemingly hard to find, but www.waitrosewine.com list other wines from this estate

"Smaragd", meaning emerald green, denotes a higher level of ripeness than the lighter category of "Federspiel" (meaning falcon or bird of prey). The Smaragd in question refers not to the gem, but to an emerald green lizard found in the area - it's amazing what you can learn at these events. To the wine: this single vineyard riesling has great purity of aromas and flavours and is beginning to flesh out with time in bottle. Like most Austrian whites it is dry, with a lovely long, juicy finish.

Machherndl Gruener Veltliner Smaragd 2008 Kollmitz - £12.50 from www.greatwesternwine.co.uk

Gruener Veltliner is Austria's unique grape variety and is beginning to become better known. We're drinking more white than red wine nowadays in the UK, so maybe Gruener could do for Austria what Malbec has done for Argentina? This wine has lovely ripeness, but remains dry, with a twist of grapefruit zest, even a hint of the bitter pith on the finish.

Feiler-Artinger Blaufraenkisch 2007 Umriss - £15.75 from www.slurp.co.uk

It might come as a surprise to find that Austria makes rather a lot of red wine. While you won't find much syrah or cabernet (yet...) they have a trio of varieties which suit their climate: Zwigelt, St Laurent and Blaufraenkisch. Never blockbuster wines, there are nevertheless some serious examples, such as this, which has spent 13 months in (mostly old, large) oak barrels. It combines black-fruited fleshiness with enough structure to give an elegant mouthful.

And I haven't even mentioned any of the delicious sweet wines yet! That will have to be a whole new post methinks.

Learning to love Muscadet

2010-02-04T20:38:00.002Z

Fashion is a fickle thing. Pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc are currently the UK drinker's white wines of choice. Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé have spawned a thousand sauvignon blancs from New Zealand to Chile, via South Africa and Eastern Europe. And Italy's GDP figures would surely be severely dented if we stopped glugging their crisp, vaguely fruity pinot grigios at every available opportunity.

But here's a question: when was the last time you drank a Muscadet?

Muscadet used to be oh so chic, but now the only time you're likely to drink it is at an eighties themed evening, when it might be served alongside a prawn cocktail, before the beef stroganoff and the black forest gateau.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about Muscadet – indeed the crisp, fresh, lightly fruity flavours are not a million miles away in style from pinot grigio. It's simply that wine fashion has moved on and poor old Muscadet is one of its victims.

Generally we think of Muscadet as being one of those wines that you should treat as DYA (drink youngest available) and not keep for a minute longer than necessary. And in general, this holds true for the Muscadets we see on the supermarket shelves at around the £5 mark.

Pierre and Marie at Domaine Luneau-Papin, however, take pride in making Muscadet that ages amazingly well. I tasted a vertical of their L d'Or Muscadets from 2008 back to 1989. As we got to the 2003, I wrote: “Now this is getting interesting”. All vintages of the wine had plenty of life in them and retained a characteristic freshness, with increasing complexity and depth of flavour as we went back in time to the earlier vintages.

UK importer Les Caves de Pyrène has L d'Or 1999 for £13.59. Buy a bottle, serve it blind to some friends and marvel at the rich, yet dry, flavours that unfold. But not with a prawn cocktail please.

Wine of the week

2009-11-24T09:09:00.003Z

Fitou l'Exception 2006, Cave de Mont Tauch - £10.00 (or buy 2 for £9.99 each) at Majestic

There was a time when Fitou was all the rage - around the mid-nineties I think. Much of it was supermarket own-label stuff and its popularity then probably had something to do with the disappearance of a previous source of bargain reds, namely Bulgaria. We always need a suppy of decent, cheapish red wine - and for a few years, Fitou was it. French, but mercifully easy to pronounce, rustically easy to enjoy - that'll do nicely.

After its brief day in the sun, however, Fitou faded from view as we transferred our affections (what fickle serial monogamists we are) to the "sunshine in a glass" provided by New World wines. Fitou has not stopped being produced, of course, and the Mont Tauch co-operative has been quietly toiling away over the years, turning out vast amounts of wine from a mind-boggling 1950 hectares of vineyard owned by 250 different growers.

Not all of it is worth seeking out, by any means, but I was quite taken with this one, made from grapes grown in the best vineyard sites. It's a blend of carignan and grenache with a little syrah. Carignan is an often-despised variety, accused of adding nothing but colour, alcohol and rusticity - but older vines give an inky, spicy character too. This is not all about the black, spicy fruit - it has plenty of that savoury, herbal aroma of southern French garrigue, which seems unique to wines from Languedoc and Roussillon. Great for a dark, late Autumn evening and some suitably hearty food - wild boar sausages would be just about perfect.

Wine of the week

2009-11-10T08:11:00.003Z

Loacker Atagis Gewurztraminer 2008, Alto Adige - £16.95 (2006 vintage) from www.greatwesternwine.co.uk

Alto Adige is a bit of a conundrum; technically part of Italy, but essentially German-speaking; a disconcerting mix of Tyrolean alpine scenery, dotted with palms and fig trees; an area where Muller Thurgau is taken seriously as a grape variety, instead of being derided. It's hard to know what to make of it.

The varieties grown in this region are, as you might expect, not typically Italian: alongside Pinot Grigio sit Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Blanc, Riesling and Gewurztraminer. Reds are traditionally made from the local varieties Schiava and Lagrein, though some Pinot Noir is making its mark.

Rainer Loacker's wines, however, are a soothing balm to confused minds. He was the first grower in this region to become organic and biodynamic, using only homeopathic remedies to treat his vines since 1979.

Gewurztraminer, though usually made as a dry wine here, can become rather fat and flabby in Alto Adige's hot summers. This version though, has great precision and freshness which reins in the variety's broad lychee and rose petal fruit. Alto Adige will never be a low-cost production area and Loacker never a maker of cheap wines - but there's a uniqueness here which is worth paying for.

By the way, just in case you were wondering - yes, they are part of the same family who own Loacker Wafers, beloved of UK coffee shops.

What's it all about, Amarone?

2009-10-22T09:29:00.002+01:00

Thank goodness for the onset of cold, dark evenings. At last we can get stuck into winter warmer red wines – and they don’t come in more comforting winter weight than Amarone della Valpolicella.

Valpolicella we all know, right? Light-bodied, soft and juicy wines that you might glug down with a bowl of pasta or a pizza. But Amarone? What’s that about?

The difference between Amarone and straight Valpolicella is all down to grape drying – a process that the winemakers in this part of the Veneto in north eastern Italy have known about and practised since at least the time of the Romans. In simple terms, winemakers pick their best grapes slightly earlier than the main harvest and then air dry them on racks for around three months before crushing and fermenting to make wine.

The grape varieties themselves can sound like a mouthful – including Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara. An old wine teacher of mine suggested Cinderella and the two ugly sisters as a way of remembering the names – it's worked for me!

During the drying process the grapes will, of course, lose moisture – weighing around half what they did originally by the time comes to crush and ferment. With less water in the grapes, they are proportionally higher in sugar, which will be converted to alcohol during fermentation.

Amarone, then, is a high alcohol wine - legally the minimum level is 14%, but can exceed 16%. But some other things happen to the grapes during the drying process as well, which create massive concentration of aromas and flavours, as well as a great ability to age and to develop layers of complexity. With alcohol at these levels, this is not a “session wine”; it’s what the Italians call a “vino da meditazione”, a meditation wine to sip on its own.

These are wines that might start out smelling and tasting of sour cherries, dark chocolate and tobacco leaf, but develop in the glass, changing each time you take a sip, evolving and tempting you back again and again. As you might expect, these wines take to ageing like ducks to water and continue to grow in fascination and enjoyability over many years.

Not cheap to produce: that extra picking separate from the main harvest; the drying process itself; grapes that can be lost to rot and can't be used to make wine; the fact that dried grapes will naturally make less wine than freshly-picked grapes – they all mean that Amarone cannot be made as cheaply as normal wine.

But prices paid for grapes destined for Amarone have been dropping, while the amount of Amarone made has been steadily rising, leading to concerns that corners are being cut and quality levels are perhaps not always what they should be. A group of leading Amarone producers, the self-styled Amarone Families, is seeking to address these issues, imposing stricter quality measures in an effort to maintain the reputation – and high price – of Amarone della Valpolicella.

Last week they came to London to showcase their wines, focussing on the outstanding 2000 vintage. It's a mark of the wines' ageworthiness that many of these wines were still youthful and barely into their stride, even after nine years.

Amarone is not a cheap wine habit to take up, with prices starting at £20, but if you fancy an exploration of the style, there is no better place to head than The Vineyard in Dorking (http://www.wineunlimited.co.uk). John is an Amarone fanatic and stocks around twenty different ones at any one time, whereas most merchants will have one or two.

Amarone on the High Street
Amarone “Le Vigne” Ca' del Pipa 2004 - £25 at Majestic (Fine Wine section)
Dense, dark and truffley – great for game.

Amarone Classico Brigaldara 2006 - £34.99, £27.99 as part of a mixed case at Oddbins
One of the Amarone Families group, Brigaldara make wines in a modern style, ie using new French oak in addition to older, larger oak casks. Polished and powerful.

Amarone Allegrini 2004 - £45.95 from Imbibros near Godalming (http://www.imbibros.co.uk), £50 from Waitrose
One of the foremost modernists of the Amarone Families, Allegrini make wonderfully expressive wines – at a price.

Grapes are not the only fruit

2009-10-05T09:37:00.002+01:00

It's wine, but not as we know it. The British Isles have a long tradition of making wines – just not the kind that is made from grapes. We probably all have memories of a relative who made dandelion or elderberry wine, which bubbled away in demi-johns in the airing cupboard, making intriguing noises and smells but not, alas, anything remotely drinkable when the moment came to try it.

Lurgashall Winery, in an intensely rural setting between Haslemere, Midhurst and Petworth, specializes in making wines and liqueurs from an array of fruits and vegetables, as well as mead from honey. They are trying to change our view of what are called country wines (to distinguish them from normal wines made from grapes). They are proud to point out that they use only fresh fruits and vegetables in their wines, with no artificial essences or ingredients – not all country wines are made in the same way it seems.

Mead is surely the most ancient alcoholic drink in the country, requiring only water and honey as ingredients. Our ancient forebears would have relied on the wild yeasts which surround us in the air; the winemaker at Lurgashall uses cultivated yeast, in order to be sure of a consistent finished product.

Lurgashall's owner is the slightly eccentric US-born Jerry Schooler, self-styled “lord of Lurgashall”. A background in industrial engineering is not perhaps the natural qualification for taking on a wine and mead business in the UK – but it must undoubtedly have come in handy when Jerry needed more buildings for the winery. Instead of building from scratch, Jerry found a Medieval barn in Billingshurst, which he then had dismantled, moved to Lurgashall and rebuilt on-site.

Eccentricity appart, Lurgashall will be celebrating its 25^th birthday next year, so Jerry must be doing something right.

As well as selling from the winery shop, Lurgashall make wines for a huge number of heritage institutions, from the National Trust to Chatsworth and Balmoral. The US is also an export market, along with Canada, Japan and Scandinavia. Americans, it seems, can't get enough of their Tower of London Mead.

What of the wines themselves? Grapes are, of course, fruits. There is no reason why, say, a blackberry should not make a palatable wine, as it has the same basic ingredients of sweet pulp with fruit acid and skins containing tannins. But silver birch sap? And rose petals?

I will not be abandoning my passion for more “normal” wines, in order to take up these charming oddities, but I have to say they do have a certain appeal. The Gooseberry Wine is reminiscent of sauvignon blanc, but why not just have a sauvignon blanc? It's not as if there is a shortage of the stuff. However, the more esoteric flavours give more interest, as long as you discard any notions of wines to go with food – other than the gooseberry, all the wines are essentially off-dry to really very sweet. These are wines to be drunk on their own, or even mixed with fizzy water or sparkling wine.

Their red Elderberry Wine and rosé Plum Wine I found most closely resembled grape wines, because they are relatively dry and have flavours and aromas that you could also find in mainstream wines.

For sheer weirdness I was drawn to the Silver Birch Wine – made from the sap of their own birch trees. It's nothing like a normal wine, but has an intriguing “woodiness” which I find hard to describe, but appealing nevertheless.

The frankly bonkers Rose Petal wine is a beautifully delicate pale pink to look at and smells and tastes of, well, rose petals. A little bit like drinking perfume, I wouldn't recommend it on its own, but with sparkling wine (not a posh one, please!) or in a gin and tonic? Mmmmm.

Of the meads, I favoured the Dry Mead and the Reserve Mead, which has had some barrel ageing to provide more depth of flavour. Mead is, by its nature, very sweet, so this is to be treated like a liqueur or a dessert wine, even the “dry” version.

The liqueurs are where the fruits themselves really get to sing. The Raspberry Liqueur is so full of fruit flavours it's practically like drinking alcoholic raspberry jam. For a real taste of tradition their Sloe Liqueur (they aren't allowed to call it Sloe Gin) has great depth of sour cherry sloe flavour with a cleansing kick of bitterness at the end – I found this the most grown-up of the liqueurs and one I would be happy to drink by the fire in the months to come.

Country wines are not about to knock regular wines off their pedestal, but they are fun – and we all need some of that.

Lurgashall Winery, near Petworth, www.lurgashall.co.uk

Country wines are all £7.50 for a 50cl bottle, the meads range from £7.50 to £9.45 for the Reserve Mead. Liqueurs cost from £9.95 to £11.45 for a 37.5cl bottle.

Wine of the week

2009-09-24T14:16:00.003+01:00

Trenel Fleurie 2007, Beaujolais, France - £9.95 at The Wine Society

Beaujolais suffers an image problem, but this wine shows what proper Beaujolais can and should be. No confected, bubblegummy flavours here. This is pretty grown-up stuff with delicious, slightly musky, deeply fruity flavours, with a whisper of tannin and a touch of savouriness. Just the thing for this week, when you could have it lightly chilled while the sun shines, or have it at room temperature in the evening. Great for charcuterie, or a good old banger.

Chile set to rule the world?

2009-09-18T08:55:00.004+01:00

Should we be worried about Chile?

It seems that,whatever Chileans turn their determined, competent hands to, they succeed. Luckily for us, they seem not to be set on world domination, content instead to bombard us with nothing more threatening than their delicious wines.

From small beginnings in the late eighties, Chile is now the fifth most popular source of wine for UK drinkers and they lead the world in terms of the proportion of wine that they export, compared to what they produce. What this tells us is that Chile's growth as a wine producer is not built on domestic consumption: their eyes have always been firmly focused on export markets and you would have to admit that they have succeeded.

Five or more years ago it was fair to say that Chile was fine as a source of straightforward, fruity, gluggable wines for under £5, but that they had a long way to go before they had anything serious to offer in the way of fine wine. Not any more.

At the recent Decanter World Wine Awards Chile (and Australia) were the top performing countries when it came to the ultimate accolades of International Trophies. “Chile's performance”, says Decanter Magazine “was notable for spanning the whole range – red and white, under and over £10.”

Over the last decade Chile's winemakers have worked tirelessly to improve their wines, to broaden the range of varieties they grow and to find the best places in their “paradise for winemakers” for each variety to perform at its best. Rather than following wine styles from other countries, Chile is developing its own unique styles of sauvignon blanc, of syrah and most of all of carmenère, fast becoming the signature grape of the country.

Now, in characteristically efficient and single-minded style, the Chilean wine industry is addressing issues of sustainability. They are doing this not just because consumers are starting to take an interest in it, but because it will give them a strategic advantage over other countries. They have identified that lack of sustainability will be a barrier to growth in years to come and something that simply must be addressed to ensure the continued success of their export-led wine industry.

If all this sounds as if accountants and management consultants are running the Chilean wine industry, rather than horny-handed honest toilers among the vines, then be reassured that the wines themselves are anything but dull. I had the opportunity to taste my way through fifty-odd Chilean wines which had all won either a Gold medal or a Trophy at recent international competitions.

Here are my favourites from the best of the best of Chile:

Errazuriz Single Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc 2008, Casablanca – Gold Medal at the International Wine Challenge
The Casablanca valley has built a reputation for high quality, relatively cool-climate wines with a balance of elegance and flavour. This is not in the New Zealand mould of pungent sauvignon with tropical fruit salad aromas and flavours – rather it's dry and satisfying with a more restrained grapefruit character making it a great food wine.
Taurus Wines of Bramley has the 2008 for £8.99; Majestic has the 2007 vintage for £9.99.

Cono Sur Reserva Riesling 2008, Bío Bío – Decanter World Wine Awards International and Regional Trophies for Riesling under £10
It's a cliché that everyone in the wine trade loves riesling, but that wine drinkers, at least in the UK, can't seem to get on with it. If you've yet to be seduced by riesling's lively, limey fruit then this user-friendly example is a great place to start. Bío Bío Valley is relatively recently-developed and one of the most southerly of Chile's wine regions. This being the southern hemisphere, the further south you go, the cooler (and wetter) it gets – so Bío Bío is a great source of cool-climate wines and Riesling has found a home here.
Tesco, £8.07

Errazuriz Wild Ferment Chardonnay 2007, Casablanca – Annual Wines of Chile Awards Gold medal and Trophy for Best Chardonnay
Just what is wild ferment I hear you ask? Not as exciting as it sounds perhaps, it refers to the fact that wild yeasts exist all around us and are capable of inducing alcoholic fermentation in grapes. Most New World winemakers prefer not to leave things to chance and will buy specific strains of commercially-available yeast in order to get the wine style they want. Wild yeasts are unpredictable, but can also give a broader range of aromas and flavours. This is youthful and lively-tasting, with juicy, nutty fruit and great length.
£10.50 from Stone Vine & Sun near Winchester (www.stonevine.co.uk)

The Co-op Santa Helena Pinot Noir 2008, Casablanca – Decanter World Wine Awards International and Regional Trophies for Pinot Noir under £10
Pinot noir is another variety that likes things not too hot and seems to respond well to the cooling influence of the Pacific in the Casablanca Valley. This has great purity of fruit and is entirely unshowy for a New World pinot.
£7.99 from the Co-operative

Terra Andina Reserva Carmenère 2007, Rapel Valley – International Wine Challenge Gold Medal
Rescued from near-extinction in its native France, Carmenère has found a new home and great acclaim in Chile. This wine has the variety's hallmark aromas of bonfires and red fruits with good acidity to keep the fruit juicy. An impressive balance of power and restraint.
www.everywine.co.uk has the award-winning 2007 vintage for £100.09 for a case of 12 bottles. Chilean specialists www.qpwines.com list the 2006 vintage for £43.99 for six bottles, £86.95 for twelve.

Wine notes and queries

2009-08-26T17:05:00.005+01:00

The world of wine can be mysterious and one that most of us, in our essentially non-winemaking country, are rather distanced from. We don't have the same deep cultural ties with wine that people who live in countries who make the stuff do. Yet we are increasingly a nation of wine drinkers and some are naturally curious about what they are drinking.

Do you have a burning question about wine that you've always wanted to find the answer to? I often find someone saying something like: “This is a really stupid question but...” There really are no silly questions when it comes to wine, so to start the ball rolling I've listed a couple of queries that crop up fairly frequently.

If you have a wine related query you can send it to me via Twitter at http://twitter.com/wineandwords. You can also keep track of my wine blog postings and general wine musings by following me on Twitter. Or if that's a little too new media for you, you can email me at heather@redwhiteandrose.co.uk. Don't be shy...ask away! You could find your question forms the basis of a future Surrey Advertiser column.

What's the difference between Pouilly Fumé and Pouilly-Fuissé?

Both these wines have a good level of recognition among British wine drinkers, but it wasn't until someone asked me this question that I realised there is ample room for confusing the two. They are also hard for English speakers to get their tongues round, which could lead to even more confusion. Pouilly Fumé is pronounced “Pou-ee foomay”; Pouilly-Fuissé, “Poo-ee fwee-say”.

Pouilly Fumé is the name for wines made from the sauvignon blanc grape around the small town of Pouilly-sur-Loire. It's bang next door to Sancerre and the wines are pretty similar – though Sancerre being much easier to say and to remember must account for at least some of its popularity in this country. Traditionally the wines of Pouilly Fumé tend to have more mineral and elegant characters compared with Sancerre's more overtly fruity and pungent flavours; though in practice you're more likely to find differences between producers than between the two neighbouring vineyard areas. Fumé, meaning smoked or smoky, is a reference to the smoky, gunflint character sometimes exhibited by the wines.

Pouilly-Fuissé, on the other hand, is the name of a vineyard area in the Mâconnais, in southern Burgundy. Pouilly and Fuissé are the names of two settlements where the grapes are grown. White wine in Burgundy essentially equals chardonnay and Pouilly-Fuissé wines carry the highest quality reputation in the Mâcon, so will often be given the traditional Burgundian oak barrel-ageing treatment. You might also see the names Pouilly-Vinzelles or Pouilly-Loché, which are neighbouring areas.

How is rosé wine made?

With our recent embrace of the pink stuff comes a natural curiosity about how it's made. Essentially there are three ways it can happen:

Mixing a little red wine into white wine

It sounds like cheating and, for most winemakers in the EU at least, it is. In the rest of the world, however, it is quite permissible to make a pink wine by adding some red wine. European winemakers are, understandably, pretty sniffy about this way of making rosé wine – unless they are in the Champagne region, where they are allowed to make their pink Champagne in this way. If you see the words “rosé d'assemblage” on a Champagne bottle, it has been made by blending in some red wine. “Rosé de saignée” indicates a more traditional rosé-making method – see below.

The saignée method

This is becoming a more widespread. Red grapes ultimately destined to make red wine are held in a vat; some of the light red juice coloured by the crushed grapes is allowed to run out; fermenting this light red juice results in a pink wine. The reason for its popularity amongst winemakers is that they can then go on to make a red wine from the remaining grapes, as well as the rosé: two wines from a single batch of grapes – you can see the attraction.

"Pressurage direct"

The most traditional way to make rosé wine and, purists would argue, the best, is the “pressurage direct” or direct pressing method, used by winemakers in Provence, for example. Unlike the rest of the world, here they take pink wine very seriously and view rosés made by any other method as inherently inferior. The winemaker selects red grapes for rosé wine which are then crushed and then left for a brief period in the vat, giving the final wine a delicate, paler pink hue and, arguably, a more refined flavour than the saignée method.

There must be other things that you've been intrigued or confused by: why does Champagne cost so much more than Cava? Why does red wine give me a hangover when white wine doesn't? Why don't most French wines tell you which grape variety the wine is made from?

To get your question answered, go to http://twitter.com/wineandwords and ask away.

Wine of the week

2009-08-10T15:08:00.003+01:00

Sainsbury's Taste the Difference PX, £6.49 for 50cl
A sweet, treacly sherry may not seem like the obvious wine for high summer (oh please). But I can tell you this is the one drink that was just right for a damp camping trip in Shropshire last week. Sitting outside when it's not really warm enough is what British summers are all about and rather than clasping a cold glass of rosé and pretending it's fun, embrace the charms of this unctuous and ludicrously underpriced liquid. It's all figs, prunes and raisins and will warm anyone's cockles. If by any chance it is actually hot, you can always pour it over your ice cream...mmm.

Are UK wine drinkers spooked by odd-looking bottles?

2009-08-10T14:53:00.003+01:00

On the face of it, Alsace is a pretty straightforward wine region. Wines are labelled with the name of the grape variety, à la New World, making it easy for non-French drinkers to gauge what they’re choosing. To keep things simple, it’s pretty much all about white wines – they do make some red from pinot noir but, to be fair, the reds are never going to set the world on fire. The style of wines from Alsace is fresh, fruity and dry, or almost dry – in other words, easy-going, and particularly good for drinking with the spicy foods of South and East Asia that we love so much in this country. Alsace itself is an almost impossibly pretty region in Eastern France, owing more to Germany than France for its architectural and cultural traditions and with lower rainfall and more hours of sunshine than you would think by just looking at a map. Why then, don’t we drink more Alsace wines in this country?

For one thing, that proximity to Germany (and it used to be more than proximity: Alsace and neighbouring Lorraine were annexed to Germany from 1870 to 1919) has brought not just cute gingerbread villages, but a tradition of using the Germanic “flute” wine bottle. Any combination of Germany and wine is commercially toxic in the UK: if it looks German, we tend to steer clear.

Why we should face our demons and embrace German wines is something for another column, but Alsace has become unfairly embroiled in our rejection of what we deem to be cheap and nasty sweet wines. I’d go so far as to say that a substantial minority of the UK population does not realise that Alsace is French and not German. We Brits don’t tend to holiday there, so it lacks the high profile and instant recognition of, say, the Loire.

If you’d like to indulge in some aversion therapy to overcome your fear of tall, thin wine bottles and try some Alsace wines, where should you start?

Varieties
Uniquely amongst French wine regions, Alsace has a tradition of putting the name of the grape variety on the label, which makes life so much simpler for the novice. Here are the major varieties you’ll encounter:

Pinot blanc:- The workhorse grape of the region, it is the most widely-planted variety, producing soft, round and fruity wines.
Pinot gris:- The name suggests a relation to pinot blanc (and pinot noir for that matter) and indeed it is part of the same family. Pinot gris produces wines with more defined fruit and perfume than pinot gris, often with a hint of richness and some spice. Pinot gris is our old friend pinot grigio, the UK’s favourite wine –but the best Alsace versions offer infinitely more character than the bland, mass-produced ones from Italy.
Gewurztraminer:- the most aromatic of Alsace varieties, frequently reminding tasters of rose petals, Turkish Delight or lychee. It has the richness and spice of pinot gris and, with age, develops a smoky complexity. A fantastic match for soft, smelly cheeses.
Riesling: - most growers in the region consider Riesling to be the king of grapes, the one which allows them to demonstrate the influence of that very French notion: terroir. Always with a backbone of acidity, it can show a great range of aromas and flavours from fruity and floral to stony and mineral – no really.

Where to buy Alsace wines
You’ll come across odd bottles of Alsace wines in almost any good wine shop and Waitrose have the best range of Alsace wines on the High Street. But, with a region like this, if you want to do more than dip your toe in, it pays to go to a specialist.

The Wine Society (www.thewinesociety.com) is the UK’s oldest wine mail order outfit and run along non-profit making lines as a co-operative making it undisputably a “good thing”. It also has a particularly strong Alsace selection; they were voted Alsace Specialist Merchant of the Year in the 2008 International Wine Challenge. Here are some of my favourites from their mouthwatering list:

Gewurztraminer Tradition 2007 Cave de Turckheim - £7.95
This is made by arguably the region’s best co-op and represents a gentle introduction to the variety with good weight of aromatic fruit and some spice. Waitrose list the, probably almost identical, Cave de Turkheim Gewurztraminer 2007 for £8.09.

Riesling Tradition 2007 Kuentz-Bas - £8.95
This is dry - just (4 grams per litre of residual sugar for those who like to know that kind of thing), but with a lovely floral nose and more citrussy palate and of course crisp acidity. One to try with Asian food that’s not too spicy or sweet.

Riesling Domaine Frédéric Mochel, 2005 - £12.50
To see what the fuss over Alsace Riesling is all about, you really need to drink a wine four or five years old, and here’s your chance. This Riesling is bone dry, in what Frédéric Mochel calls the Protestant style of wine – by which he means dry, linear and pure. With age, hints of petrol (in a good way) add to the tropical fruit. If this gives you a taste for more mature Riesling, the Society also list Mochel’s Grand Cru Altenberg de Bergbieten 2002 at £14.95, which is a super-charged version of the straight Riesling, with even more of those delicious exotic but elegant flavours.

Gewurztraminer, Domaine Zind-Humbrecht, 2007 - £14.95
If the notion of a Protestant wine has intrigued you, here is what you might logically call a Catholic wine. Olivier Humbrecht is, arguably, the most gifted and important winemaker in Alsace. The former scientist and first ever Frenchman to become a Master of Wine, has embraced the notion of natural wine-making. His dazzling skills have blazed a trail for organic and biodynamic wines which other growers have since followed, but it’s Domaine Zind-Humbrecht that created the model. If you want to know how a wine can smell and taste of where it’s from, rather than just of the grapes from which it’s made, then you can have no better illustration than the wines of Zind-Humbrecht. All his wines are worth trying – and be warned that prices only go upwards from here. A hands-off, non-interventionist approach means it’s hard to generalise about the wines: dryness levels vary by wine and by year, for example. This wine has a sense of richness rather than sweetness and fantastic concentration. Waitrose have Zind-Humbrecht Riesling Heimbourg 2006 for £20 and Zind, a blend of varieties with great character, for £14.99.

Pinot Gris Hugel Jubilée 2007 - £22
A steep price, though Hugel does make cheaper versions of their varietal wines, under the Tradition rather than Jubilée label which sell for around £12-14. If you want to know what sets Alsace pinot gris apart from Italian pinot grigio, then it pays to splash out. The Hugel family are practically wine-making royalty in Alsace, dating back to 1639. We’re back in the Protestant wine mould here: while there’s richness and concentration in Hugel’s wines, there is also purity and dry restraint which make them extremely food friendly.

Wine of the week

2009-07-31T17:16:00.004+01:00

Wine of the week in a week where I've been out of wine-drinking action with swine flu presents its challenges. But I'm no quitter and will not shirk from my duty to bring the thirsty masses the refreshment they deserve.

Domaine de l'Olivette 2007, Vin de Pays des Côteaux de Cabrerisse - £5.99 at Waitrose (£5.69 at www.waitrosewine.com)
I stocked up on this wine recently for a party because, to my mind, it offers unbeatable character and depth for the money. From an all but unknown region in southwestern France, it's a tasty blend of grenache blanc, bourboulenc and marsanne. It has a summery fruity-floral character, but also some herbal and white pepper notes thanks to that cocktail of varieties. The depth of flavour means that it doesn't taste lean and weedy, so it can provide satisfying refreshment even if the weather is not as hot as you might wish... And it's organic too.

Swine flu - wine flu?

2009-07-29T19:52:00.003+01:00

Having just recovered from a week confined to bed due to swine flu, it has struck me that I may have stumbled upon an, as yet, unreported consequence of the pandemic.

For the past seven days not a drop of wine has passed my lips - only right and proper, not really ill if you can still face knocking back a glass of wine. But, my point is, that's a week's worth of wine consumption that is lost, never to be recovered.

Let's say I would have normally drunk a couple of glasses of wine on four of those evenings, that makes 8 glasses of wine that have remained undrunk, directly due to swine flu. Multiply that by the number of people in this country who are statistically likely to get swine flu this year, and who are also wine drinkers.

OK I admit I don't have those numbers - but I'd love to know if someone else does. In 2008 UK wine consumption stopped growing and levelled out for the first time in years - could swine flu be the thing that actually leads to a drop in wine drinking in the UK?

Splash out - not literally I hope

2009-07-27T15:41:00.005+01:00

Special occasion wines for summer

Most of us don't go spending over £10 on a bottle of wine unless it's a special occasion. But, as you're probably tired of hearing by now, staying in is the new going out and we are all, apparently, abandoning pubs and restaurants to eat at home. Even the most humble house red or white will likely set you back more than ten quid, so why not treat yourself to a really decent bottle of wine for the same price if you're staying home?

White

Donnafugata Polena 2008, Sicily, Italy - £10.99 at Oddbins

Many of Sicily's wine producers started out as makers of Marsala, the mainly sweet, fortified wine that we really only stick in the cooking rather than drink. Donnafugata was one of the first to start making regular wines with great success. This is an unoaked 50/50 blend of viognier and catarratto grapes: the viognier giving a lovely stone fruit and floral character and the catarratto a more herbal and grassy counterpoint.

Matahiwi Estate Holly Sauvignon Blanc 2007, Wairarapa, New Zealand - £10.99 at Oddbins, down to £8.79 as part of a mixed dozen

There's no doubt that sauvignon blanc's crisp, juicy characters are made for the summer and this one has an extra dimension to it compared with many New Zealand examples. There's a lovely smoky element to the fruit, which has probably developed during the months in bottle – 2007 is long in the tooth for most sauvignon blanc, but this has stood the test of time, though probably not one to hold on to until Christmas.

Masson-Blondelet 2007, Pouilly Fumé, Loire, France - £12.49, Waitrose

There are basically two models to follow for makers of sauvignon blanc – the more restrained, mineral and food-friendly one from the Loire Valley in France; and the more tropical fruit salad style that is typified by New Zealand (see above). If you want a textbook example of the Loire style, then look no further than this classic Pouilly Fumé: with a backbone of fine acidity this has zippy, mineral fruit and great elegance.

Red

Southern Right Pinotage 2007, Walker Bay, South Africa - £11.99 at Waitrose

The pinotage grape is South Africa's gift to the wine world – but for some wine drinkers, they'd rather South Africa kept it to themselves. It's a Marmite of a grape variety which will always divide opinion and it's true that many cheaper versions are a spooky combination of rubber, bubblegum and Bovril that I try to avoid. This one, though, is a different kettle of fish: lovely beetroot and sour cherry aromas lead onto a smooth, fresh palate combining fruit and savoury characters. Nothing spooky about it, I promise!

Joseph Drouhin Rully 2006, Burgundy, France - £12.99 at Waitrose

Pinot noir is the red grape of Burgundy and the region's most serious examples hail from its northern section, the Côte de Nuits. Rully, by contrast, is a village in the southerly Côte Chalonnaise, which produces reds that are, generally, lighter, fruitier and somewhat rustic – but perfect for summer drinking. The bright fruit and softish tannins mean that you could easily chill this lightly to appreciate its refreshing, spicy raspberry flavours.

Jackson Estate Vintage Widow Pinot Noir 2007, Marlborough, New Zealand - £17.99, down to £14.39 if you buy any two New Zealand wines, at Majestic

Pinot noir again, but this time from New Zealand. The oak ageing has given delicious liquorice overtones to the perfumed fruit in this wine. It is more seriously structured than the Rully above, so I wouldn't chill it.

Chinon Les Varennes du Grand Clos 2001, Charles Joguet, Loire, France - £14.99 at Majestic

The Loire's red wines made from cabernet franc, essentially a lighter-bodied, more perfumed version of cabernet sauvignon, are traditional wine bar favourites in Paris. They also make for top summer reds with their generous, sappy fruit that somehow, don't ask me how, manages to feel cooling in the mouth. This 2001 gives you a chance to see how the grape develops as it matures – a heady, but never heavy, mixture of spiced hedgerow fruits, with a slightly medicinal edge. One for dinner parties rather than the barbecue.

Morgon Côte du Py 2007, Domaine Jean Foillard, Beaujolais, France – £19.90 at Les Caves de Pyrène in Artington

Beaujolais: back in the 1980s we used to love it, until the bubblegum confectedness of Beaujolais Nouveau put us off and we decided it was decidedly naff. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater: there is life beyond Beaujolais Nouveau. In general terms, the quality levels rise from Beaujolais, through Beaujolais-Villages, then, at the top of the tree, the ten named communes, “crus” in French, such as Morgon. The region has many young winemakers prepared to show what their beloved Gamay grape is capable of in the right hands and are not prepared to make wine in the traditional fruity and simple vein. The winemaker here is determined to let the grape shine with minimum intervention (organic and biodynamic methods, no sulphur even, very risky) and if you're feeling adventurous you'll be rewarded with a funky, rainbow explosion of flavours in your mouth. Try it with typical French charcuterie for a taste sensation.

Sparkling

Langlois-Château Crémant de Loire Rosé, Loire, France - £11.99 at Taurus Wines in Bramley; £12.99, or £10.39 as part of a mixed dozen, at Oddbins

Champagne houses, who know a thing or two about making sparkling wine, have a history of hooking up with makers of fizz in the Loire to good effect. Langlois-Château has been under Champagne Bollinger's wing since the 1970s. The terroir and grape varieties may not be the same as in Champagne, but this pink fizz, made entirely from cabernet franc, is a delightful and elegant mouthful of crunchy red fruit.

Wine of the week

2009-07-24T09:44:00.002+01:00

Now, it may be tipping it down today, but rumour has it that we might actually get a sunny day, or even two this weekend. So, to get in the mood, have a try of my wine of the week.

Leyda Single Vineyard Garuma Sauvignon Blanc 2007, Leyda Valley, Chile
Stockists - Waitrose £8.99, Great Western Wine have the 2006 vintage for £9.50
I know, I know - a Chilean sauvignon, how very original - not. Wait though, this one has more to recommend it than most at this price level.

Partly this is to do with where it's grown - the Leyda Valley is one of the most recently-planted and most northerly in Chile. Now, Chile being in the southern hemisphere, the further north you go, the nearer the Equator and, therefore the warmer you get, right? Well, uh, no.... It seems the cold, cold Pacific has more of an influence here (13km from the vineyards) than latitude and Leyda is actually a cool-climate area, perfectly suited to producing crisp, aromatic white wines.

This has plenty of lime zesty fruit, with a distinctive peapod/asparagus tinge, which sauvignons often develop as they age. Not remotely thin or weedy, but with mouthwatering juicy fruit, it can more than stand up to, say, barbecued prawns with chilli and ginger. Ooh, now I'm getting hungry...

Wine of the week

2009-07-17T10:04:00.004+01:00

A new feature for my blog - one wine to try for every single week of the year - see if you can keep up!

Luna Beberide Mencia 2007, Bierzo, Spain
Averys Wine Merchants, £9.49 (www.averys.com)
Mencia is the name of the variety, Bierzo the region, in Spain's cool and damp Northwest (sound familiar?). I had probably hoped to recommend something light, white and cooling at this time of year, but something tells me that a wine with more warmth and body might be more in order this weekend.
Mencia may not be a grape you've heard of before, but it is one of the new guard of Spain's varieties that we are probably going to be hearing more about. Mencia itself is not new, but the ability to make it into wines that have international appeal, is. This wine is deep-coloured, with plenty of dusky fruit, but with the variety's hallmark acidity giving it structure, it retains freshness. This freshness, combined with pretty soft tannins, make it perfect for summer drinking - even if the summer weather is far from perfect!
This wine has just been named joint winner of the "Best Red under £10" category at the New Wave Spanish Wine Awards.

Summer wines - under £10

2009-07-10T12:43:00.003+01:00

Here are my favourite wines, for whatever weather summer might throw at us, for under £10 a bottle, including some rosés. If you would like to read my bargain sub-£5 recommendations, they are in the previous post below.

White
Torres Vina Esmeralda 2008, Spain - £6.99 at Waitrose and Majestic
This wine is absolutely packed with the essence of summer – fresh, light and aromatic, thanks to its blend of 85% moscatel and 15% gewürztraminer grapes. The musky, floral aromas might lead you to expect something sweet, but it's dry with lively acidity. Perfect for sipping in the garden or with fish and seafood – and don't even think about keeping it beyond the end of September.

Glen Carlou Tortoise Hill White 2007, South Africa – £7.50, or £7 case rate, at Ranmore Wines, Ranmore Common, between Effingham and Dorking
South Africa has a reputation for putting together interesting blends of grapes and this is a great example. A mix of mostly sauvignon blanc, along with some fashionable, apricot-y viognier and a little chardonnay for body and breadth, this has lovely floral aromas and a citrus zest and mineral palate.

Fox Gordon Princess Fiano 2008, Adelaide Hills, Australia – Oddbins £9.99, or £7.99 as part of a mixed dozen
Fiano is a native Italian variety that originates in the hills south of Naples. Recently it's been successfully taken up by winemakers in Sicily, but has also made the longer trek all the way to Australia. It has an alluring nose of honey and apricot with plenty of juicy fruit on the palate – not subtle, perhaps, but could stand up to barbecued food.

Domaine Bégude Chardonnay 2007, Limoux, France - £7.99 at Waitrose
Limoux is a small enclave in the otherwise hot and steamy sweep of southern France that leads down to the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. Not, you might think, a promising place to attempt to make elegant white wines. Limoux, however, is a cooler area in the foothills of the Pyrenees, capable of making wines with great fruit expression and good acidity – potential spotted by Domaine Bégude's owners, English couple James and Catherine Kinglake. This wine was fermented and aged in oak barrels, giving it some subtle cinnamon spice to counterpoint the fine acidity – one for cash-strapped Chablis fans.

Rosé
Torres Viña Sol Rosé 2008, Catalunya, Spain - £5.99 at Waitrose
Plenty of lively, crunchy red fruits in this blend of spicy grenache and dark-fruited carignan. One for easy-going enjoyment.

Château Guiot Rosé 2008, Costières de Nîmes, France - £6.99, or £5.99 when you buy 2 bottles, at Majestic
Deep-coloured, as much light red as deep pink, this has hints of dark damson plum on the nose. It's full-on and has a welcome savoury dimension to the fruit, making it particularly food-friendly.

Muga Rioja Rosado 2008, Rioja, Spain - £8.99, or £7.49 when you buy 2 bottles, Majestic; £7.99 at Waitrose
This is in a different mould to the other two rosés – it's pale, delicate and elegant, with delicious, crisp red fruit.

Red
Canaletto Primitivo 2006, Puglia, Italy – £5.99 at Somerfield and on offer at £4.49 at Waitrose until 21 July
Puglia, the “heel” of Italy, has a fairly low profile as a wine producer – yet this region used to produce more wine than the whole of Australia not so long ago. They still produce plenty, most of which doesn't make it to this country; the primitivo grape makes its most appealing red wines. The smoky, black cherry fruit cries out for barbecued red meat. By the way, don't be tempted by the insipid Canaletto Pinot Grigio, the white partner to this red.

Viña Zorzal Graciano 2007, Navarra, Spain - £8.99, or 2 for £15, at The Vineking in Weybridge and Reigate
I first recommended this wine as part of a selection of Spanish wines earlier this year – since then this wine has won a gold medal at the International Wine Challenge, so I make no apologies for including it again. This has fine, blueberry fruit, with proper tannins and refreshing acidity – not a DVD wine, this is a wine to drink with food, the meatier the better.

Bodegas Castano Hecula 2005, Yecla, Spain - £7.99 from The Vineyard in Dorking
This densely-flavoured wine is made from the grape known as Monastrell in Spain, Mourvèdre in France and Mataro in Australia. Still with me? All you need to know is that this is a delicious mouthful of black fruit, all the more interesting for having some time to mature in the bottle, giving it notes of exotic spices.

The Hedonist Shiraz 2006, McLaren Vale, South Australia - £9.99 at Waitrose
McLaren Vale Shiraz is no shrinking violet, typically with loads of everything – ripe, full-on black fruit and a wallop of alcohol. This wine has all that, but something else too, some extra dimensions of tarry, smooth and spicy notes that make me think of the southern Rhône and Châteauneuf-du-Pape more than Australia. So while ten quid isn't cheap, it's hard to find a decent Châteauneuf at that price. If you're that way inclined, you might like to know that this is a biodynamically-made wine.

Looking through this list, I'm struck by how many Spanish wines have made it in – it certainly wasn't intentional. But it is an indication of just how well they are doing at delivering interesting, value for money wines.

Next time: the final instalment of wines for the summer, looking at special occasion bottles over £10.

Bargain wines for summer

2009-07-03T09:36:00.005+01:00

Without wanting to tempt fate, it seems we might actually be having a summer this year. Ever community-minded, I have put together my list of wines to see you through the warmer weather.

What makes a wine good for the summer? There are a number of reasons, but they can probably be summed up in one word: refreshment. This might be conveyed by fresh, zesty flavours, lower alcohol, zippy acidity, or vibrant fruit. So I’ve searched out wines that will complement the lazy days of summer – fingers crossed.

We still don’t like to spend that much on a bottle of wine in this country, with the average amount paid stubbornly hovering just over £4 a bottle. This week I’m going for the bargain end of things, with wine recommendations under £5. My experience of wines at this level is, generally, dispiriting: it’s very hard to put anything characterful in a bottle at that price. I must have tasted hundreds of wines under £5 in order to arrive at this list: there’s a lot of dross out there.

I’ve tasted the dross, but you don’t have to: here are my top 10 wines for under a fiver this summer.

White
Oddbins Own White 2008 (Vin de pays d’Oc, France), £4.49, £3.59 as part of a mixed dozen
Dull name and a hideous label, but get past those hurdles and you’ll find a wine with all manner of crisp, appley and citrus fruit and nice weight. Made from a veritable cocktail of grape varieties, helping to give extra dimensions of flavour, it’s hard to ask for more at this price.

Virtue Sauvignon Blanc Chardonnay 2008 (Central Valley, Chile), £3.99 Waitrose
The virtue in the name refers to the fact that the wine is shipped in bulk to the UK and bottled here. Shipping wine without the weight of the glass makes it cheaper, as well as giving it a smaller carbon footprint. Why don’t we see more wines like this? The wine itself is full of fresh and juicy fruit, with the chardonnay giving some more weight and depth to the herbaceous sauvignon.

Foraci Tre Cupole Grillo 2008 (Sicily, Italy), £5.99, £4.79 when you buy any two Italian wines, Majestic
Grillo is one of Sicily’s native grape varieties (not all of which are worth discovering), giving this some distinct character amongst the sea of cheap but cheerless whites. Cut pear aromas, with floral and almond flavours, it makes for an interesting mouthful.

Carletti Malvasia 2008 (Abruzzo, Italy), £5.99, £4.79 as part of a mixed dozen, Oddbins
Another Italian white: Italy has always had plenty of grape varieties to work with and now their winemaking is able to do them justice. This is a financially painless way to discover the aromatic Malvasia grape, which has bags of character, a curious mixture of floral and spicy notes.

Undurraga Chardonnay Pinot Noir Brut NV (Maipo Valley, Chile), £9.99, £4.99 if you buy two, Majestic
I probably wouldn’t bother with this sparkling wine at the full price, but at under a fiver it’s hard to resist. It’s not made in the same way as Champagne, but it’s clean and refreshing and, for me, preferable to Cava at the same price.

Red
Oddbins Own Red 2008 (Vin de pays d’Oc, France), £4.49, £3.59 as part of a mixed dozen
The red partner to the white above, so same warning re: cheap and nasty-looking label. The grenache-based blend inside, however, is much more fun: chewy, dense and spicy with bags of peppery black fruit.

Beaux Galets Rouge 2008 (Vin de pays de l’Herault, France) £3.99, Majestic
There is also a white version of this wine, which I didn’t feel able to recommend, but this red, a mixture of merlot, carignan and grenache grapes, is good for the price. Don’t expect depth and complexity, but it has plenty of sweet black and red fruit.

Castillo de Montearagon Reserva 2003 (Cariñena, Spain) £4.49, Tesco
Spain does a pretty good job of delivering good value, if not always exciting, red wines. There is plenty of juicy blueberry fruit here, under a gloss of oak and with some definite tannins: one for food rather than drinking on its own.

Familia Zuccardi FuZion Shiraz/Malbec 2008 (Mendoza, Argentina), £4.49 Waitrose
This is decent stuff with juicy black fruit and shiraz’ hallmark spice balancing out the tannic structure.

Carletti Sangiovese Merlot 2008 (Abruzzo, Italy), £5.99, £4.79 as part of a mixed dozen, Oddbins
The red partner to the white Malvasia is well-balanced, with some tannin to give structure to the spangly fruit.

Interestingly, perhaps, I didn’t find a rosé under £5 that I felt I could recommend – heaven knows we drink enough of them in the UK, so my palate must be seriously out of whack with most British rosé drinkers!

The next instalment will feature wines from £5 to £10 - including some rosés, I promise. Competition is much fiercer at these price levels because winemakers have more to play with and can deliver hugely better quality - and independent wine merchants can get a look in too.

Perfect time for port?

2009-06-15T14:43:00.003+01:00

This may seem like an unlikely time of the year to be writing about port. The dark purple, sweet and highly alcoholic drink is something so redolent of winter and, specifically, Christmas, that we don’t give it a second thought for the rest of the year.

It might surprise you to know, then, that port doesn’t have to be deep purple and can be served chilled – even over ice – giving it appeal, even in the warmer months.

On that bombshell, here’s a quick outline of what port really means and how it’s made. It all starts life as grapes grown in the Douro Valley in northern Portugal. Life for vines (and people) here is tough: the weather is scorching (40˚C is a possible average in summer), the soil is not soil at all but rocky schist and there is nary a flat vineyard to be seen, only varying degrees of slope from fairly gentle to vertigo-inducing. It takes tenacity, some would say pig-headedness, to tend vines here – it also requires grape varieties able to stand up to these conditions. None of your namby-pamby merlot and pinot noir here: this is the land of varieties like touriga nacional, tinta barroca and tinto cão, amongst others even less well known.

Once ripe and full of natural fruit sugar, the grapes are harvested. Grapes for port get only a very short fermentation, so they need to be treated vigorously in order to extract plenty of colour and tannin in that time. For once the mental picture of a swarthy local treading grapes in a vat is true.

Foot-treading in shallow granite troughs, or lagares, is the traditional way, and is still used for the very best or small-production ports. Mostly, though, machines of varying kinds have replaced humans – including robotic feet.

After treading, the fermenting wine is fortified with grape spirit, raising the alchohol level to around 20%. Yeasts cannot exist in this alcoholic environment, so fermentation stops, leaving a wine with some remaining sweetness: embryonic port.

After fermentation, different treatments and length of ageing determine what kind of port will finally result. All ports need some ageing and the Douro Valley, with its extreme climate, is an unsuitable place to do it. Young port is, therefore, traditionally taken downstream to Oporto at the mouth of the Douro River, where it will age in the shippers’ port lodges in the damper and gentler maritime climate. This journey used to be undertaken by picturesque sailing boats, until the Douro was dammed for hydroelectric power: now it’s done by lorry.

Ruby port
This is the most straightforward style of port and accounts for the majority of the port that we drink – predominantly at Christmas, when price wars between the major producers result in silly prices. The bottles rarely have the word ruby on them, preferring their own brand identities, such as Warre’s Warrior or Cockburn’s Special Reserve.

Wines from multiple years are aged for two to three years, then blended and bottled while still deep-coloured, full of youthful berry fruit and a spirity fire. They don’t improve in the bottle, so no point stashing them away for a few years, and there’s no need to decant – other than the fact that it looks good on the table of course.

Prices from around £9 a bottle now – much less come Christmas.

Vintage port
The most famous style of port is also the most rare and expensive, accounting for only around 1% of the total sold, so most of us never actually drink it.

Vintage port is the product of a single year’s harvest, deemed to be of exceptional quality. Like ruby port, it is aged for a short time in wood, then put into very thick, dark glass bottles, where it is destined to remain for years, even decades, before being drunk. The port houses each decide whether to “declare” a vintage every year: the quality of the wine is ostensibly utmost, but in practice a vintage is declared three or four times in a decade.

In years where a port shipper does not “declare” a vintage, they may still, confusingly, produce a single quinta vintage port. These carry the shipper’s name and the name of the vineyard or quinta, such as Taylor’s Quinta de Vargellas or Graham’s Malvedos. They are less pricey than the straight vintage and designed to be drunk younger, as they come from less favoured years.

Why does vintage port last so long? All wine needs one or more of the following ingredients to help preserve it and to provide a framework within which the flavours can develop: sweetness, acidity and tannin. Vintage port has all of these in spades, as well as masses of dense fruit to provide the centrepiece to fill out the structural framework. As it ages, the fruit matures to give complex aromas and flavours – and it will always need decanting, to separate the clear wine from the thick deposit in the bottle.

Single quinta ports start at around £25 per bottle, vintage port varies greatly depending on the year, but expect to pay around £40 and up.

Late bottled vintage (LBV)
This is a relatively recent innovation, dating from the 1970s. LBV gives some of the cachet of a vintage port, with the grapes coming from a single year, but the price and quality are somewhere between ruby and vintage. As the name suggests, it spends longer than true vintage port ageing in wood before being bottled (hence late bottled). Most are filtered before bottling so need no decanting. They are designed to offer a full-bodied, dark-coloured port that goes some way towards the flavour of vintage port, but which is cheaper and can be drunk earlier.

Prices for LBVs start at around £10 a bottle.

Tawny port
Unlike the ruby and vintage versions, tawnies are aged in wood for an extended period. The time in barrel results in a mellow, nutty style of port which is deep amber-brown: tawny in fact.

The most basic tawnies can be pale pink rather than deep mahogany brown and don’t have much to recommend them. Instead look for “aged tawny” on the label, or an indication of age. 10 year-old tawny will be an average age of the wines in the bottle, ditto 20, or even over 40 year-old tawny. You might also come across a single vintage tawny, known as “colheita”.

Not deep purple, more mellow than sweet and spirity: this is the port that lends itself to summer drinking. While there’s nothing better than a nip of it next to a crackling fire in the winter months, in summer you can chill it, or even serve it over ice for a refreshing aperitif.

Tawny ports, like ruby, won’t have any sediment or need decanting and won’t improve in the bottle.

Warre’s Otima 10 year old – around £11.99 at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Thresher/Wine Rack and Waitrose
Quinta do Noval 10 year old - £15.99 at Waitrose
Taylor’s 10 year old - £17.99 at Sainsbury’s
Taylor’s 20 year old - £27.25 at Waitrose
Dow’s 20 year old - £26.25 at Waitrose
Calem 1990 Colheita - £20 at Waitrose

As with all these posts, this article was published in the Surrey Advertiser, but this version is much longer.

Ripe New Zealand reds

2009-06-01T09:29:00.005+01:00

“You wine writers need to check your facts!” barked John Buck, of Te Mata Estate, the oldest winery in New Zealand. This to a room full of wine writers, at last week’s London Wine Fair.

And his gripe? That too many wine guides state that, while New Zealand produces great white wines, its red wines lack fruit and have a tell-tale unripe, green, character. To prove his point, we then proceeded to taste a range of top flight Kiwi reds, all from the highly promising 2007 vintage, none of them showing a trace of anything unripe, yet with the New Zealand hallmark clearly-etched fruit. That was us told.

In defence of wine writing in general, I feel I should note that the leafy, unripe character of New Zealand’s reds is not a figment of our imagination. It was most definitely there when I first started tasting Kiwi reds back in the mid-nineties; I tasted it as recently as a couple of years ago in some Hawkes Bay syrahs. However, New Zealand’s winemakers are a determined bunch and have clearly worked hard to bring up the standard of their red wines, demonstrated by those impressive 2007s.

New Zealand’s first red wine successes came with pinot noir, which, ironically, has a reputation as one of the fussiest grapes in the world and hard to get right. Much of New Zealand’s neighbour, Australia, is too hot for top class pinot noir, for example, resulting in baked or stewed fruit flavours. New Zealand, however, has been arguably the most successful producer of fine, perfumed pinot noir, outside of its ancestral French home in Burgundy.

Pinot Noir producers to watch
New Zealand is, by any measure, at the cooler end of the winemaking world. However, its length from North (warmest) to South (coolest, this being the southern hemisphere), the varying influence of the cool Pacific and Southern Oceans, the variety of soils and sites, all make for wine regions which produce different styles of wine – even when based on the same grape variety.

Ata Rangi
The daddy of New Zealand’s pinot noir makers. They epitomize the muscular, relatively full-on style of Martinborough pinot. This spot at the southern tip of the North Island is about as far north as pinot ventures in New Zealand, making for depth of flavour, complexity and savoury richness. Burgundian in style – and price.
Ata Rangi Pinot Noir 2007, £31.49 from New Zealand House of Wine, Majestic (Fine Wine) £45 per bottle, down to £36 if you buy any 2 New Zealand wines.

Jackson Estate
Based in Marlborough, at the northern tip of the South Island, Jackson Estate has a reputation for elegant, Loire-ish sauvignon blanc. Their pinot noirs, though, are equally alluring and a great illustration of the lighter, more juicy style of Marlborough pinot.
Jackson Estate Vintage Widow Pinot Noir 2006, Majestic, £17.99, down to £14.39 if you buy any 2 New Zealand wines.

Felton Road
This is a small outfit with a huge reputation. Based in Otago deep in the South Island, the most southerly wine region in the world, they turn out deceptively effortless wines. The sunny days and cool nights in Otago give their pinots perfumed fruit and delicate tannins; light, but with no lack of flavour. Biodynamic practices may also have something to do with the poise and depth.
Felton Road Pinot Noir 2007, £25.50 from Imbibros, £25.99 (£22.50 case rate) from The Vineking, £26.20 from Les Caves de Pyrène (though the 2007 has yet to arrive and they have sold out of the 2006). They also make a number of wines from particular vineyards or blocks of vines, available in tiny quantities, including Calvert Vineyard and Block 3 – hard to find and prices start at £30 and up.

Other varieties
If New Zealand was going to succeed with any red variety, then pinot noir would be top of the list, with its liking for cooler conditions. Surely the warmer climate varieties like cabernet sauvignon, merlot and syrah are more of a struggle. Well, they have been, hence the talk of green, leafy wines.

However, the North Island, and specifically Hawkes Bay, has a warmer, maritime-influenced climate capable of ripening these varieties. Particularly important for syrah is an area called the Gimblett Gravels, with large pebbles from an ancient riverbed. These stones absorb heat from the sun during the day and radiate this heat during the night, helping to ripen the grapes – in much the same way that the “pudding stones” of Chateauneuf-du-Pape do in France’s southern Rhône Valley.

Producers to watch

Trinity Hill
With an uncompromising attitude to quality, Trinity Hill’s wines are ambitious and a signpost to the future of New Zealand reds. Their syrahs are all worth trying.
Trinity Hill Homage Syrah 2006, £75 from Swig. Less eye-watering prices for the Trinity Hill Gimblett Gravels Syrah 2007, £19.95 from Swig, £17.35 from New Zealand House of Wine.

Craggy Range
The winery may be in Hawkes Bay, but Craggy Range specialise in producing single vineyard wines from all over New Zealand, made from a range of grape varieties by Master of Wine Steve Smith. Highly-rated by people in the know, they command respect from everyone who has come across them.
Craggy Range Sophia 2006, a blend of mostly merlot, with cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon and malbec in support, is £25 at Waitrose. Wine Direct have the 2005 for £24.95, New Zealand House of Wine the 2004 at £23.75. For a more affordable taste try Craggy Range Syrah Block 14, Gimblett Gravels 2006, £16.99 from Waitrose.

Te Mata
Finally, back to New Zealand’s oldest producer, dating from the 1890s. They have a long-standing reputation for producing outstanding red wines (hence John Buck’s impatience with the “green” label), which have long commanded international recognition. Coleraine, their flagship red, is a blend of cabernet sauvignon and merlot with a fair dollop of cabernet franc. The 2007 is embryonic, but already mouthwatering and a delicious prospect, especially if you are prepared to wait a few years to allow it to develop.
Te Mata Coleraine 2007, £27.99 from The Vineyard (due in a couple of weeks, so check first!). The 2006 is available from New Zealand House of Wine for £28.25 and from Wine Direct for £26.75.

Stockist details
Imbibros – branches in Godalming and Farnham, http://www.imbibros.co.uk/
Les Caves de Pyrène – retail outlet in Artington, Guildford, http://www.lescaves.co.uk/
Majestic – various branches and online at http://www.majestic.co.uk/
New Zealand House of Wine – online-only: http://www.nzhouseofwine.co.uk/
Swig – online-only: http://www.swig.co.uk/
The Vineking – branches in Weybridge and Reigate, http://www.thevineking.com/
The Vineyard – Dorking, http://www.vineyard-direct.co.uk/
Waitrose – various branches and online at http://www.waitrosewine.com/
Wine Direct – on-line only: http://www.winedirect.co.uk/

Are English wines coming of age?

2009-05-15T15:33:00.003+01:00

English wines are at an awkward adolescent stage in their growth. They are past the early years when they were viewed as something of a joke, and not a very funny one at that. Today, more and more consistently enjoyable wines are being made across England (and Wales) and conditions seem right for a growth spurt to take them into adulthood with the other big boys of the wine world.

Of course wine-making in this country is not a new thing: the traditional view conjures pictures of Roman Britons lounging in their villas (presumably with the hypocaust turned up high), downing goblets of locally-produced wine. Sadly there is no evidence to support these imaginings: grapes seem to have been grown here in Roman times, but there is nothing to suggest that any wine was made from them.

However, it is true that wine was made, probably in a rather patchy and piecemeal way, over the intervening centuries. Wine was intimately connected with monastic and church ritual, but any lasting progress was hampered by the Black Death, the dissolution of the monasteries, easier trade routes with wine regions further south and climate change. The renaissance of English wine began shortly after the second world war, when the first commercial vineyard was planted at Hambledon in Hampshire.

So perhaps, given this long history, it’s churlish of me to talk of English wines being still only adolescent. Well you have to recognize that we don’t have the ideal climate for grape-growing and wine-making. If you’ve visited other wine-making regions around the world, you can’t help noticing that they are, well, warmer than here. Our climate is the limiting factor on our wine industry: it dictates which grape varieties can be grown, and only then in the most favoured spots, and only in the warmer years too.

These tricky conditions have led English wimemakers to plant grape varieties specifically bred to survive and ripen in our marginal climate. There’s nothing wrong with these varieties per se, but mostly they were developed in Germany and have correspondingly Germanic-sounding names: Huxelrebe, Schönburger, Würzer, Dornfelder. These are not names to tempt English wine drinkers – if those varieties are any good, why aren’t they grown elsewhere? Never seen a Siegerrebe from Chile or Australia, have we? And any combination of “Germany” and “wine” is commercial poison. There’s also some, perhaps correct, snobbishness about these varieties: they are mostly hybrids (made from crossings of other varieties) and there is a view that hybrids can never produce good quality wine, certainly not great wine.

As time has gone on, many of these older Germanic varieties and hybrids have started to die out in favour of other grapes, as our climate has warmed, as vine-growing and wine-making know-how have improved. They are still there and still used, but their names are not trumpeted on labels; they are mostly blended together in wines with inoffensive-sounding names like Autumn Spice or Surrey Gold.

Varieties that have proved themselves over time and which look likely to grow further in popularity are Bacchus, for white wines and Pinot Noir for reds.

Bacchus, despite being pretty much unknown outside these shores does have some advantages. It doesn’t sound German and even sounds like it might have something to do with wine. Perhaps more importantly (but only perhaps), it makes wines that are attractive to the average wine drinker. Bacchus wines have some things in common with our current favourite white, Sauvignon Blanc: fresh, herbal and nettley-smelling with attractive fruit.

Pinot noir – ah, finally we get to grow a variety that people have already heard of, that is actually grown in other countries. Pinot noir is the grape that makes red Burgundies; it is also one of the trio of grapes that are permitted to make Champagne. That’s quite a pedigree and, by some stroke of good fortune, we English seem to be able to grow it here.

Making red wines in England has been a bit of a struggle, frankly. Red grape varieties are more difficult to ripen here, so growers have had to resort to those unfamiliar-sounding hybrids in the past. Now, however, Pinot Noir has arrived and seems to suit the climate – and perhaps the climate has changed a little too, to meet it halfway. You still see other varieties in bottles of English red wine, but the future looks increasingly pinot-tinted. And, as a bonus, if the weather isn’t good enough to ripen the pinot noir to make red wine, then growers can use it to make sparkling wine instead.

Sparkling wines are perhaps the area where English wines have taken the greatest strides in the last few years. In Ridgeview and Nyetimber, both based in Sussex, England has sparkling wine makers whose ambition is to emulate Champagne itself in style and quality. People may have found the idea laughable not so many years ago – but they’re not laughing now. Indeed the Queen, it is said, serves Nyetimber sparkling wine at Buckingham Palace – though I don’t believe her Majesty is obliged to divulge all expense receipts (yet), so I can’t be categorical.

English Wine Week – 23rd – 31st May
This is the annual celebration of all things English and winey and a great excuse to get out and visit a vineyard or two. Over the course of the week vineyards across England will be opening their doors to welcome visitors and offer a variety of activities, including tours, tastings and sales or hosting special events. Details of all activities are available on www.englishwineweek.co.uk.

Recommended English Wines
A highly personal selection of my current favourite English wines.

Ridgeview Fitzrovia Brut 2006, £21.95 from Ridgeview themselves or £21.99 from Waitrose
Ridgeview’s take on a rosé Champagne, made authentically from chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier. All of Ridgeview’s wines are worth a try and their commitment to quality is always impressive – the only trouble being, their wines sell out so quickly that it’s hard to buy them at their peak of maturity.

Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 2001/3, £25.99, from Waitrose
Nyetimber are, by far, the largest sparkling wine producer in the country and further expansion is planned. They don’t suffer from false modesty and consider their wines on a par with Champagne. It’s a fine and elegant sparkling wine in any case.

Camel Valley Brut 2006, £19.99 from Waitrose, £19.95 from the vineyard
Unlike Ridgeview and Nyetimber, at Camel Valley, based in Cornwall, they pursue a more English idiom of sparkling wine, rather than apeing Champagne. This fruity and easy-going wine is made from a blend of Seyval blanc, Huxelrebe and Reichensteiner grapes.

Chapel Down Bacchus 2007, £9.49 at Waitrose, £9.99 direct from the vineyard in Tenterden, Kent
If you’ve yet to try Bacchus, this is a good place to start. Chapel Down is the country’s largest wine producer, making wines from grapes from their own substantial vineyards, as well as buying in grapes from growers all over Kent, Sussex, Essex and even the Isle of Wight. Although described as a dry wine, this wine is essentially off-dry, which is I feel the best way to appreciate most English white wines. The small amount of sweetness helps to round out the palate and enhances the fruit.

Bookers Vineyard Dark Harvest 2005, £7.99 from Waitrose, or £8.95 at Bookers Vineyard
What I really wanted to recommend is Samantha Linter’s pinot noir – but, sadly, she hasn’t had ripe enough grapes to make any in the last two summers, and the 2006 vintage is now sold out. One of only a small handful of female wine-makers in England, Samantha seems to have found her niche with her attractive, scented pinot. The Dark Harvest is made from the more reliably performing Dornfelder and Rondo grapes. Its jewel-like purple colour is matched by plenty of juicy berry fruit.

Denbies Hillside Chardonnay, £13.50 from the vineyard
I couldn’t write about English wines without mentioning Denbies, the largest single vineyard in the country (rather than the biggest producer). Denbies make a wide range of wines and, overall, quality is high and consistent. They can’t get the chardonnay grapes ripe enough every year to make a still, 100% chardonnay wine, but this is a great signpost of what English wine is capable of in the right hands and with favourable weather. No funny-sounding grape varieties, no hiding behind residual sweetness, just a well-made chardonnay that doesn’t automatically make you think, “OK for an English wine”.

Oddbins v Majestic

2009-05-05T17:54:00.001+01:00

Most wine in the UK is bought in supermarkets, but there is still a place, albeit a shrinking one, for specialist wine merchant chains on our High Streets. Oddbins and Majestic are, I would guess, the most interesting of the chains for people interested in wine.

I’ll come clean straight away – I once worked for Oddbins. Only for 10 months or so, until I found that selling wine and selling tins of beans had too much in common for me. But I will do my best not to get all misty-eyed about how things used to be “back in my day” and attempt to give a fair comparison of these two giants of UK wine retailing.

How do they stack up? Publicly-listed Majestic currently has 147 wine warehouses across the country, compared with 132 Oddbins shops, privately owned by Simon Baile and his business partner. The distinguishing factor for Majestic is that shoppers must buy a minimum of 12 bottles of wine (or beer or spirits); at Oddbins you always have the option of popping in for just a single bottle. I get the feeling that Oddbins eye this case-only policy jealously and would love to have their customers do the same. I can see their point: it’s so much easier to serve 20 customers in a day, each of them spending, say, £80 each to earn £1600 income; rather than having to deal with more like 160 customers, spending an average of £10 each.

Additionally, it must irk Oddbins’ owners that their rival can essentially build in a case discount to all their prices, whereas they must offer a single bottle price, which is necessarily higher. In order to address this imbalance, Oddbins offers discounts of up to 15 and even 20% on particular wines if you buy a mixed case, in order to encourage shoppers to buy more each time they visit. However, interestingly, Majestic are trialling a minimum purchase of six bottles in some of its stores, rather than the traditional twelve – so it may be that the benefits of their case-only policy are wearing thin in these straitened times.

Majestic’s management has had nothing more troublesome to deal with than the transition of power from long-time CEO Tim How, to Steve Lewis last year. From the outside at least, their progress looks assured, including snapping up fine wine specialists Lay & Wheeler in March this year.

Oddbins, by contrast, has been through a particularly torrid time in the last decade or so. In the eighties and nineties Oddbins was owned by Seagram, as part of its spirit and wine brand portfolio. During this time Oddbins grew rapidly to over 200 shops and stood head and shoulders above other High Street merchants – a funky image, eclectic range and pioneers of new wines to the UK and a foregone conclusion as the International Wine Challenge’s Wine Merchant of the Year.

Then in 2002, Oddbins, that champion of the new, the exciting, the sometimes, frankly, odd, was bought by a French company, Castel Frères. It should never have worked and it didn’t. Finally, last year, Castel sold Oddbins to the son of one of its former owners – not without first having cherry-picked the most profitable sites for its own group of underwhelming French wine merchants, Nicolas.

Oddbins’ new owners face challenges on many fronts – breathing life into their wine range, so neglected under Castel; retaining and motivating staff; regaining their place in the hearts of the UK’s wine lovers – and all at a time of unprecedented economic slowdown. I don’t envy them their task.

If Oddbins have been known for their funky, risky side of wine retail, then Majestic are more steady Eddy. They don’t take chances with their wine range – if someone’s going to champion a new wine country or region, you can bet it won’t be Majestic. However, while Oddbins have, to all intents and purposes, been absent from the UK wine scene, Majestic has stolen a march on its long-time rival and turned ex-Oddbins shoppers into loyal Majestic customers.

It’s not an easy time for anyone selling anything quite so frivolous as wine and it would be a shame to see either of these two retail institutions suffer. And, while it’s too early to say if Oddbins can rekindle its old magic, a rejuvenated wine presence on the High Street can only be welcomed.

Top wine picks from Oddbins
Oddbins Own White and Oddbins Own Red 2008 - £4.49 (£3.59 as part of a mixed dozen)
The Castel-era versions of these wines were dreary. Now, though, they are fantastic value for money wines made by the enterprising Domaines Paul Mas in the Languedoc – though it’s a shame they haven’t changed the fright of a label on the bottle. The white is a veritable cocktail of grapes: grenache blanc, vermentino, chenin blanc, colombard, ugni blanc and chasan which deliver a fresh, crisp yet weighty mouthful of apple and citrus fruit. The red, meanwhile, is made up of grenache, cinsault, syrah and carignan and offers lively, dark fruits with a touch of spice. At this price don’t expect greatness - but they are honest and cheerful.

Fox Gordon Princess Fiano 2008 - £9.99 (available mid-May)
This is the kind of off the wall wine we love Oddbins for – a cultish southern Italian grape variety, used to make a wine in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia. It has a gorgeous, alluring nose of honey and apricot – in the vein of viognier, but with more freshness – a full-on and interesting mouthful.

Margrain Pinot Noir Home Block 2007 - £14.99 (£11.99 as part of a mixed dozen). Available from end of May.
The case price is great value for such an accomplished Pinot Noir from Martinborough in New Zealand. This spot, at the very southern tip of the North Island, across the water from Marlborough, seems to produce the most intensely-flavoured and “masculine” of New Zealand’s pinots – this is rich, ripe, spicy and smoky, but with typical pinot noir lively acidity and perfume.

Top picks from Majestic
Dr L Riesling 2008 - £6.99
Despite its complete lack of popularity with the wine-drinking public, Majestic valiantly continues to stock a small but well-chosen range of wines from Germany. This riesling is just off-dry, with plenty of zesty, peachy fruit and at just 8.5% alcohol with a screwcap it’s a perfect picnic wine.

Hautes Cotes de Beaune Blanc, Domaine de Mercey 2004 - £9.99 (£7.99 if you buy two)
This is the kind of thing that Majestic do so well – white Burgundy is hardly original, but they have searched out a less fashionable area and found a great example of maturing Burgundian chardonnay at a very reasonable price. There’s a hint of honeyed ripeness to the appley fruit, along with a touch of peach and spice.

De Martino 347 Vineyards Carmenère Reserva 2007 - £7.49 (£5.99 if you buy any two Chilean wines)
If you’re planning a barbecue then look no further – it practically smells like barbecue steak already. The palate is a mass of juicy black cherry fruit.

State of independence - Surrey's wine merchants

2009-04-20T08:48:00.002+01:00

They may not have been demonstrating in the streets during the G20 summit, but independent wine merchants in Surrey are on a mission to free wine drinkers from the dead hand of the supermarket and multiple chain. With their help, we wine drinkers can cast off the shackles of the BOGOF and 3for2 offer and dare to explore new wine horizons in search of true wine value.

I have just spent an enjoyable day talking to a small cross-section of Surrey’s independent wine merchants, finding out what makes them tick and what keeps them going, despite the onslaught of the deep discounting behemoths. What struck me most, talking to these people, is their passion for wine and their desire to share it with as many people as possible. And, while they show no lack of ambition, it’s probably also true that few of them are going to grow hugely rich by selling wine. In fact there’s a well-worn saying that the way to make a small fortune in the wine trade, is to start with a large one.

Supermarkets lure customers with 3 wines for £10; and research has shown that the number one deciding factor on which wine to buy is a price promotion, above grape variety or personal recommendation. So how can the independents hope to compete?

The answer seems to be that there is a loyal band of wine drinkers who are prepared to look beyond the BOGOF. These people value the effort a wine merchant has put into choosing their range and trust them to offer advice, service and “real value” wines, as well as a genuine interest in their customers.

Do you have to spend more at an independent wine merchant? If you’re looking for 3 for £10 wines then the answer is generally yes. But from around £5 a bottle, the choice for a curious and interested wine shopper is far more inspiring than the supermarket wall of wine. And, interestingly, though all the merchants I spoke to offer wines from around £5 and up, the average amount people spend on a bottle ranges from around £7, up to £12 or so.

This statistic seems to back up what I heard the merchants saying to me today: people come back to them again and again. So customers might start off looking for the bargain bottles, but as they build up trust with the merchant, they’re willing to trade up and spend a little more.

Should we be spending more on each bottle of wine? On average we are loath to pay more than £4 a bottle in this country. Of the average price of £4.18, £1.57 and 55p are duty and VAT respectively, leaving just over £2 for the wine itself – including the bottle it comes in, shipping costs and any marketing overheads. The actual amount that could realistically be spent on what’s actually in the bottle is, therefore, closer to £1 at best. As the £4 is an average amount, there are plenty of people spending even less. How anyone makes wine that sells for £3 or under is something of a mystery to me and is clearly not sustainable. Someone has to be losing out – not least the wine drinker, I would argue.

Independent merchants, on the whole, fully understand that they cannot, and would not wish to, try and compete at the bottom end of the market. Their customers are probably already interested in wine and value the input of someone who can help them discover new ones, often with bottles on tasting at the shop. Or they could even track down something they wouldn’t normally stock. We’ve come to expect services like free delivery and glass loan, but independents frequently also offer tastings of their wines and/or special events. Last but not least, the actual shopping experience is enjoyable, a world away from throwing a couple of bottles in along with your weekly supermarket shop.

What do we want? An inspiring and interesting selection of wines that represent true value for money and which help support our local economy! Well I don’t think anyone will be chanting that any time soon on the streets of London, but it’s a start.

Who is your local wine merchant?
Les Caves de Pyrène, Artington, Guildford – eclectic selection of “real wines”, including many organic and biodynamic producers.
Guildford Wine Company, Shalford – friendly and knowledgeable local merchant with a broad range to appeal to a wide local customer base.
Ranmore Wines – a new venture expanding its smallish, hand-picked range, with a good selection of fizz from a former Champagne-only specialist.
Taurus Wines, Bramley – a broad but carefully-chosen range from around the world and plenty of expertise in wines for weddings and parties.
The Vineyard, Dorking – broad range of wines and prices in a welcoming, smart shop and the biggest selection of Amarones I’ve ever seen.
The Vineking, Reigate and Weybridge – a huge range (especially in the larger, newly-opened Weybridge shop) of anything but dull wines, chosen by a Viking (I kid you not).

There are many more, including: A&A in Cranleigh, Arthur Rackham in Burpham, Imbibros in Godalming and Farnham, Haslemere Cellars, Vicki’s in Chobham...the list goes on. Find your nearest merchant by Googling “independent wine merchant Surrey”.

Like wine for chocolate

2009-04-03T12:53:00.002+01:00

Easter is just around the corner and for many of us that means chocolate. Chocolate eggs of all shapes and sizes, chocolate bunnies, boxes of chocolate, chocolate anything in fact, and lots of it.

This got me thinking about wine and chocolate – not a natural combination you might think - and you’re probably right. Chocolate is quite a challenge for any alcoholic drink, with its dense, rich sweetness, its sheer “sticks around in your mouth for ages”-ness. Most of the time I’d probably go for a cup of tea, or coffee, if I’m eating some chocolate. But in the interests of research I have been looking around for wines that might just work with the dark stuff.

Which leads me to the first issue – chocolate is such a broad term. There’s a world of difference between your Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and your 70% cocoa solids plain chocolate; what might go with an airy, creamy milk chocolate mousse is probably not going to suit a dark chocolate roulade with raspberry coulis. Chocolate itself has different characters – and, to add to the complexity, we love to use it in all manner of puddings, sweets, biscuits and to combine it with cream, nuts, fruit – you name it.

So chocolate and wine combinations have more to them than meets the eye. Here are some suggestions, based on the type of chocolate you’re dealing with.

White chocolate
White chocolate is hardly chocolate in some ways, as it contains no cocoa as such, just cocoa butter, vanilla and masses of sugar of course. This makes it the lightest and sweetest type of chocolate which needs a light and sweet wine to match.

A fun option would be a Moscato d’Asti, from Piedmont in Italy. It’s lightly sparkling, light in alcohol (only 5-6%) and definitely sweet – could there be a more unfashionable combination in a wine? Treat it as a guilty pleasure – it might be uncool, but its sweet, grapey, pear-tinged bubbles are a delight with white chocolate puddings (as well as fruit salads, incidentally). Oddbins have Michele Chiarlo’s Moscato d’Asti “Nivole” at £9.99 for a half bottle. A less refined version of this is available as wines labelled “Asti” rather than “Moscato d’Asti”: the most widely distributed version is Asti Martini NV, £5.96 from Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose.

Milk chocolate and light chocolate puddings
If you’re planning on helping the children finish their supply of milk chocolate eggs, then you could do worse than try a glass of tawny port to go with it.

All port starts out life as a deep-coloured red wine, whose fermentation is stopped by the addition of grape spirit, leaving a fortified, naturally sweet wine as a result. Ruby port, the regular stuff, is aged for a short time in barrel, then bottled while it is still deepest ruby and full of brambly fruit. This style of port also has its uses with chocolate – I’d be tempted to try it with unadulterated plain chocolate, as well as with dark chocolate puddings that involve berry fruits.

The tawny version of port has a lighter, yes tawny, colour, brought about by long term ageing in barrel. As the wine loses its deep colour, it takes on a more mellow, nutty character, making it a remarkably versatile drink, one that can stand up to milk chocolate and lighter chocolate puddings.

That nutty character would also make a nice match with chocolate sweets involving nuts…chocolate brownies, perhaps?

Look for an aged tawny, at least 10 years old: the older the wine, the more mellow and complex it will be. A good introduction to the style is Warre’s Otima 10 year old Tawny Port, £11.99 for 50cl at Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda, Thresher/Wine Rack and Waitrose.

An interesting twist on the tawny port style is Mavrodaphne of Patras (in Greece), available for £4.99 at Waitrose. This is made in the same way as port, but from the splendidly-named Mavrodaphne grape, native to Greece. It has also been aged in casks, giving it that hallmark caramelly flavour with a hint of spice. I recently enjoyed this wine with a seemingly difficult to match pud involving milk chocolate mousse in a cup of dark chocolate with raspberries on top – the Mavrodaphne took all this in its stride.

Dark chocolate and rich, dark chocolate puddings
These can be some of the most difficult things to pair with wine, because of their full-on flavours and richness. You might come across some surprising matches, however.

I unexpectedly enjoyed Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise with posh dark chocolates. Not sure if I can explain why. The wine is a lightly fortified sweet white wine made from the same grape as the Moscato mentioned above and I can only deduce that somewhere between the sweet fruit of the wine and the rich bitterness of the chocolates, some harmony was reached. Tesco and Waitrose both stock Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise made by the winegrowers’ co-operative for around £5.50 for a 50cl bottle.

A more mainstream solution is to echo the chocolatey richness and slight bitterness of the food with a wine with similar traits. Ruby port could work here, as could wines from Maury or Banyuls in the Southwest of France. Another form of sweet, fortified red wine made in a similar way to port – who knew there were so many of these things around? – the young versions of these wines combine a bitter chocolate character with a trace of black fruit. If this sounds like the pudding you’re eating, then give a Maury or Banyuls a go. Waitrose have Domaine Pouderoux Maury 2002/3 for £9.99 for 50cl.

In all these matches I’m obeying the food and wine matching premise that the wine should be sweeter than the food that you’re eating. I’m generally not a fan of rules when it comes to choosing wines, but I find wines that are less sweet than what I’m eating end up tasting overly dry and lacking fruit.

However, it’s horses for courses and people who baulk at the idea of any sweet wine might prefer to have a dry red with chocolate. Again, it makes sense to look for wines which have plenty of ripe, dark fruit with a hint of chocolate flavour – full-on Zinfandels from California are often touted as a good chocolate companion. I would also recommend trying an Amarone from Italy: these wines are made from partly dried grapes, which gives a full-bodied wine with masses of dark, ripe black cherry fruit and an edge of bitter chocolate. Not a cheap option (£20 and up), but Phil Jones of The Vineyard in Dorking is a fan of the style and should be able to point you in the right direction.

The richest, sweetest chocolate puddings are quite possibly beyond the reach of most wines…except one. Liqueur muscats from Australia are a unique wine style and a gift from Australia to the rest of the wine world. Muscat grapes (I’m intrigued how often this grape variety is cropping up here) are harvested late, when they have begun to shrivel and raisin on the vine. The grapes are part-fermented, then fortified to produce, port-style, a sweet, fortified wine. Aged in casks in tin-roofed huts under the hot Australian sun, these syrupy wines turn dark in colour, with a spectrum of flavours including figs, marmalade, treacle, nuts…I could go on. Not wimpy wines, they can stand up to just about any pudding you care to throw at them.

Majestic stock De Bortoli Show Liqueur Muscat for £11.99 a bottle. A step up in quality, though, is Stanton and Killeen Classic Rutherglen Muscat, £13.15 for a half bottle at Waitrose.

And finally…if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, try an Australian sparkling shiraz. These wines are never serious, but can be serious fun – and their full-on sweet, black fruit with notes of dark chocolate give a clue that they might just work with puddings. You can pick up Jacob’s Creek Sparkling Shiraz at Sainsbury’s for £8.98 and Banrock Station Sparkling Shiraz is £8.79 at Waitrose.

If all that sounds a little overwhelming, remember it’s hard to beat the great British cuppa with anything sweet.

Spain - is there life beyond Rioja and Cava?

2009-03-23T08:56:00.002Z

We love Spain – love its warm weather and late-night tapas-munching bar culture when on holiday. Love its wines – Cava, all the fizz of Champagne at a fraction of the price and Rioja of course, lovely soft, fruity red wines.

Well yes, I wouldn’t want to argue with any of that but, as the world’s third largest producer of wines, there is a whole sea of Spanish wines out there to explore. We have been happily paddling in the shallows of Cava and Rioja – but perhaps it’s time to strike out for deeper waters in search of adventure.

Catalonia
Most of the Cava that we know and (some of us) love hails from the Penedés region near Barcelona in Catalonia, north east Spain. But there is much more to area than cheap and cheerful fizz. Miguel Torres, one of the most important figures in Spanish wine for the last four decades and more, is based in Catalonia. His wine stable includes all wine styles (and prices) but a delightful introduction to the modern face of Spanish white wine is Torres Viña Esmeralda. It’s a blend of highly aromatic Muscat grapes, along with a dash of Gewurztraminer. Muscat is about the only grape variety that can be said to smell of, well, grapes; Gewurztraminer adds a hint of rose petal to the pot. All this might lead you to expect a sweet wine – but Viña Esmeralda is dry, with plenty of clean, aromatic fruit. It’s also just 11.5% alcohol, so makes a great choice for sipping in the garden on a sunny afternoon.
Torres Viña Esmeralda, Waitrose £6.99; Thresher/Wine Rack £8.49 or £5.66 at the 3 for 2 price; Majestic £6.64 or £4.99 if you buy two.

Rías Baixas
This cool, rainy northwestern corner of Spain probably has a hard time attracting the average British holidaymaker – why go all that way for weather we can get at home? Its white wines, however, are definitely worth seeking out. These are made from Albariño, a grape which combines the slightly peachy aromas and flavours of the increasingly trendy Viognier, with the crisp acidity reminiscent of Sauvignon Blanc. What’s not to like? Great for fish and seafood.
Albariño 2007, Martín Códax, Majestic £10.99 or £8.24 when you buy two.

Cariñena
Spanish wine regions are like the washing up: there seems to be an endless supply of them. Cariñena is one of the ones with little to distinguish it from countless others – but this low profile makes it a good source of bargain bottles for wine shoppers. Spain does a good line in spicy, heart-warming reds and this one is a blend of Grenache, topped up with around a third of Tempranillo – the predominant grape of Rioja. Grenache produces punchy, spicy wines that go down well at this time of year. The Tempranillo gives more tannic structure and classy black fruit. If this were from Rioja, you’d have to pay considerably more for this amount of drinkability.
Castillo de Montearagón Reserva 2003, £4.49 at Tesco.

Calatayud
Another region you’ve probably never heard of, but a familiar grape in the form of Grenache – or Garnacha in Spanish. It’s got plenty of meaty flavour and dark bramble fruit – and its tannins need something meaty to eat alongside to enjoy this wine at its best.
Viña Fuerte Old Vine Garnacha 2007, £5.49 at Waitrose.

Navarra
Navarra is one of those wine regions which suffers from being next door to a much better-known neighbour: in this case, Rioja. Rather than trying to plough their own furrow, many of Navarra’s winemakers seem content to produce wines in the mould of Rioja, but sadly most are just not as good. This wine, however, is an exception. It’s made from the Graciano grape, which is sometimes used in small quantities in better quality Riojas, but it’s rare to see a wine made entirely from this variety. This is not because Graciano is a poor quality grape, but the fact that it’s hard to get it to ripen fully. Underripe, Graciano makes wines with mouthpuckering tannins and rasping acidity – not a good combination. Viña Zorzal’s Graciano, though, is fully ripe with plenty of silky blackcurrant fruit, but with enough acidity and tannin to keep it fresh and balanced.
Viña Zorzal Graciano 2007, The Vineking (branches in Reigate and Weybridge) £8.99 or £15 for two bottles.

New grape varieties, unfamiliar wine regions – and I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what Spain has to offer the wine lover. Cast off your water wings and dive in, the water’s lovely.

Portugal, Europe's wild west

2009-03-05T16:57:00.005Z

Think of Portuguese wines and what comes to mind? Mateus Rosé, the sweet pink wine in the funny shaped bottle that you can re-use as a lamp base? Or Port perhaps, the sweet, fortified wine that makes a brief appearance in the cocktail cabinet at Christmas?

Those drinks are still part of the picture, but things are changing fast in Europe’s most westerly wine region. Portugal is now making some of the most exciting wines around - if you’re prepared to open your mind to some unusual grape varieties and their tongue-twisting names.

Sticking out as it does into the Atlantic Ocean to the far west of Spain, Portugal’s climate is greatly influenced by the sea. The coastal regions, especially in the north, are cooler and wetter than you might imagine by simply looking at a map. Portugal’s northern coastal regions experience around three times as much rain as soggy old Manchester. However, as you move south and inland, the terrain and the climate change dramatically – by the time you have reached the Alentejo, bordering Spain in the south east, rainfall is down to only around half of what Manchester might experience in a year.

The vast, rolling plains of the south are Portugal’s own New World. Wine-making is less steeped in tradition and there have been many more winemakers arriving from outside the country, bringing new methods and international grape varieties with them. The hot and dry climate is home to cork oak forests (you’ll never find a synthetic cork on a bottle of Portuguese wine), olive groves and vast wine estates.

Some recommended Portuguese wines to try:

Vinho Verde
Everyone knows this means “green wine”, though the name refers to the region, in the cool, wet north, rather than the wine. You can find red Vinho Verde, though it’s an acquired taste with its searing acidity and rasping tannins. I’d recommend the white version for a more gentle introduction to the style.

At its most basic, white Vinho Verde is a light-bodied, crisp, fresh mouthful that keeps you coming back for more – a great accompaniment to things like grilled sardines, where the acidity of the wine cuts through the fattiness of the fish, but has no overpowering flavour of its own.

Quinta de Azevedo 2007, £5.99 from Waitrose and Majestic, is very much in the mould of the clean and simple style, made from Portugal’s native Loureiro and Arinto grapes.

Giro Sol 2007, £10.95 from Fortnum & Mason (http://www.fortnumandmason.com/). This is a revelation: made entirely from the native Loureiro grape this wine really sings, with aromas of stone fruit and crushed oyster shells and a combination of dryness but delicious, ripe fruit on the palate. The wine is the result of a joint venture between Dirk Niepoort, one of the Douro Valley’s most dynamic wine-makers, and Soalheiro, makers of the finest Vinho Verdes. I suspect this wine would cost considerably more if it had anything other than the name Vinho Verde on the label.

Reguengo de Melgaço Alvarinho 2006, £12.95 from South Downs Cellars of Hurstpierpoint (http://www.southdowncellars.co.uk/), is far removed in style from the basic model of Vinho Verde. Made from the Alvarinho grape – also known as Albariño outside Portugal - this is dry and mineral, but with a real sense of richness and depth on the palate. Great with seafood.

The Douro Valley
For centuries the Douro Valley in northern Portugal was synonymous with a single drink: port. This fortified, sweet red wine was arguably invented by, certainly most appreciated by, the British. According to the regulations governing port production, the amount of port that each producer can make is restricted – any grapes leftover after this maximum had been reached was traditionally made into a rough and ready red table wine. Nothing grand, it was destined for local, short term drinking and no great effort was put into its production.

However, as the market for port began to shrink in the latter part of last century, and stainless steel made temperature controlled fermentations possible, Douro’s growers realised they could have the makings of more decent table wines at their disposal. Now, Douro’s non-fortified red wines, made from the same mix of grapes as their half-brother (or sister?) port, are making waves in the wine world and attracting acclaim – and corresponding high prices.

The grape varieties may not be familiar – Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, Tinto Cao and Tinta Barocca to name just a few of the major ones – but the unique, aromatic and full-bodied wines that result are a welcome change from the ocean of same old same old Shirazes, Cabernets and Merlots.

Altano 2005, £5.49 from Waitrose provides a good grounding in the style, made by the Symington family who are synonymous with some of the most famous port houses. This is spicy, full-flavoured, savoury and very food friendly.

Waitrose’s own “In Partnership” Douro Reserva 2006, at £9.99, may not be cheap, but does give you great value for money. Made in conjunction with renowned Douro producer Quinta de la Rosa, it is a seriously classy glassful of polished, spicy and structured fruit – one to try at a dinner party for a claret fiend perhaps.

Other regions
Quinta de Bons Ventos Red 2007, £5.99 from Oddbins. From the Estremadura (literally meaning “extremely hard”) just north of Lisbon, this is an interesting mouthful reminiscent of bramble jelly, with no shortage of fruit, but good freshness too.

JM Fonseca Periquita 2005, £4.99 at Waitrose. This cheery little wine comes from the Terras do Sado region to the south of Lisbon. Periquita is not the name of the grape (nothing as straightforward as a single variety here) – it’s a mix of Castelão, Trincadeira and Aragonez (aka Tempranillo). If you can get past the hideous wild west saloon bar-style label, the wine inside is delightfully fruity, with some structure – a good all-rounder.

Your chance to taste for yourself – special 2 for 1 ticket offer for readers of this blog!

ANNUAL TASTING OF PORTUGUESE WINES, 10TH MARCH 2009
Lord’s Cricket Ground
6pm – 8pm
Nursery Pavilion, St Johns Wood, London, NW8 8QN

Rich, flavoursome reds and vibrant whites, unique grape varieties, and a host of interesting winemakers with hundreds of individual wines to choose from – if this sounds like heaven to you then come to Lords Cricket Ground on the 10th March for the Annual Tasting of Portuguese Wines (6pm – 8pm).

Tickets £15 (£7.50 OAP.students) available from:
http://www.seetickets.com/ (search ‘wine’)
Phone See Tickets on 0871 220 0260

Readers can buy tickets on a special 2 for the price of 1 offer, by quoting the word PORTUGAL when you book by phone on the number above – this offer is not available online.

What to do with your leftovers

2009-02-23T08:48:00.003Z

Some of us encounter the problem more frequently than others – how best to keep leftover wine from a bottle you haven’t finished. Some people tell me it’s a problem they never face, simply because they always finish the bottle. However, I’m sure we are all left with unfinished wine at some stage. My particular vice is having numerous bottles on the go at the same time: if you’re eating chilli con carne you can’t possibly have the same wine you opened to go with chicken risotto last night, can you? Well I can’t, anyway.

Once a bottle of wine is opened, the liquid inside is exposed to oxygen and the process of oxidation begins. A little bit of oxygen can be a good thing, but, left long enough, all wine will turn to vinegar as a result. Before you get to the vinegar stage, though, the wine becomes less lively, less aromatic and fruity and less enjoyable to drink.

Cheap and cheerful
So what’s the best way to keep an opened bottle of wine fresh?
The simplest solution is simply to put the cork back in the bottle. Cold delays oxidation, so white wines that go back in the fridge have a better chance of surviving intact for a while. And the more wine left in the bottle the better. Any bottle that has just a glass out of it and that you stopper and go back to the next day is generally not too affected. You also need to think about the style of wine: the lightest, most aromatic white wines will suffer most from being left around for more than a day or so, especially if they are left unstoppered and out of the fridge for any length of time. Whereas some full-bodied and young red wines (I’m thinking especially of Italian reds and the like), can positively benefit from being opened one day and drunk the next – the gentle oxidation is just what the wine needs to allow the wine to open out and show more of its range of flavours.

There’s an array of devices available for preserving wine, from the cheap to the vastly expensive. But a quick and potentially free solution is simply to have a range of smaller bottles with screwcaps on hand. Just decant the unfinished wine into a bottle that accommodates it and voilà – instant wine preservation.

Sparkling wines have an additional problem – preserving the fizz is essential to the enjoyment of these wines. There is a myth, which I believed for years, that putting a teaspoon (handle downwards, bowl sticking out of the top) in a bottle of Champagne will keep the sparkle for longer. Readers, I have to tell you, it’s utter rubbish. When I tried leaving an opened bottle in the fridge, without a spoon, I found no difference – all sparkling wines will stay fizzy for a while in the fridge, with the amount of wine left in the bottle the critical factor. If you want to be sure of coming back to a fizzy bottle, up to three days later, then invest in a special Champagne stopper, from around £5 a pop (ho, ho) online.

Top of the range
Many restaurants and bars now offer a wide range of wines – and more and more by the glass. This is great for wine drinkers, not just for providing more variety, but also for giving us the chance to order just one glass and drink sensibly, rather than having to order a whole bottle. It also gives greater scope for experimentation – you might want to play it safe and go for a wine you know and love if you have a bottle to get through. But if you can order a single glass then you might just give that Argentinian Torrontes a whirl.

But, when you order your single glass, how do you know if you’re getting the first glass from a new bottle, or the last one? And if it is the last one, can you be sure that your wine is going to be as fresh and lively as it should be? Especially if you’re going for something out of the ordinary, your bottle might have been hanging around for days, or longer. Pubs or restaurants that just re-cork cannot guarantee the quality of their wines by the glass.

There are a number of wine saving systems available to wine drinkers, but two which have earned respect in the high pressure environment of pubs, bars and restaurants are the Presorvac and the Enomatic. The Presorvac is a clever system which sucks air from the opened bottle of wine with a pump, keeping the oxygen out which causes oxidation. Conversely for sparkling wines the system pumps air into the bottle to preserve the bubbles. You can buy the Presorvac online from various suppliers, including Guildford-based Wine Gift Centre (http://www.winegiftcentre.com/) – but be prepared for the hefty price tag of £270!

A system which is surely beyond the scope of all but Russian oligarchs for use at home is something called the Enomatic, which has been put to good use by the recently re-launched Old Bear in Cobham (http://www.theoldbearcobham.co.uk). These machines cost a cool £4,000 each and The Old Bear has invested in two of them, allowing them to serve 8 different wines in a range of measures (50, 75 and 125ml). Each wine is blanketed in a layer of inert argon gas, which preserves the just-opened freshness of wines for up to three weeks, apparently. They change the wines available each month – January was Australian whites and Italian reds – and my sampling of a days old red wine was every bit as good as if it was the first glass from a newly-opened bottle.

The cheap and cheerful home versions of these two systems are things like Private Preserve, which uses inert gas to blanket the wine; and Vacu-vin, which uses the vacuum system – but of course neither is going to work for sparkling wines. You can pick up either of them for under a tenner online and, while their performance is not up to the level of the Enomatic or Presorvac, they are an improvement on simply sticking the cork back in the bottle.

What's love got to do with it? Fizz for Valentine's Day

2009-02-06T09:20:00.001Z

I seem to recall from my younger days that St Valentine’s Day was all about getting a card (or not, in which case cue moodiness and feelings of desolation) from a mystery admirer on 14th February. In other words, it was a day for the free and single, whether young or not. Now, however, it seems to have turned into something that involves couples celebrating their togetherness, to the exclusion of all the singletons. It’s one of the busiest nights of the year for the restaurant trade (not to mention the rose sellers), as couples across the land pay through the nose to eat a special “valentine’s menu”, surrounded by other couples all doing the same.

Frankly I’d rather stick needles in my eyes, so, as usual, I’ll be marking the event by staying home. With more and more of us having to count the pennies, maybe you will be joining me – so to speak.

One of the joys of staying in for Valentine’s Day is that you can splash out on special food – and wine of course – and know that you’ll still be hard-pressed to spend a fraction of what it would cost you to go out.

If you want to make someone feel special, then what can say it better that something sparkling? Champagne is top of the list, if your budget stretches to it – and pink champagne seems to have become de rigueur in recent years.

Laurent-Perrier Rosé NV (£79.99 for a single bottle from Wine Rack, or £59.99 if you buy 3; £62.99 from Oddbins, or check on-line at www.wine-searcher.com for independent stockists from around £44)
This is the classic pink fizz lover’s fizz. Unlike many rosé champagnes its pink colour comes from letting the skins of the pinot noir and pinot meunier grapes stay in contact with the grape juice – rather than just mixing in a little red wine to a regular champagne. It’s got delicious, crisp, aromatic red fruit – and it’s not cheap.

For cash-strapped romantics you can’t do better than Lindauer Brut Special Reserve NV (£11.99 each or £7.99 if you buy 3 from Wine Rack; £9.99 from Waitrose and Oddbins; £9.99 at Majestic, down to £7.49 if you buy two). Technically not a rosé, but it does have a delicious hint of salmon pink from the high proportion of pinot noir in the blend. The quality of the New Zealand fruit shines through, giving strawberry and cream hints to the nose, but a thoroughly grown-up, savoury palate to follow – great as an aperitif or with smoked salmon and the like.

Of course fizz doesn’t have to be pink, so here are a couple of recommendations that I find give reliable value for money.

Taittinger Brut Réserve NV has a higher than normal amount of chardonnay in its blend, which gives it extra elegance and poise. This champagne is fairly widely available, but for the best prices at the moment head to Majestic, who have it for £36.65 or £27.49 if you buy two bottles; or Waitrose, where you can buy a single bottle for £25.59.

If you’re looking for a sparkling bargain, it’s probably best to avoid the very cheapest champagne, which you can pick up for say £11-12. While it may live up to “cheap”, it is likely to throw in “nasty” for good measure. It’s better to spend your money on a decent New World interpretation of champagne, or a French crémant – made in the same way as champagne, but outside the Champagne region.

Green Point Brut Vintage 2004 gives a hint of champagne style and substance – it is Moet & Chandon’s Australian operation after all. Pick it up at Majestic for £19.49 a bottle, or just £12.99 if you buy two.

From France you could give Cuvée Royale Crémant de Limoux Brut NV a whirl. At £6.36 on offer from Waitrose, it’s money well-spent.

Half a gallon of your finest Chablis, please...

2009-01-23T13:02:00.002Z

Chablis is, arguably, the most famous name in the world of wine. It is instantly recognizable to any wine drinker, even if they have never tasted it. Until the French authorities started to clamp down on such practices, almost every wine-producing country in the world made a “chablis”: a sign of the power of the name and its strong association with a classic wine style. Indeed, one of my earliest wine-drinking memories involved buying a “half gallon of Chablis” (I kid you not) while in the US.

Genuine Chablis, rather than its imitators, must come from a specific area in France, surrounding the small and rather sleepy town of Chablis, southeast of Paris. As a wine region, Chablis is lumped together with the Burgundy region – probably at least partly because its wines are, like white Burgundy, all made from the chardonnay grape. Stylistically and geographically, though, Chablis (the region and the wine) has more in common with Champagne to the north and with the classic Sauvignon Blanc growing areas around Sancerre in the Loire Valley to the west.

Classic white burgundies are characterised by the use of new oak barrels to ferment and age the wines, giving them extra weight and depth of flavour to complement the ripe fruit. Chablis, meanwhile, aims for a very different expression of the chardonnay grape. The hallmarks of the best Chablis are minerality, elegance and crisp acidity. Some oak is used here, but most of it is not new and does not, therefore, impart its unmistakeable vanilla stamp to the wines. It’s more about giving an extra nuance of flavour and some additional texture to the wine. The exact amount of oak used varies by producer, by the year and even by the vineyard from the same producer.

Given its northerly position in France (only Champagne is further north), getting chardonnay to ripen fully here is a gamble the Chablis wine makers undertake each year. As you would expect, there are big differences in the size and quality of the grape crop from year to year, so it is a region where it pays to know your vintages. Winemakers must hope for enough sun to get their grapes just ripe enough, while maintaining their hallmark acidity and finesse. They are able to do this at all only by virtue of a geographical accident.

Chablis’ vineyards are planted on an outcrop of what’s called Kimmeridgian, a particular type of limestone packed with fossilised remains of oyster shells. This soil provides a fantastic growing medium for the vines, which warms quickly and keeps the vines well-drained and helps the grapes to ripen in a marginal climate.

How Kimmeridgian got its name from a small village in Dorset is a rather convoluted tale. Imagine an enormous submerged bowl made of limestone which lies under the English Channel. One lip of the bowl emerges from the Earth around Chablis and the other around Kimmeridge, Dorset. Why an English hamlet unknown outside Dorset got the glory, rather than the historic wine-making region of Chablis is a mystery. I’m guessing the English got the chance to give the stone its name before the French noticed – and now it’s too late.

So what does Chablis taste of? Unlike many white wines, Chablis is not fruity – or fruit-driven, whatever that means. It smells and tastes of stones, minerals, sometimes flint and smoke. It is resolutely light-bodied, with high acidity – but the best wines are never harshly acidic and don’t lack flavour, despite their light body. Can the fossilised oysters which cover the vineyards really be imparting their chalky minerality to the wines made there? Impossible to prove, but an irrestistible theory – and Chablis with oysters is undoubtedly one of the classic food and wine matches. The evidence is out there…

Some Chablis to try

Tesco Finest* Chablis 2007, £8.99
2007 was a challenging year in Chablis – cool weather made the choice of picking date all-important, in order to have enough ripeness in the grapes to balance out the high acidity. This wine impressed me with a sense of where it comes from – racy, mineral and a hint of green apple fruit.

Waitrose Chablis 2007, £10.99
Made by the reliable co-operative, La Chablisienne, this has good depth of flavour and correct acidity. One for fans of Sancerre or Pouilly Fumé.

Chablis 2006, Domaine de Chantemerle, £10.99, Majestic
In contrast to 2007, 2006 was a hot vintage (we had a summer too, you might remember) and this translates into a more powerful and perfumed wine.

Chablis Premier Cru Vaillons Defaix-Raveneau 2001, Tesco, £18.49
If you want to know what maturing, classy Chablis tastes like, then give this splash-out wine a whirl. A huge streak of acidity runs through this wine, which has never been near an oak barrel.

Who is top dog in the wine production stakes?

2009-01-08T10:08:00.001Z

I caught a snippet of wine news in the national media last week. It was announced that Italy, for the first time since 1998, was set to overtake France as the world’s largest producer of wine in 2008. A further sign of France’s inexorable decline as the former gargantuan superpower of the wine world? As usual, when statistics get into the public domain, there’s a bit more to it when you look more closely.

France and Italy are generally pretty neck and neck in terms of wine production, occupying the top two spots and competing for first place on a regular basis. 2008 has been a poor year, with resulting lower yields in France; whereas conditions were more favourable in Italy, allowing them to nudge ahead this year.

Behind the front two comes Spain; but with a mere 36 million hectolitres, to France’s 52 million and Italy’s 54 million, they are never going to be a serious challenger for the top spot. A hectolitre is a Euro-harmonised measure of volume, by the way, equal to 100 litres: basically we are talking a lot of wine here.

So far so unsurprising, but this got me thinking about who we assume makes the most wine in the world. If you look down the aisles of major supermarkets in this country, which country would you imagine is snapping at the heels of the top three? Australia perhaps?

In fact Australia is down in sixth place, behind the US (ah yes of course) and, er, Argentina. Argentina?

We may be relative newcomers to the idea of buying Argentinian wines, but they’ve been making them for a long time – and clearly drinking most of them themselves, thank you. It’s interesting to compare Argentina with Chile – two countries that we tend to lump together in wine terms. While Argentina has long had a successful wine industry, mostly making wine for domestic consumption, Chile has not.

Chile now sits in tenth place in world wine production terms, but is undisputed world champion in terms of wine exporting: of the 7.9 million hectolitres of wine they make in a year, close to 50% of it (4.2 million hectolitres) is exported. Chile historically had no tradition of wine drinking or wine-making. However, in one of the most remarkable success stories of the wine world, they built a wine-making industry based on, and still dominated by, exports.

It’s worth looking at another unusual name, for us in Europe at any rate, which figures highly in the wine production statistics: China. China is now the world’s seventh largest producer of wine in the world, just behind Australia. We don’t (yet) see Chinese wines on the High Street, as most of their production is for domestic consumption. But, given the Chinese determination to succeed when they set their minds to it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that all changes in the next five years.

Where do you reckon New Zealand comes in the world rankings? Maybe somewhere close to Chile? Not only are they nowhere near Chile, producing just over 1 million hectolitres of wine a year to Chile’s 7.9 million, they don’t even make the top twenty. Such wine-making luminaries as Greece, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine and Moldavia all make more wine than New Zealand. We in the UK are by far New Zealand’s biggest export market.

It’s also instructive to look at the absolute volumes being produced by each country, as well as their relative importance. Italy, with its 54 million hectolitres, produces over three times as much wine as Australia. In fact just two regions, Sicily and Puglia (the “heel” of Italy) produce more wine than the whole of Australia each year. Of France’s 52 million hectolitres of wine, 10% or so of that total is produced by just one region: Bordeaux, France’s single biggest wine region, by some margin.

There’s no big story here, just a timely reminder that statistics always have a story to tell, if you look behind the headline.

Sources:
- Organisation International de la vigne et du vin (OIV), Situation Report for the World Vitivinicultural Sector in 2005 (the most recent available)
- Istituto Statistica Mercati Agro-Alimentari (ISMEA), Rome
- Conseil Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bordeaux (CIVB)

One day like this a year...

2008-12-12T12:25:00.000Z

Everyone can dream. While my children concoct their ideal lists of toys for Father Christmas to bring, I pore over wine merchants’ lists, choosing my ideal wines that I will organize myself, rather than leaving Father Christmas in charge. So here’s my self-indulgent fantasy Christmas Day…

I’ll start with something fizzy of course – Buck’s Fizz with breakfast maybe. Any old Cava will do, but good quality orange juice really makes it.

We like to have our Christmas dinner in the evening, so lunch is usually something simple and quick – a light and refreshing wine will do the trick here, but it is Christmas so Sancerre or Pouilly Fumé would make an indulgent choice: Masson Blondelet Pouilly Fumé 2006, £11.49 at Waitrose, is very proper with fine acidity and minerality; Château de Sancerre, Sancerre 2007 is more floral and youthful and £13.99 at Majestic, or £12.99 if you buy two.

After lunch a quick dose of fresh air and a walk with the children, then back indoors to the business of getting the main event ready. Cooks always need something delicious to sip to keep morale up, and I fancy a dry amontillado sherry, sherry as it should be: dry, nutty and the ultimate winter pick me up. Sherry is not in the least fashionable, which means that fans can pick up fantastic value for money sherries for a relative song: Tesco Finest 12 year old Amontillado is just £6.99.

As the light fades we get ready to sit down to the feast. I tend to avoid starters, or the appetite is gone before the first sprout’s been eaten. The pop of a Champagne cork is redolent with the spirit of celebration and I’d love to crack open something special to kick off Christmas dinner in style.

I’m lucky enough to have a couple of bottles of Taittinger vintage Champagne squirreled away and now could be the time to pop the cork. Big name vintage Champagnes are going to set you back £30 and up, but supermarkets do a good job of sourcing Champagnes which they release under their own label – a great way to get better Champagne for less money, as long as you are not squeamish about a supermarket name on the label. The stylish Waitrose Brut Special Reserve Vintage 2002 will set you back £24.99; Tesco Finest Vintage Champagne 2002, a sophisticated, dry but fruity mouthful is £19.96.

For some people, Christmas isn’t Christmas without a fine claret, but I’m pleasing myself here, so I’ll go for a New Zealand pinot noir, specifically from Central Otago. These don’t come cheap but, for my money, you’d have to spend about twice as much to get the same excitement from Burgundy, home of the world’s greatest pinot noirs. Mount Difficulty’s Roaring Meg Pinot Noir (£17.49, down to £13.99 if you buy two, at Majestic) is a fantastic illustration of the style: lush, velvety fruit but in no way a blockbuster. For those who prefer something white I’ll splash out on a decent bottle of white Burgundy for a classic taste of luscious, juicy chardonnay fruit given a healthy dose of oak. Domaine Juillot Mercurey Premier Cru “Clos des Barraults” 2005 (£16.99 at Majestic) perhaps, or Philippe le Hardi Mercurey 2006, £14.99 at Waitrose.

Christmas pud is a hard thing to match with classic dessert wines – to keep pace with the intense flavours and dense sweetness you need a wine with guts. Step forward Stanton and Killeen Rutherglen Muscat, £8.43 for a half bottle from Les Caves de Pyrène, based in Artington outside Guildford. Made from late harvested Muscat grapes, matured for years in oak barrels in the hot Australian sun to achieve a burnished amber colour and figgy, candied-peel flavours this is a liquid version of Christmas pudding or mince pies.

The children take themselves off to bed while the grown-ups settle down in front of a film, or maybe a sociable board game. There’ll be an aged tawny port to sip and a few salted almonds and fancy chocolates to nibble on. Warre’s Otima 10 year old tawny port positively heaves with nutty, spicy aromas and flavours and is widely available from around £10.50 for a 50cl bottle.

The reality…the children will no doubt wake the whole house at some entirely unreasonable hour: the buck’s fizz will be cast aside as unsuitable for breakfast at 7am; the same children will of course flat out refuse to go for “A walk???” or to take themselves off to bed when we think they ought to, so our late evening film might end up being a children’s DVD. My fantasy Christmas Day will probably never materialise, but we can all dream…

Note: it seems churlish to question the benefit of a VAT reduction, but here goes. While VAT was lowered in the Chancellor’s pre-budget, duty was increased. For most wines the drop in VAT is roughly equal to the increase in duty, so many retailers have chosen to hold wine prices at their previous levels. However, retailers do have slightly differing pricing policies and, while I’ve made every effort to verify that the prices I have quoted are correct, please do not hold it against any retailer if you find a slightly different price in their shops.

Pick of the (fizzy) pops

2008-12-05T09:32:00.001Z

Champagne may be the wine of kings and the king of wines, but there are times when you want to create a celebratory mood with the evocative pop of a cork, without breaking the bank. So what are the options?

Traditional method wines are made in the same way as Champagne but, because they are made outside the specified geographical area of Champagne, cannot call themselves that. To help consumers, many will use the term traditional method, or a variant of it, on the bottle. It would be so much more helpful, nevertheless, if such wines could be labelled “méthode champenoise” or “Champagne method”, but even such admiring use of the word is outlawed by the official body charged with protecting the Champagne name worldwide.

Cava
Top of any bargain-hunting fizz shopper’s list is Cava. Yours for around a fiver, or barely more, there are plenty of bottles out there to choose from. Cava is made in the same way as Champagne, but the grapes used are different: macabeo, xarello and parellada (hardly classic or well-known), though some also add a little chardonnay (one of the Champagne trio of grapes) to their blend. In what seems to be proof that the traditional method is no guarantee of quality, Cavas just don’t resemble Champagnes in any meaningful way. The grapes used must have a large part to play and unfortunately they are either excessively neutral, or rather earthy and with a tell-tale burnt rubber character. So, despite the low price, I would rather not drink Cava – unless it’s as a base for a buck’s fizz, where its neutral character is a virtue, or any earthiness is masked by orange juice.

Crémant
A step up in quality from Cava is the wide range of sparkling wines made around the world in largely the same mould as Champagne. The closest, geographically speaking, is crémant.

Crémant is the term used to describe any sparkling wine made in France and using the same production method as Champagne, but outside the Champagne region. Burgundy, home of chardonnay and pinot noir for its renowned still white and red wines, uses these same grapes to make crémants that are a fair copy of Champagne, with perhaps greater weight of fruit and a touch less elegance. Majestic list the ultra-reliable Louis Bouillot Perle de Vigne Crémant de Bourgogne NV for £11.99, or £7.99 if you buy two. For £10.99 you can try the same producer’s (they seem to have this market sewn up) 2005 Perle Rare at Waitrose. This last also lists Cave de Lugny Crémant de Bourgogne NV Blanc de Blancs (ie made from chardonnay only) for £8.99.

Other French regions make their own crémants, based on their regional speciality grapes. In the Loire, chenin blanc dominates, while Alsace crémants are usually predominantly pinot blanc – though Tesco has an interesting Finest* Alsace crémant made entirely from Riesling for £8.99.

Champagne lite
Champagne houses themselves are not slow to spot an opportunity to extend their brand and there are a number of New World outposts of names which you might recognize from closer to home. If you fancy a taste of Champagne expertise at a (slight) discount, then give one of these a go. Mumm Cuvée Napa is a reliable performer, with good fruit expression and great drinkability – Waitrose list it for £11.99, Majestic has it for the same price, but down to £8.99 if you buy two. Green Point is Moet & Chandon’s parent company’s Australian sparkler – the 2004 vintage is £19.49, or £12.99 if you buy two, at Majestic; or £13.99 for a single bottle at Waitrose. Arguably top of the quality tree is Roederer Quartet, which will set you back £18.99 at Waitrose, £19.99 for a single bottle at Majestic, down to £14.99 if you buy two.

New World sparklers
We’re in danger here of approaching Champagne prices, so bargain hunters should perhaps head for true New World expressions of the traditional method. One of the stalwarts of the style is Lindauer Special Select or Special Reserve: it’s undergoing a name change, so you may see it called either. In any case this wine is predominantly pinot noir, topped up with chardonnay and has the most delightful blush of negligée pink. The strawberries and cream nose gives way to a more seriously savoury palate, perfect with smoked salmon. You can pick this up at Wine Rack for £11.99 each or £7.99 at their 3 for 2 price; £9.99 at Waitrose, though it will be down to £7.49 from 3rd December; £9.99, or £7.49 if you buy two, at Majestic.

Home grown
An honourable mention must to our own English sparkling wines, which have been improving steadily for a number of years. Our marginal climate for grape ripening becomes a virtue when making sparkling wines, which need high levels of acidity rather than full ripeness to be successful. The wines are made in the same way as Champagne and often using the classic Champagne grape varieties of pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay. On the other hand, our domestic wine industry is small-scale and cannot produce wines in such quantity that the prices can compete with the New World – you just cannot make quality sparkling wine here for under ten quid. However, in an effort to boost our economy it is your duty to try at least one of these: Chapel Down Brut NV, £19.99, or £13.33 at the 3 for 2 price at Wine Rack delivers a creamy nose and a fruity palate with some spice courtesy of the distinctly un-Champagne-y Reichensteiner grape. Ridgeview, based near Burgess Hill, make a creditable range of sparklers, including the chardonnay-dominated Ridgeview Merrett Bloomsbury 2005/6, available at Waitrose for £19.99.

Champagne: king of wines and wine of kings

2008-11-17T11:29:00.001Z

“Champagne: in victory I deserve it; in defeat I need it.”, attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Champagne is the most mythologized of wines: the wine of celebration and a byword for luxury. Imagine Napoleon’s quote applied to any other drink and it doesn’t have quite the same ring: “Lager: in victory I deserve it…” See what I mean?

Just what makes Champagne so special, so deserving of its unique status among wines? In the end it all boils down to where it’s made: the northern French region of Champagne which gives the wine its name. Other wines may use the same grapes, the same production methods and maturation, but no other wine can use the name Champagne. Everything else is simply sparkling wine, no matter how high quality.

Champagne the region is the most northerly wine-production area in France, not far from Paris and atop an all-important outcrop of chalk. We don’t fully understand all the ways in which chalk is important for grape-growing, but it seems to play a vital role of water-regulation for the vines, as well as providing a material which can easily be excavated to make cellars ideal for maturing wines.

Champagne the wine can be made only within this region and is usually a blend of three grape varieties: pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay. Of these, pinot noir and chardonnay have built their own considerable reputations as the varieties responsible for the great red and white wines, respectively, of Burgundy. Pinot meunier, little known outside Champagne, is more of a workhorse, useful sort of grape. According to accepted wisdom, Chardonnay gives finesse to the blend, while pinot noir provides structure and power; pinot meunier is responsible for an attractive fruitiness early in a Champagne’s life: useful for giving some early drinking appeal, where chardonnay and pinot noir take time to develop their full array of aromas and flavours.

What to look for on the label
Most Champagnes are, therefore, a blend of these three grapes. Each house or marque will have their preferred blend, which forms a large part of their distinctive house style. Veuve Clicquot and Bollinger are classic examples of Champagnes with a higher than average proportion of pinot noir. Taittinger, on the other hand, is proud of the high proportion of chardonnay in its Champagnes. You can even find 100% chardonnay Champagnes, which will be labelled blanc de blancs. Blanc de noirs, logically then, is made only from pinot noir and/or pinot meunier.

Most of what we see in this country – and we are Champagne’s number one export market, accounting for over a quarter of exports – is labelled Brut. In the somewhat arcane labelling laws of Champagne this is what dry Champagne is called. The other style that you’ll find, if you go looking, is Demi-sec: not semi-dry as the name suggests, but pretty sweet and something to serve with dessert. In between these two styles are various grades of sweetness, so the full and rather confusingly named, range begins with the driest Brut, moving through Extra dry, Sec, Demi-sec then sweet.

In addition to the level of sweetness in a Champagne, the other terms to look out for are vintage or non-vintage. Most Champagnes are non-vintage, ie they are made from a blend of wines from a number of different years. Champagne houses wanting to deliver their house style use this multi-year blending to maintain this style from year to year, ironing out differences in ripeness, acidity levels and so on. If a particular growing season is deemed to have produced a wine of sufficient quality and harmony, then growers will make a vintage Champagne, 100% of which will be from the named year. So vintage Champagnes are not made every year: in practice probably three or four times each decade.

Think pink
So much of Champagne is wrapped up in tradition and myth that it’s something of a novelty to see the region catching the pink fever that has swept through the whole wine world. Rosé Champagnes used to be a relative rarity, but now everyone seems to be having a go at making one and you can’t move for them. If Champagne denotes something to celebrate, then pink Champagnes seem to notch up the special occasion rate even further. As Michael Caine might say, not a lot of people know that most pink Champagne is made in a way positively forbidden for still rosé wine: a small amount of red wine is added to achieve the desired colour and flavour. Of course the Champenois have a suitably elegant term for it, rosé d’assemblage, but it can still seem like a surprisingly cheap method for a wine with a fancy price tag.

What to eat with Champagne?
The obvious answer is whatever you like! Champagne is supposed to go with anything and there is something in the cliché – whatever you’re eating, from fish and chips to haute cuisine, it tastes better with Champagne. Lily Bollinger put it best: “I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and I drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it, unless I'm thirsty.”

If this has whet your appetite to find out more about Champagne, then come along to one of my upcoming Champagne appreciation evenings. Taste a range of six different, high quality Champagnes and discover for yourself the difference between blanc de blancs, vintage, non-vintage, demi-sec and a range of “grandes marques”. Evenings run on Monday 17th November at East Horsley Village Hall or Wednesday 26th November at the Guildford Institute. They start at 7.30pm and cost £25 per person, including all of the Champagnes and glasses. More details are available on www.redwhiteandrose.co.uk/courses

How soon is now?

2008-11-02T19:06:00.001Z

It’s a question I’m often asked: which wines should you keep? And for those that can be laid down, how long for?

First things first: the vast majority of wines bought in the UK are drunk within days (if not hours) or purchase. Consequently most wines on sale here reflect that fact and are best drunk straightaway. Obviously wines do have a shelf life (they’re not bottles of milk), so straightaway needn’t be taken literally: what I mean is, within months. However, not all wines are created equal, so here’s a quick guide to drinking up times.

DYA – drink youngest available
At one end of the spectrum are those wines that should be drunk as young as possible: they don’t improve with age and are best enjoyed in their fresh and fruity youth. Rosés and pretty much all wines made from Sauvignon Blanc fall into this category. Another thing to bear in mind is that the southern hemisphere is six months ahead of its northern counterpart in wine-making terms, so 2008 Sauvignon Blancs and rosés from the likes of New Zealand and Chile are hitting the shelves around now: treat 2007s as needing drinking up pronto and be wary of anything from 2006.

The middle way
Most everyday wines fall into this category: they probably won’t improve with age, but you can hold onto them for a year or so without any harm being done. If you have found a terrific little wine from the south of France that didn’t cost much and fancy stashing some away to age – by all means have a go. But don’t be too surprised if, after three or four years, it hasn’t got better – it probably wasn’t designed to.

Wines for laying down
As a very general rule of thumb, any wine costing less than £10 a bottle is not going to be laying down material. Wines that are going to repay ageing are not usually readily available on the High Street, so don’t worry that you might buy one by mistake! If I were buying really fine wines with a view to keeping them for a number of years, then I would rather deal with a specialist merchant – and probably pay for proper cellar storage too.

The ingredients needed to allow a wine to age are plenty of fruit, acid and tannin (for reds) or fruit and acid (for whites). Tannin is the “stewed tea” feeling that you get from red wines and which can make young wines designed to age almost undrinkable, until those tannins have had time to soften and mellow.

Prime candidates for ageing include:
Claret (red Bordeaux): high acid levels, tannins and dense fruit make the most expensive claret unlovable in its youth. The best wines in a good year can need ten years or more to mature and show what they can do – and can then last for another decade or more. A word of warning – this applies only to the very top level of Bordeaux. The vast majority of what you see for sale is more humble stuff designed for early drinking rather than cellaring; as usual, let price be your guide: if it’s under ten quid, it’s probably not for keeping.
Northern Italian reds, especially Barolo and Barbaresco. If you want to know what tannin really tastes like then pick up a bottle of Barolo – this wine needs a decade before you know what all the fuss is about.
Vintage port. These wines can happily age for decades; probably the ultimate “lay some wine down for your children” wine.
Dessert wines. The magic combination of sugar and acid allows sweet wines to live amazingly long lives. Sauternes and intensely sweet wines from the Loire and Germany are classic examples.

Do you have to lay these wines down?
In the end, everyone’s taste in wine is personal, so there are no hard and fast rules. The English think it sacrilege to drink a vintage port until it’s getting on for voting age; Americans love to get their teeth into one that’s barely started primary school. The French, too, seem to enjoy drinking wines younger than we do.

One wine that I would always suggest keeping – if you can manage it! - for at least a few months is non-vintage Champagne. Champagne houses are legally obliged to age their wines for a certain period of time before selling them. Vintage Champagnes, produced from a single year’s harvest, must have at least three years’ maturity before release, though many producers keep them much longer. Non-vintage Champagne, however, need only be aged for fifteen months before being released for sale. Buy it, stash it under the stairs or in a cupboard for a few months and you should find that the Champagne has more harmonious, more complex flavours as a result.

Tasting notes on back labels for grander wines often say something like “enjoyable now, but will repay cellaring for a further four or five years” – unless it’s a French wine, when of course it won’t have a back label at all. But will you enjoy it more in five years’ time? There’s only one way to find out. You might find that, in fact, you preferred it in its exuberant, dense youth. Wines do change as they age and it’s down to personal taste whether you prefer older wines to younger ones. The best advice is to buy 6 or 12 bottles of a wine that you like (just not £5 Cava please) and try a bottle a year to see if you like the way it evolves. Why not have a go and then let me know in six years’ time how you got on?

The Rhône - wines from the warm south

2008-10-20T09:33:00.003+01:00

We need to face facts: it’s over, done, finished. The good times are well and truly over – the summer I mean, not anything else that might be playing on your mind…

We might get an optimistically sunny day from now on, but there’s no getting away from it: nights are drawing in, the Halloween tat has an aisle to itself in the supermarkets and those money-grabbing marketeers at Disneyland Paris are advertising Christmas already.

The place to turn for wines to match the season has to be the Rhône Valley, especially the southern Rhône. These warming wines are just made for longer, darker evenings – if you are looking for a wine to go with roasted chestnuts, bonfire night bangers or just a rib-sticking stew, then the Rhône should be your destination.

In the northern Rhône red wines are all syrah (or shiraz, as it’s also known) based. In the southern part of the valley this grape is joined by a pair of other varieties: grenache and mourvèdre. Syrah is undoubtedly a noble grape, giving long-lived, muscular and meaty wines. Grenache adds a lighter touch of red fruit and a distinct white pepper kick, making the wines of the south approachable for early drinking. Mourvèdre acts as a kind of seasoning, providing backbone, spice and dense blueberry fruit to provide depth to the flavours. Southern Rhône wines are, for me, some of the most easy to drink wines around, with plenty of spicy red and black fruit to flesh out the tannic structure and a warming, alcoholic finish.

Where to start?
Côtes du Rhône is the most widely available and cheapest way to get started on these wines. In general, any wine in the region comes under this umbrella designation and gives you a cheap and cheerful taste of what the region can do. That’s what you might call entry level – the next step up is Côtes du Rhône Villages, meaning the wine comes from areas judged to make better wine than the norm. Somewhat confusingly (but hey, this is France, they don’t like to make things easy for you) the best villages in this area are also allowed to put their village name alongside Côtes du Rhône on the label. So you might see, for example, Côtes du Rhône Villages on its own, or Côtes du Rhône Villages Séguret, or any of a number of other village names. Either way, these Côtes du Rhône Villages wines give you a chance to see what the fuss is about, representing an area under vine around 1/8th the size of the straight Côtes du Rhône area.

Still with me? At the top of the southern Rhône tree are villages who have been deemed to make such noteworthy wines that they no longer use the label Côtes du Rhône at all: such as Gigondas, Vacqueyras and Vinsobres. Each has its own style and character, so have some fun searching out bottles to try.

The jewel in the crown of the southern Rhône is, without doubt, Châteauneuf du Pape. The name is one of the most recognizable in the world of wine, its fame based on full-bodied expressions of the blend of up to 13 grape varieties permitted here. This is not unexplored territory – Châteauneuf du Pape 2005 Clos des Papes was voted “Best Wine in the World” by US-based Wine Spectator magazine this year. And if you need to ask the price, well, I think you know what I’m going to say. About a hundred quid a bottle if you must know.

There are, for sure, cheaper Châteauneufs to be had – but the trouble is, the region is so well known, some producers are able to sell rather mediocre wine purely on the strength of the name, so finding a good one can be problematic.

For the value-conscious wine consumer (and aren’t we all now?) it pays to search out pastures new; those areas that have yet to win fame with wine pundits. My hot tip would be to search out wines from the Côtes du Ventoux. Technically part of the wider Côtes du Rhône area, it was for many years a kind of Bart Simpson region: underachiever and proud of it. My first taste of its wines, ten years ago or so, didn’t win me over: mean fruit, excessive tannin and just no fun.

Now however, as the wine-making cliché goes, a new generation of young, ambitious winemakers are keen to show just what they can do. Based on the same trio of grapes (syrah, grenache and mourvèdre) as you find elsewhere, the best producers are now making wines to rival the best of the southern Rhône villages. Producers to look out for are Domaine des Anges and Domaine de Fondrèche. Cadman Fine Wines (http://www.cadmanfinewines.co.uk/) stock the outstanding 2005 Fondrèche Fayard for £7.99 a bottle; http://www.everywine.co.uk/ offers a case of the 2005 Domaine des Anges for around £8.50 a bottle. Not quite the same quality level, but more easily available is La Vieille Ferme Côtes du Ventoux, £5.69 at Waitrose, made by the owners of renowned Châteauneuf du Pape producers, Château de Beaucastel.

Exploring the southern Rhône
The southern Rhône is one of the most attractive wine regions of France to explore – and there’s nothing like actually visiting a region to really get to grips with its wines.
Other than soaking up the wine and the scenery, a trip to the region’s studenty, relaxed capital, Avignon is not to be missed. The famous bridge is something of a non-event (it doesn’t even cross the river – call me old fashioned, but I thought that was the point of a bridge - and you have to pay to go on it), but the Palais des Papes is well worth a look. The palace was the result of some papal bust up in the 14th century, when the Pope decamped from Rome to Avignon – and apparently built a new holiday home in what is now Châteauneuf du Pape, hence its name: “the Pope’s new castle”.
If you’d like to combine learning about wine, including visits to wineries, with a relaxing break within view of cycling mecca Mont Ventoux, then have a look at http://www.aubergeduvin.com/. A friendly and knowledegable English couple run wine weekends there throughout the year.

Some like it sweet

2008-10-03T16:30:00.001+01:00

Do you like sweet wine? Thought not. Admitting to liking sweet wine is social suicide, a guilty pleasure to be indulged in in the privacy of your own home. I would like to use this column to come out as a lover of sweet wines – and I am going to try to convince you to join me in trying to overthrow one of wine’s great taboos.

Sweet wines have an image problem, there’s no doubt. For many (for me anyway) it conjures memories of early wine-drinking days when we merrily downed bottles of rather cheap and nasty German wine – Liebfraumilch, Hock and the like. Or family Sunday lunches accompanied by a bottle of Sainsbury’s Medium Sweet Spanish White. Those wines have done the cause of sweet wines immense harm with their artificial, confected sweetness, used merely to disguise the distinctly poor quality wine underneath.

But putting the past aside, consider whether you really don’t like sweet wine. Some of the wines that are considered dry, are in fact technically off-dry – that is, they have some detectable sweetness. It might not surprise you to know that some Australian chardonnays are not bone dry: Hardy’s VR Chardonnay 2007, for example has a residual sugar level of 5.5 grams per litre. Residual sugar is the final amount of sugar left in a wine when it is actually put into the bottle. Moving back a few steps, that sugar starts off in the ripe grapes harvested to make wine. During fermentation, as anyone who ever watched the Holsten Pils advert of the 1980s will remember, the sugar is turned into alcohol. If all the available grape sugar is used up, a bone dry wine results. If not, then the amount left is the residual sugar of the final wine. Humans, apparently, begin to detect sugar at a level of 4 grams per litre – so any wine with a level above this, we will sense as having some sweetness.

In theory anyway: going back to Hardy’s VR Chardonnay, it may be technically off-dry, but I would bet most drinkers would not class it as such. The sweetness is tied up with the ripeness and weight of the wine and does not “stick out”. And it’s not just white wines that have more sugar in than you would think: Concha y Toro Sunrise Merlot 2007 has 6 grams per litre of residual sugar. In both these cases we are looking at relatively cheap (around £5) wines aimed at the mass market, made by big producers who must surely be in complete control of their wine-making processes. That sugar is there deliberately to enhance the wines, to give a sense of ripeness and more body – and perhaps to cover up some less enjoyable characters in the wine.

Sauvignon Blanc – the wine that we can’t get enough of – frequently has sugar levels that technically put it into the off-dry category: Nobilo Five Fathoms Sauvignon Blanc 2007 from New Zealand for example has 8 grams per litre. Champagne routinely has 11 or 12 grams per litre of sugar even though it’s labelled Brut (or dry). What’s the story?

The trouble is, sugar is only one half of the story: lingering in the shadows is acidity, the yin to sugar’s yang in wine. To put it simply, the higher the level of acidity in a wine, the higher the level of sugar can be without us sensing the wine as sweet. Hence Brut Champagne has quite a bit of sugar in it, yet we still perceive it as dry. Equally, Sauvignon Blanc has crisp acidity and can tolerate a higher level of residual sugar than other styles of wine.

So, we’ve established that most of us do in fact drink sweet wines, even as we profess not to like them. Now it’s but a short step to embracing sweet wines and revelling in the sheer pleasure of a luscious dessert wine.

But if that feels like too much too soon, then follow my five easy steps to sweet wine heaven:

1. Start yourself off gently: if you’re having a pudding involving berries, especially autumn raspberries, try a sparkling Moscato d’Asti, or Asti Spumante – light, frothy, fun and definitely sweet.
2. Move onto a chilled Tawny Port with olives, nuts and nibbles. You can even serve Warre’s Otima, widely available for around £11 a bottle, on ice for a classy aperitif.
3. Try a late harvest chenin blanc from the Loire – some of the lightest of the true dessert wines and with fantastic crisp acidity to balance out the sugar. Great to have with any kind of apple pudding, especially apple tart. Give Waitrose’s Château Gaudrelle Réserve Spéciale 2005, Vouvray for £7.99 a go.
4. Now you’re ready for the ultimate dessert wine: Sauternes. Rich, luscious barley sugar, honeycomb and dried apricot flavours are a fantastic match for blue cheese, especially Roquefort. A half bottle of Waitrose’s own label Sauternes, made by top-rated Château Suduiraut costs £9.99 (residual sugar 103 grams per litre by the way).
5. Next time you want an instant dinner party pudding, try top quality vanilla ice cream with a drizzle of Pedro Ximenez (or PX for short) sherry. For extra indulgence you could soak raisins in the PX first and bung them on the ice cream too. This stuff is almost beyond dessert wine with residual sugar of mind-boggling levels of (dentists and nutritionists look away now) 400 grams per litre. Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference PX and Tesco’s finest* PX are both absurdly good value at £7.19 and £5.49 respectively.

Once you’ve mastered all five steps you will have conquered your fear and you too can join me as an “out and proud” lover of sweet wine.

Can Bordeaux turn the tide?

2008-09-24T18:53:00.002+01:00

Bordeaux is probably the most famous wine region in the world, producing some of the most expensive and prestigious wines made anywhere – if you have £500 to spare then you too can treat yourself to a bottle of Château Mouton-Rothschild 2005. Mouton-Rothschild, along with the rest of Bordeaux’s élite wine producers, are onto a good thing it seems. But what about the rest of the region?

Bordeaux produces more wine every year than the whole of Australia – that’s a lot of wine. And the trouble is fewer of us are buying that wine now than we used to: France used to occupy the number one spot in the wine import chart for the UK, seemingly by right. They have slumped to number 2, losing out to Australia – and the United States looks set to push them down into third place before too long. Looking below the level of the classed growth châteaux, all is not well for today’s Bordelais wine makers.

What’s the problem?
As UK wine consumption has increased, France’s share of that consumption has shrunk. Why have we gone off French, and specifically Bordeaux, wine?

Complexity – just look at the countries which have benefited from France’s falling popularity: Australia and the US: both English-speaking New World countries. The Australian and US wines that have done best here are usually lower priced, varietally-labelled wines – by that I just mean that the grape variety is on the label. Bordeaux, by contrast is more complicated: their wines are based on blending grape varieties and the name of the region, or one of its many sub-regions, or even the individual château name, is the most prominent thing on the label.

Value for money – at the price that UK wine consumers want to pay (just over £4 a bottle on average) Bordeaux’s wines just cannot offer the same straightforward ripe, fruity flavours that the New World can. If you read this column at all regularly, you’ll know that spending more on wine is one of my favourite hobby horses. Upping the amount you spend by a couple of quid does give the winemaker much more scope to put quality in the bottle.

Lack of quality – it’s a frustrating truth about Bordeaux that you can spend, say, £7-8 on a bottle and still be disappointed with the wine. There’s no getting away from the fact that too much thin, green, unripe Bordeaux is made – and this can probably only be addressed by ripping up substantial areas of poor quality vineyard.

We don’t understand Bordeaux - it’s not as easy to understand as Aussie Shiraz and never can be. We don’t drink wine the way the French do: there are deeply embedded cultural links in France between the food they eat and the wine they drink and their styles of wine are best understood and enjoyed with food. We Anglo Saxons are more northern European in our drinking habits and often our wines need to be TV or DVD-friendly rather than food-friendly.

So what’s the answer?
If I knew that I wouldn’t be writing about it here! I’d be making a fortune advising the French government and wine authorities on how to regain their place in the UK market. However, here’s a look at how one company is going about trying to win back the affection of the country that, let’s face it, was the original market for claret (the English word for red Bordeaux) and helped to make it the wine it is today.

The company Baron Philippe de Rothschild owns two major concerns in Bordeaux: first growth Château Mouton-Rothschild and Mouton Cadet. The Château is the jewel in the crown, with incredible attention to detail and every care lavished on hand-made, stratospherically-priced wine. Mouton Cadet produces a range of branded wines from Bordeaux. You can pick up the basic red and white versions at Sainsbury’s for £7.19. The Mouton Cadet label is Bordeaux’s biggest brand, selling 12 million bottles each year (compared with Château Mouton Rothschild’s 300,000 in 2007) in 150 countries. The idea is that some of the glamour, exclusivity and expertise of the Château rubs off on Mouton Cadet, giving their brand a unique appeal. The Mouton Cadet operation is certainly large-scale and impressive, with scrupulous quality control in its state-of-the-art winery.

Mouton Cadet is designed as an entry level wine, bringing new consumers to Bordeaux, giving a consistent, reliable claret experience – all the things a brand should do. But will it help to win back UK wine drinkers? I’m not sure. It does offer a consistent taste of what Bordeaux can offer and tastes better now than it did a few years back, with more fruit and a subtle lick of oak. But, selling at over £7 a bottle, it cannot and is not intended to tap into the true mass market. And at that price the competition from the New World is fierce. Yes, it’s food friendly wine – but that’s never going to be as important here as it is in France.

What it does offer is the safe haven of a brand, which we consumers have shown we like. I salute Mouton Cadet (and its smaller competitors such as Calvet and Dourthe) for their willingness to create a brand which tries to take on the New World, without forsaking its own sense of place – it is still unmistakably claret. But UK wine consumers have increasingly turned their backs on this style of wine and even mighty Mouton may not be able to turn back the tide.

Eureka moments

2008-09-05T11:00:00.001+01:00

For me it was realising that white Burgundy is made from Chardonnay. OK, it may not be up there with Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” in his bath, but it was a real lightbulb moment for me. It happened in the course of the first evening class on wine appreciation that I took, many years ago. And of course the connection between Chardonnay and Burgundy is blinking obvious to anyone who takes even a casual interest in wine – but for me, it was an exciting discovery.

It’s moments like that which have kept me going on the wine education trail ever since. I went on to study and pass the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) Intermediate and Advanced Certificates. I knew things had got out of hand when I found myself embarking on the two-year WSET Diploma in Wine & Spirits, but it seemed my thirst for wine knowledge could not be quenched. With the Diploma now under my belt I occasionally mull over whether I’m hard enough to take on wine education’s ultimate challenge: Master of Wine. Gaining this gruelling qualification is surely the wine world’s equivalent of winning an Olympic gold medal. Since its beginnings in 1953 only 264 people across the entire world have been awarded the title of Master of Wine – that’s less than five a year.

When I’m running a wine tasting I get a real kick out of answering people’s queries – things that have obviously puzzled them for ages and they finally get the chance to ask. “What’s the difference between Pouilly Fumé and Pouilly Fuissé?” for example. Well apart from both being difficult to pronounce and coming from France, they have little in common: Pouilly Fumé comes from the Loire Valley and it made from Sauvignon Blanc; Pouilly Fuissé comes from Burgundy and is made from Chardonnay. Easy when you know – but how do you get to know? Taking a wine appreciation course is a good first step.

Apart from learning about the different types of wines made all over the world, the most important aspect of wine education has to be tasting wines. You can imagine that a lecture about car maintenance could be fairly useful - just think how much more useful it would be to actually get some hands-on practice on a real engine. It’s the same with wine: learning about the different styles of sparkling wine can be interesting, but it really comes alive when you can taste and compare these wines at the same time. All of the pieces of the puzzle come together and you learn so much more – quite apart from the fact that tasting wines with other people is one of the most fun and sociable things you can do.

If I’ve sparked your own interest in learning more about wines there are many ways that you can take things further. If you know you’d like to go straight for a qualification in wine, then the WSET (Wine and Spirit Education Trust) is the place to start. Their website (www.wset.co.uk) gives you information on their qualifications and where you can study around the country. On the other hand, if you’re not sure that you want to go the whole hog and study towards a specific qualification then you might be interested in the courses that I am running from September to December in East Horsley and Guildford.

These are wine courses for people who don’t want to go on courses! You can sign up for all six evenings, or just come along to the sessions that really interest you. If you can’t make a particular evening in, say, Guildford, you can swap to East Horsley if it suits. The evenings will be relaxed, friendly but informative, with plenty of time for questions – and there is no such thing as a silly question! As a firm believer in practical experience there will also be ample opportunity to taste, with six different wines on offer each week.

The topics for the six evenings are:

Exploring the world of wine – an introduction to wine focussing on grape varieties: how wine is made, why wines taste different, how to taste them
Food and wine matching – demystifying this topic, practical food and wine matching session for you to discover what works for you
Organic wines – a hot topic in wine as in food: what does it mean? How do the wines taste?
Sparkling wines – there is a huge range of wines with fizz: try them and find your favourites
Champagne – wine’s ultimate luxury: but what does Vintage mean, versus Non Vintage? Do you prefer Blanc de Blancs or Demi Sec? Discover the range and styles of Champagne and decide.
Wines for Christmas – be relaxed about wines for the festive period and explore some special wines for special occasions.

Each evening costs £25 per person, or £125 if you book all six sessions – so you get one session free. Everything you need is provided, including tasting glasses and handouts. If you’d like to come along to any of the evenings, booking information can be found on my website: www.redwhiteandrose.co.uk/Courses, or you can email me on heather@redwhiteandrose.co.uk.

What to drink in a recession

2008-08-20T10:50:00.001+01:00

Zero growth in the economy, rising inflation and fears about our economic security: times are tough for the hedonistic wine consumer who likes to enjoy the good things in life, without having to count the cost.

There are some particularly worrying signs of further price rises to come for wine. The strength of the Euro is making European wines relatively more expensive in the UK now than they were a year ago; prices of glass bottles have sky-rocketed; rising fuel prices have made wine more costly to transport. All these elements add up to a picture of rising wine prices in the immediate future. In the longer term Australia’s hot climate grape-growing areas dependent on irrigation from the Murray River are destined to disappear – and to take with them a river of low-cost wine currently flowing into the UK.

But there are some things you can do to continue to enjoy wines, without paying ever more for them. Here are my Top Tips for wine buying in a recession.

Shop around for special offers
There are still plenty of good value wines around, but it’s best to be prepared before you head out to the supermarket and end up hurriedly stuffing a couple of bottles off the gondola-end offer in the trolley. Have a look at www.quaffersoffers.co.uk before you go and use its search facility to find out where the best deals are. Many of the big brand names in wine are constantly on offer – somewhere – and it’s frustrating to pay more than you need to. Quaffers Offers saves you the legwork of comparing prices.

Drink less but better
I know I’ve said it before, but I’m prepared to bang on about it again. Ultimately, if you don’t want to sacrifice quality, but have a limited budget, then restricting the quantity is really the only sane way to go. I don’t want to sound like a temperance fiend on a soapbox, but we do seem to believe that an unrestricted supply of cheap booze is a right. Surely it’s better to treat wine as just that – a treat, rather than a commodity sold only on price.

Buy in bulk
As long as you are not one of those people who have to eat every piece of chocolate or every biscuit in the house, then you should not need to worry that having some extra bottles of wine knocking around will result in your own personal 24-hour drinking licence. Most suppliers will give you a discount on a case of 12 bottles (and sometimes 6), so it really does save you money to buy more – as long as you don’t drink more as a result!

Buy online
Instead of bunging a few random bottles in the trolley along with the rest of the supermarket shopping, think about ordering wine online. Most High Street merchants and all the supermarkets are there, along with a host of mail order or online-only places. Without a physical shop front to tempt shoppers in – and without the overheads either – many of mail order places can give great value for money as well as individual customer service. You may not find as many of the famous names as you would on the High Street – but if you are prepared to be adventurous and try something new you might find yourself with a better wine at a cheaper price. Try Googling “buy wine online” and see what you find.

If you are nervous about cowboy merchants that you’ve never heard of, then try The Wine Society (www.thewinesociety.com). This venerable institution has been going since 1874 and is run as a co-operative, so any profits are re-invested in the company or used to fund special offers for the members – you have to buy a share in the society to become a member and buy wines.

The days of Champagne lunches in the City may have disappeared (until the next boom), but wine-drinkers with some savvy can still find plenty to please their palates.

Local (wine) heroes

2008-08-20T10:47:00.001+01:00

Local, sustainable, low food miles: these are the buzzwords when it comes to what we eat nowadays. If you want to extend the idea of buying local to the wine that you drink, what are your choices?

Right, before you stop reading, please bear with me for a while. English wines are not a joke anymore: every year we seem to produce more and more reliable, palatable wines. English wines are judged, blind, against wines from around the world in competitions like the International Wine Challenge and the Decanter World Wine Awards – and consistently come away with medals and commendations. Our winemakers are learning how to get the best from our soils and climate, which grape varieties to plant and how to make the best wines in our challenging, but warming, climate. Why, even the Queen serves Nyetimber English sparkling wine to visiting foreign dignitaries at Buckingham Palace, so if it’s good enough for Her Majesty…

So, let’s not start out with the thought that English wines are a joke and give them a fair chance to impress us. Here in Surrey there are five vineyards growing grapes to produce wine, including Denbies, the largest single vineyard in the country.

Denbies is a slick, well-oiled wine-making machine with an enviable track record of picking up awards for its wines. As well as making wine, Denbies is a destination in itself. Attractively perched on the North Downs opposite Box Hill and overlooking Dorking, they offer vineyard tours, tastings in their shop as well as being a venue for meetings, conferences and weddings. It’s a bustling and pleasant place to be on a sunny summer’s day. The estate was established in 1986 and, over the years, it is gradually replacing more and more of the strange-sounding Germanic hybrid grapes such as Reichensteiner, with familiar and trusted varieties like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. These last two, along with Pinot Meunier are the three Champagne grapes – and it is in sparkling wines that the best hopes for English wine reside.

Denbies’ Greenfields Cuvée 2003, a sparkling wine made from the trio of Pinots Noir and Meunier plus Chardonnay and using the traditional “Champagne” method, stunned many wine consumers by winning a Gold Medal at the 2007 International Wine Challenge. Alas, the 2003 understandably sold out and the 2004 vintage is the one currently on sale. At £21.99 it’s not cheaper than Champagne, but it does share some of its characters, albeit at the lighter end of the spectrum.

Surrey Gold is Denbies’ biggest seller, an off-dry, still wine made from a blend of Müller Thurgau, Bacchus and Ortega grapes. It makes for pleasant summer drinking with its crisp exotic fruit. You can try the full range of Denbies’ wines in their shop, allowing you to make up your own mind on their quality.

If Denbies is the big fish, then Greyfriars Vineyard is the tadpole of Surrey wines. Just 1 ½ acres of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vines on the south side of the chalky outcrop of the Hog’s Back make up this vineyard, owned and run by Bill Croxson and Philip Underwood since 1989. I admire the far-sightedness – probably mixed with some stubbornness – that led Bill to plant these noble grape varieties, when the fashion at the time was to choose Germanic hybrids. These hybrids were said to match the climate but, unfortunately, have not shown that they can produce really top quality wines and have never been embraced by the consumer. I tried Greyfriar’s Vineyard Chardonnay 2005 (Bill likes his wines to age before he releases them for sale) which is very dry and crisp. It’s an uncompromising style which I admired rather than appreciated and I fear is not likely to win a wide audience. Given the clean, crisp flavours, I hold out greater hope for Bill’s sparkling wines.

If you’d like to try Greyfriars’ wines for yourself, including the sparkling wines of which Bill is rather proud, then pop along to the vineyard on one of their open weekends: 6/7 and 13/14 September.

The prize for Surrey’s most picturesque vineyard must surely go to Painshill Park in Cobham. Within the boundaries of an 18th century landscaped garden, between a Gothic folly and an ornamental lake lies a 2 ½ acre vineyard replanted fifteen years ago with Chardonnay and Seyval Blanc (another hybrid). The vineyard is a recreation of the original, which formed part of the park in the early 1800s. They make a sparkling wine, a white and a rosé which are available to buy in the park’s own shop and tearoom.

Godstone Vineyards is a 6 ½ acre site planted with Seyval Blanc. They have a shop and tearoom where you can try before you buy. The final piece of the Surrey wine puzzle is the intriguingly-named Iron Railway Vineyard in Croydon. This small-holding seems to produce a variety of crops, including grapes for wine – if you ever find some of their wine, please let me know!

Let’s not kid ourselves: English wines are not yet in a position to rival those of the major wine-producing countries at the top level. We can’t produce consumer-friendly wines at the £4 average bottle price that we like to pay, our climate is challenging and restricts the styles of wine that we can produce. But, it is clear that quality is rising and our sparkling wines, in particular, have the potential to really put us on the wine map.

www.denbies.co.uk
www.greyfriarsvineyard.com
www.painshill.co.uk
www.godstonevineyards.com

Turning water into beer

2008-07-31T14:18:00.001+01:00

Turning my back on wine for once, this week it’s all about beer – specifically beer brewed in Surrey. And by beer, I’m not talking about pale, fizzy lager either, but real ale, which is, in many respects, England’s national drink.

Making real ale is, at its most basic, a simple process, mystified in part by the arcane language of the brewer. With apologies to the more knowledgeable amongst you, here’s my Bluffer’s Guide to brewing. Malted barley is put into a tank, or mash tun, with hot water (known as liquor) and mixed. The water, or wort, imbued with the flavour and sugar from the barley, is drawn off then boiled up with hops, which give it a distinctive bitter flavour. Yeast is added (“pitched” in the lingo) to provoke fermentation, whereby the sugar in the liquid is converted to alcohol, resulting in the finished beer. The skill of the brewer is in selecting the type of malt used, say Maris Otter or Golden Promise, the level of toast for the malt, from lightly roasted crystal malt to dark brown chocolate malt. There are also various hop varieties to choose from: Fuggles and Goldings are popular choices. And of course they have to produce the same taste over and over again.

Within living memory, most English towns would have had a local brewery, producing beer to their own recipe, which was drunk in the local pubs. But times have changed, the majority of the local breweries have shut down, their operations taken over by a smaller number of large scale brewers like Marston’s and Greene King. Our tastes have changed too: we’ve moved onto lager, cider and – dare I say it – wine. We’ve also moved away from the habit of spending the evening down the local and downing a few pints, instead drinking at home, in restaurants and gastropubs. All this means that the market for real ale has been contracting in recent years.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. While the overall market for beer and real ale is shrinking, within it a relatively new group of small-scale, artisan brewers has sprung up and they are doing rather well. There are five active breweries in Surrey (plus a couple of pubs who brew their own beer) who are carving out a niche for themselves primarily by supplying free houses: those pubs not tied to a brewery or pub company and who can choose to stock whichever beers they like.

The senior member of the small club of Surrey brewers is David Roberts of Pilgrim Ales, based in the centre of Reigate. Pilgrim have been going since 1982 and their beers are sold in a range of free houses through something called the Society of Independent Brewers’ (SIBA) Direct Delivery System. This scheme allows small-scale brewers to deal with pub chains and retail outlets by streamlining the ordering and delivery process for both brewers and the pubs and shops involved. David is slightly coy about revealing where his beers can be found – but look out for his Burden Pale Ale, a light-coloured, crisp beer with a slightly smoked flavour.

The newest arrival on the Surrey brewing scene is Ascot Ales, based in Camberley. Chris and Suzanne Gill started brewing just before Christmas 2007 but have already enjoyed success with their range of typically light, hoppy beers, influenced by their love of Belgian beers. For summer drinking Suzanne recommends Alligator Ale, an American pale ale which is light, refreshing and hoppy. You can find Ascot Ales in branches of Waitrose and Threshers – both organizations who are making efforts to provide outlets for local producers. They are also to be found in independent free houses including The Barley Mow in Shepperton, the Albert Arms in Esher and the White Hart in Tongham.

Scott Wayland started his Wayland’s Brewery in Addlestone not long before the Gills, first brewing last July. His “one man band” outfit is nevertheless successfully supplying beer to 22 local outlets, mostly within a 10-mile radius of the brewery. A full list of where to find Scott’s beers is on his website,but includes The Wheatsheaf and Pigeon in Staines and The Happy Man at Englefield Green. Scott’s summer drinking recommendation from his range is Blonde Belle, made from 100% lager malt which makes for a light and refreshing ale. The more adventurous could try Martian Mild, named in honour of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. At 3.8% abv it’s light in alcohol, but full of flavour.

The aptly-named Surrey Hills Brewery is located on a farm outside the village of Shere. The owner, Ross Hunter, gave up a career in IT project management (I’m bored just writing that) for the excitement of brewing. His first brew was on Friday 13th May 2005 – but luckily for Ross, it was a success and Surrey Hills has gone on to win numerous awards for its range of beers. Currently they are brewing to capacity and produce 7,000 pints of ale a week, so this is definitely still a small-scale, hand-crafted operation. I can vouch for the drinkability of Ross’ beers, as they are the supplier of beer to my children’s school fair. For the summer, Ross recommends their speciality summer ale, Gilt Complex, which is a pale golden, thirst-quenching hoppy ale. Their regular Ranmore Ale is also a good option at 3.8% abv, described as a “session beer”.

The Hog’s Back Brewery is the biggest fish in the small pond of Surrey brewing. To put things in perspective, they produce around 48,000 pints a week compared with Surrey Hills’ 7,000. Founded in 1992, they are probably the most well known of our local breweries. As well as supplying a long list of pubs, including Wetherspoons’ Herbert Wells in Woking, they have also been successful in getting their beer on the shelves of Waitrose, Threshers and Budgens. Despite being a small and friendly operation, they show plenty of marketing savvy, with a well-stocked shop on-site, liveried delivery vehicles and regular tours of the brewery. Their recommended summer tipple is Hop Garden Gold: hoppy, as a the name suggests, an aromatic, citrussy ale.

If this has given you a taste for experimentation, then a beer festival could be for you and most of the Surrey breweries will be at one of these two this year. The daddy is CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival, running from 5th – 9th August at Earl’s Court in London. Closer to home, the next big local event is the Woking Beer Festival, 7-8th November at Woking Leisure Centre.

You can find out more about each brewery, their beers and where to find them via their websites:
www.pilgrim.co.uk
www.ascot-ales.co.uk
www.waylandsbrewery.co.uk
www.surreyhills.co.uk
www.hogsback.co.uk

Last of the summer wine

2008-07-15T09:23:00.001+01:00

Last time I focussed on all things pink for summer drinking – this time it’s the turn of white and red wines suitable for our capricious summer weather.

If I were writing this in, say, Spain it would be so much simpler. There, summer is hot, no two ways about it, and any wine recommendations would be for whites that you can chill right down for maximum refreshment, without too many worries about the flavour. Reds would be of the kind that can also take some chilling, as who would want to drink something at room temperature in the heat? Here, however, it’s never that simple: we could enjoy one of our mini heatwaves, which ends in the inevitable thunderstorm, or suffer seemingly endless grey days – or just about anything in between. And let’s face it, in this country we just don’t do sultry warm evenings as a rule: there aren’t many nights where you want to sit outside in a t-shirt sipping something ice cold. So, versatility is the order of the day and probably having a good range of suitable wines for any weather is the only way to be ready for anything the British weather can throw at us.

That said, there are some wines that I would probably avoid at this time of year, most notably claret/red Bordeaux. The tannic structure and elegance of these wines just doesn’t fit with the season somehow. Wines from the Rhône, with their spice and warmth, as long as they have enough acidity to remain fresh, seem to make a better match.

Wines for a Party
‘Tis the season to slave over a hot, smoky barbecue in the hot sun (just who thought this was a good idea?). What wines to serve to the masses? Don’t buy anything that you aren’t happy to drink yourself is always sound advice.

Whites
Cuvée Pêcheur, Vin de Pays du Comté Tolosan 2007, £3.69 at Waitrose. A mixture of half fruity Colombard and half crisp, neutral Ugni Blanc.

Fiano di Sicilia, Settesoli 2007, £5.99, or £4.79 if you buy two bottles, at Majestic. Fiano is the grape variety of the moment, scoring a hit with its delicate peachy fruit combined with crisp acidity and this one is made by a respected producer from Sicily.

Domaine de l’Olivette Blanc 2007, £5.79 at Waitrose. Some people will choose this because it’s an organically-made wine at a reasonable price. I like it because of its savoury, fruity, spicy flavours: perfect for barbecues.

Reds
Cuvée Chasseur, Vin de Pays de l’Herault 2007, £3.29 at Waitrose. The red partner to the Cuvée Pêcheur above, this typical southern French blend of Carignan and Grenache offers decent party glugging.

Sainsbury’s Portuguese Red 2006, £3.19. I was pleasantly surprised by this wine’s generous, spicy fruit, which put it ahead of other, more expensive, wines.

Los Robles Fairtrade Carmenère, Chile, 2007, currently £5.19 at Waitrose, but from 16 July until 5 August it will be down to £4.39. Carmenère is Chile’s signature grape, with its hallmark slightly leafy edge to the smoky black cherry fruit.

Over £5
For white wines, what do you want when (if!) it’s hot? Something cold, crisp and refreshing. If you’re feeling adventurous, then try a bottle of Fino or Manzanilla sherry – these are the driest, most refreshing white wines around and the drink the Andalusians sip while they graze on tapas. Yes, sherry is fortified, but is still only 15% alcohol – many a New World wine hits the 14/14.5% mark. Remember, sherry isn’t just a drink for granny at Christmas. Keep a bottle in the fridge and treat it as you would any other white wine: finish it within days, don’t leave it languishing on the shelf for months.

Sainsbury’s Manzanilla Superior Pale Dry Sherry, £5.99. Textbook stuff: crisp, dry and satisfying. Made for Sainsbury’s by Emilio Lustau – they don’t make poor sherry, so look for this name. Try it with olives, tapas or soup (especially gazpacho).

Picpoul de Pinet, Cuvée Ressac Prestige 2007, £7.55 at Nicolas. A wine known to every French wine drinker, but with a low profile here. This is the ultimate seafood wine: fresh and mineral, but with some weight.

Tesco Finest Grüner Veltliner, Austria, 2007, £5.99. Tesco have put in a lot of work on their Finest wine range over the last couple of years, weeding out the poor quality wines. This is good value for Austria’s signature grape variety. The nose is slightly floral and peachy and the palate is just dry but rich and concentrated with hints of grapefruit.

Tesco Finest Gavi DOCG 2007, £6.13. This is a great wine for people who don’t want their wines to dominate, or taste of oak. Made from the Cortese grape in Piedmont, northeastern Italy, this wine is typically light and fresh, with pear fruit, but has enough body to stand up to food. Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Gavi 2007, £6.99 is in the same mould, or you could go for Majestic’s Gavi La Lancellotta 2007, £7.49, down to £5.99 if you buy two.

D’Arenberg Dry Dam Riesling, South Australia, £9.99 at Oddbins. This has great freshness as well as ripeness of fruit. Juicy, limey fruit with a hint of toastiness and just 11.5% alcohol. A delicious and versatile wine.

Red wines

Cusumano Nero d’Avola 2005, £5.49, Oddbins. I urge you to try this wine – even if you don’t normally drink red wines. This is perfect warm weather drinking with its ripe, lively, juicy cherry fruit. A total pleasure to drink. The “dinner party” version of this style of wine is Planeta’s Cerasuolo di Vittoria, 2006, £13.99 at Waitrose. The Planeta family are the big beasts of the Sicilian wine jungle and this wine is beautifully perfumed with soft fruit but no lack of flavour – wonderfully understated.

La Piuma Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2006, £5.49 from Waitrose is a nice example of this grape variety. Montepulciano makes wines with an agreeably fruity and smoky nose, that are soft, spicy and slightly rustic on the palate. Just the right balance for barbecues.

From the Rhône have a try of Sainsbury’s enjoyably rustic Taste the Difference Côtes du Rhône Villages 2006 at £5.99, which is a perfect chewy, spicy and fruity partner for sausages. Moving up a notch in quality is Tesco’s Finest Vacqueyras 2005 at £7.48. It has more of everything, including tannins, so this is one for food.

Think pink wines for summer

2008-07-02T11:56:00.001+01:00

The weather may or may not be playing ball (writing this a week before you read it, you might be reading this in scorching heat or under gloomy skies, who knows), but Wimbledon has started, strawberries and cream are on the menu – it must be Summer. Time to crack open a bottle of…what? This week I’m concentrating on pink wines, which epitomise summer. Next time, I’ll be sniffing out some choice red and white wines to see you though the barbecue season.

Think pink
Rosé wines are on a seemingly unstoppable rise in this country. Five years ago you’d have been laughed at if you ordered a glass of rosé in the bar, now you can’t move for bottles of the pink stuff in the supermarket aisles. Even before they became fashionable, rosé wines were always a great summer drink. Here’s why: they offer more fruity flavour than white wines, without the tannin of red wines, but you serve them chilled, so they have instant refreshment. Rosés are also the best wines for standing up to salads or any dish with a dressing. The extra fruit (and sometimes a little lick of residual sugar) combine well with the vinegar or lemon of the dressing, but the fresh acidity cuts through the oil.

Here are some of my favourite rosés to see you through the summer that I’ve tasted recently. And beware: last summer, you might remember, was a bit of a washout. As a result, many wine merchants and restaurants/bars ordered more than they needed and have been left with a glut of rosés that they couldn’t shift. The trouble is that, with very few exceptions, rosés should be drunk as young as possible. As they age, they tend to lose their bright, vibrant fruit and can taste dull and flat. That means you should be looking for 2007 vintages of rosé to buy this summer - especially from the Southern hemisphere, where they’re harvesting six months ahead of Europe. If you see 2006 rosés, my advice would be to steer clear, unless they’re on such a good offer you don’t mind if they don’t come up to scratch.

Tierra Brisa Malbec Rosé 2007, Argentina, £4.29, down to £3.79 when you buy 2, at Majestic. Tried a rosé made from Malbec before? Well here’s your chance. Not the most sophisticated of wines, but has well-defined fruit and a little toastiness on the finish.
Eva’s Vineyard Rosé 2007, Hungary, £4.29, Waitrose. A blend of Pinot Noir and the local Kékfrankos grape, this has good freshness to its attractive fruit.
Champteloup Selection Rosé d’Anjou 2007, £4.99, Waitrose. If we’re rehabilitating rosé, then we may as well go the whole hog and relive the 80s with an off-dry Rosé d’Anjou. This is nicely balanced and the sweetness would probably match well with sweet Thai-style nibbles.
Tagus Creek Shiraz/Touriga Nacional Rosé 2007, Portugal, £5.19, Waitrose. This is very deep coloured and is really a red wine for people who don’t like red wine. Plenty of soft, spicy red fruits.
Casillero del Diablo Shiraz Rosé 2007, Chile, £5.99, Sainsbury’s. Consistently reliable performer that offers relatively weighty fruit with plenty of crunch to it.
Domaine Bégude Pinot Noir Rosé 2007, France, £7.49 or £6.99 if you buy 2, Majestic. Pinot Noir tends to make lighter, drier and more savoury styles of rosé and this is a very correct example. One for food.
Muga Rosado 2007, Rioja, £7.19, Waitrose. Pale salmon colour, this is delicate, lively and fresh. One to savour.
Clos d’Yvigne “Bel-Ami” Rosé 2007, France, £7.99, or £7.49 if you buy 2, at Majestic. Made by an Englishwoman in the unfashionable area of Bergerac, next door to Bordeaux. This is 100% Merlot, making for an attractive, easy-going but grown up wine.
Château d’Aquéria 2007, France, £9.99, down to £9.49 if you buy 2, Majestic. From the specialist rosé-producing area of Tavel in the southern Rhône Valley, this is densely flavoured with a long spicy finish. Serve it with gutsy food to taste it at its best.

Next time: white wines that make refreshing summer drinking and red wines that you can chill on a hot day, or that can warm the cockles as you huddle round the barbecue for warmth.

Searching for the great white

2008-06-13T06:00:00.001+01:00

When I first started taking an interest in wine, it was Chardonnay. Then when we’d tired of over-oaked, overdone Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio took over as the “default” white. Now you only have to look at the shelves in the off-licence or supermarket to know that Sauvignon Blanc has become our white wine of choice.

But as soon as any wine has achieved that level of popularity and ubiquity, we start to get dissatisfied with “the usual” and an itch to find the next big thing. If you get the feeling that Delboy would be ordering a glass of Sauvignon Blanc today instead of Beaujolais Nouveau in his Peckham wine bar, you know it must be time to move on.

But where next? What are the candidates for the next big white wine? Here is my shortlist for wines that could make it to the top spot.

Chenin Blanc
Chenin Blanc’s home is the mid-section of the Loire Valley in France. There they use the grape to make a huge range of wines from light, fresh sparkling Crémant, to bone dry Savennières, Vouvray and Anjou Blanc, to lusciously sweet Côteaux du Layon and Bonnezeaux. Made well, Chenin delivers plenty of round, crisp fruit, sometimes with a hint of honey on the nose, even when bone dry. It has crisp acidity, like Sauvignon Blanc, but tends to be rather more rounded in character, without the herbaceous, grassy character that marks out Sauvignon. Do beware though: Chenin Blanc needs lowish yields to show its true character and South Africa especially is guilty of producing vast quantities of cheap, dull Chenin, so it’s best to spend a little bit more than bargain basement prices.

Waitrose have La Grille Classic Barrel Fermented Chenin Blanc 2006 for £8.25, with plenty of crisp, well-defined fruit and good length. They also stock one of my favourite white wines, Domaine Huet Le Mont Sec Vouvray 2005 at £15.25. Not cheap, but a truly special wine with fantastic depth of flavour, great length, deliciously ripe but crisp fruit – it’s a certified biodynamically-produced wine too.

Riesling
Wine writers bang on about Riesling, each year predicting that this really will be when Riesling makes its comeback, which then fails to happen. Why on earth do we bother, when it seems clear that most wine drinkers just can’t take Riesling to their hearts? It’s because Riesling is such a fascinating, expressive grape that makes some fantastic wines from around the world. Part of the trouble for many drinkers is that Riesling is unfairly associated with sweet, industrially-produced German wines like Liebfraumilch – which is not even made from Riesling. However, German wines are generally perennially out of fashion, the crimplene flairs of the wine world.

So if you want to ease yourself into the world of Riesling, without fear of coming across something sweet and sickly, I’d head for Australia, which is making some truly exciting and always dry Rieslings. Try O’Leary Walker Polish Hill River Riesling 2007, £8.99 at Waitrose for a taste of this deliciously crisp, racy grape. Majestic have Paulett’s Riesling 2006, Polish Hill River (obviously a hot spot for Riesling) for £9.99, or £8.49 if you buy 2 bottles. Thresher/Wine Rack have the 2006 Leasingham Magnus Riesling from the Clare Valley for £8.99 or £5.99 at the 3 for 2 price, which is textbook Aussie Riesling: crisp, waxy and limey.

Viognier
Viognier is definitely becoming steadily more fashionable, going from a little-known variety found only in a tiny part of France’s Rhône Valley, to an international grape grown in Chile, Australia, New Zealand – as well as in large swathes of the south of France. In contrast to Chenin and Riesling, Viognier is not characterised by crisp acidity: indeed it can be rather “fat”, even flabby, if not treated carefully in the vineyard. But Viognier’s trump card is its delicious peach/apricot fruit character, sometimes with a little spice. Perhaps the pinnacle of Viognier is its original home in the tiny appellation of Condrieu in the Northern Rhône: Chapoutier’s Condrieu “Invitare” 2006 can show you what all the fuss is about, but it will set you back £25 at Majestic. For more everyday enjoyment try Waitrose’s d’Arenberg The Hermit Crab Viognier/Marsanne 2007 for £8.99, hailing from McLaren Vale in Australia, or Sainsbury’s Stamford Brook Viognier 2007 from South East Australia at £5.99.

So will it be one of these three that will ultimately triumph? I’ll let you know in about five years’ time.

On your marks...

2008-06-04T17:12:00.000+01:00

Does this sound familiar? You’re in the supermarket and want to pick up a couple of bottles of reliable wine, nothing fancy, while you’re there. With a budget of £6 and only a couple of minutes to spare, you’re looking for surefire, good value wines. Get ready for supermarket wine sweep. Here are my hot tips for good value, reliable wines from the aisles.
First things first: avoid the big names (you know what I mean: Blossom Hill, Gallo, Hardy's and the like). I know, I know, it's tempting when you're in a hurry to go for the familiar, but please resist! All that advertising and promotion doesn't pay for itself you know, so there is just not that much money left to spend on the wine at around a fiver a bottle.
What's the region that offers the most reliable, good value wines at this price? Top of the list has to be Chile, so I’d head here first.
Concha y Toro is the largest winemaker in Chile, but they have respect in the wine trade for producing quality wines from the bottom to the top of their range. One of their star bargains is Casillero del Diablo Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s on offer at Sainsbury's for just £4.49 until 20th May and at Morrison’s for £4.44 until 8th June. This is a great price for a delicious red, with plenty of juicy, ripe black fruit and a hint of dark chocolate. Just the thing for summer barbecues. There’s a Sauvignon Blanc in the Casillero del Diablo range (£4.49 at both Sainsbury’s and Morrisons), but you don’t need me to tell you to buy it – the stuff just flies off the shelves all by itself, as we can’t seem to get enough of this variety. If you fancy a bit of a change and are a fan of oak, try Casillero del Diablo Limari Chardonnay 2007, £5.99 at Sainsbury’s. Yes, it’s oaky, but there’s plenty of fresh, juicy fruit, courtesy of the cool climate of the Limari Valley. Still within the Concha y Toro stable, their Sunrise Merlot 2007 is on offer at £3.99 at Waitrose until 3 June: very decent summer glugging.
Over on the other side of the Andes, there are bargains to be had in Argentina. Malbec has become that country’s signature grape and it offers plenty of dark, brambly fruit with soft tannins. Tesco have Argento Malbec, just sneaking in under £6 at £5.99.
Leaving South America behind, there are still plenty of reliable performers in Australia – as long as you steer clear of Oxford Landing/Hardy’s and the like. Peter Lehmann is a large-scale producer in the Barossa Valley, known for his big, beefy Shirazes. If this is your thing, then go for it by all means – but in the summer you might find Peter Lehmann Semillon more refreshing: crispy, textured fruit. Just the thing for people who don’t fancy Chardonnay, but can’t stomach Sauvignon Blanc either. And it’s £6.15 at Tesco, a little over the budget, but rules are there to be broken.
What about the Old World? Can Europe really not compete in the reliable bargain category? Yes it can, but we’ve been at this wine-making lark so long that things have got, well, complicated. There are countless well-made, interesting and well-priced bottles available from all over Europe: the trouble is we lack the kind of big brand names which have helped New World wines win such popularity in our hearts and wallets. However, to try and level the playing field a little, I will give an honourable mention to Sicily. They’ve been making wine here for centuries, of course, but have seen a revolution in vine-growing and winemaking here in the last decade. They’ve adopted New World techniques to make consumer-friendly wines from Italy and Sicily’s own wide range of grape varieties, many of them not too expensive either. The label of Casa Mia Fiano 2007 (£5.15 at Sainsbury’s) tells you squarely that this is aimed at “the ladies”. Despite that, the Fiano grape can’t help but make attractive wine: ripe and perfumed. Waitrose have a veritable bargain in Trinacria Rosso 2007 for £3.79. Made from a trio of indigenous grapes, it’s soft and plummily fruity.
Finally, should you have time to do a bit of swatting up before you go (easy if you’re shopping online) don’t forget to consult www.quaffersoffers.co.uk. This useful little site lists all the wines on offer at supermarkets and High Street merchants, so that you can check out the best deals before you go shopping. Or, if you are very organized, you can search for your current wine favourites and see which supermarket has them on offer currently and thus make sure you buy them at the best price. Some wines are always on offer somewhere, so this can really save you money.
Now just put on your running shoes and see how long it takes you to bag a bargain!

Italy, land of the vine

2008-05-16T15:33:00.000+01:00

Italy has perhaps the best claim to be the oldest wine-making country in the world. When the Greeks arrived here in ancient times they dubbed it Oenotria, or land of the vine, since grapes were already being cultivated.

Since prehistoric times the various peoples inhabiting the Italian peninsula have been experimenting with vine-growing and wine-making, resulting in a rich variety of wines and wine styles, made from an array of indigenous grape varieties, as well as those imported from other countries. And, this being Italy, wine is inextricably linked with the country’s rich cultural heritage, not least its regional cuisine.

So far so good. But there are problems: all that variety can be confusing for consumers. Here’s one example: if you see Barbaresco on a bottle of wine, is that the grape variety, the area where it’s made, or the name of that particular wine? Well it’s the area of production, but that’s not obvious to many wine shoppers. And once you’ve got that straight then you come across the name Gaja on a pricey bottle of wine: he’s the most famous winemaker in Barbaresco, but declines to put the word Barbaresco on the label.

Rich complexity, yes. Confusion, certainly. Italy’s cheerful disregard for anything that smacks of kow-towing to authority, combined with a deep sense of regionality can serve to turn consumers off Italian wines altogether. However, I urge you to persist and to discover the wine riches on offer, beyond the world of Pinot Grigio.

Yes, poor old Pinot Grigio. Not so long ago it was the in wine, immensely popular, until it was supplanted in our affections by Sauvignon Blanc. Now, if you bring along a bottle of Pinot Grigio to a dinner party you might as well be saying “Look, I’m a bit out of touch and don’t know much about wine.” There is so much more to Italy and Italian white wines, that we shouldn’t overlook them in favour of yet another New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.

First of all, a much-abused wine style that we all think we know: Soave. This region suffered from decades of mistreatment at the hands of unambitious growers, resulting in high yields and oceans of watery, dull wine. More recently, there has been an effort to drive up quality and rediscover the greatness of this wine. The leading light has been Leonildo Pieropan, whose Soaves start at £15 a bottle (and Pieropan is the big name on the label – you have to look hard to find the word Soave, tucked away on the back label). Majestic has a slightly cheaper version in the shape of Inama Soave Classico 2006 at £12.49, down to £9.99 when you buy any two Italian wines. This wine is anything but dull, and is full of perfumed, crisp fruit. And if you’re feeling rebellious you could make your second bottle of Italian wine Banfi’s Pinot Grigio, San Angelo 2007, normally £9.99, but down to £7.99 if you buy two. Not cheap, but if you want to know what Pinot Grigio should really taste like, then give it a go (maybe in the privacy of your own home).

To understand Italian wines, white or red, you have to grasp their function: they are meant to accompany food. Italians are rather perplexed by the British tendency to drink wine when it’s not part of a meal and their wine styles reflect their original function. White wines, therefore, are not meant to dominate, but to complement food so their flavours are designed to be muted and subtle. A prime example of this is Gavi, a wine from the northeast of Italy, made from the Cortese grape. It’s unoaked and offers understated pear fruit combined with delicious minerality. Majestic’s Gavi La Lancellotta 2007 at £7.49 (£5.99 if you buy two) is a great introduction to the style.

Italian red wines also offer plenty of, sometimes overwhelming, variety. What I like about many of them for summer drinking is that they provide refreshment along with the fruit and alcohol, one of the hallmarks of food-friendly wines. All red wines are an interplay of fruit, supported by a structure of tannin (the “stewed tea”, mouth-drying substance) alcohol and acid. It’s the acidity that gives Italian wines their refreshing quality, which is most important in warmer weather. If you generally steer clear of Italy when choosing wines, then I would urge you to try Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Primitivo 2007, £5.99. It comes from Puglia, the heel of Italy, which every year produces more wine than the whole of Australia. This deep purple wine is intensely flavoured with aromatic, fleshy black fruit. A crowd-pleaser, yes, but it could be the wine to win converts to Italy.

Do you drink Valpolicella? If you do, you’re a rare breed. Since we’ve been seduced by the power and exuberance of new world wines, we’ve come to view wines which are restrained, with a light touch, as somehow inferior. Yet on a summer’s evening, Valpolicella, with its low tannins and gently cherryish fruit is like a soothing balm. Waitrose stocks the eminently quaffable Vignale Valpolicella 2007 for £4.79 – and it’s only 12% alcohol.

Really understanding all of Italy’s wines is undoubtedly a life’s work, but there’s so much on offer from all over the country, from the crisp, aromatic wines of the German-speaking Alto Adige in the north, to the warm, spicy reds of Sicily, that everyone is bound to find something that they like. Morellino di Scansano? Fiano di Avellino? Bring it on!

And the winner is...

2008-05-06T10:20:00.001+01:00

OK, you’re scanning the supermarket or off-licence shelves for a nice bottle to take home that evening. Such a lot of choice, so many bottles: how to decide? That one’s got a pretty label, this other one’s discounted, but does that just mean they want to be rid of it? Hold on, this one’s won some sort of gold medal at a competition, obviously someone thinks it’s good, let’s go for that one.

Have you ever been swayed by the fact that a wine has won a medal in a competition? And have you ever wondered just what winning a medal means – what has the wine been through to deserve one?

Well, having just completed participating as an associate judge in the International Wine Challenge 2008, I have a better idea of how those medal stickers get onto the bottles. The Wine Challenge is the biggest and best known wine competition in the UK and has been dubbed “the Oscars of the wine world” by Jancis Robinson MW.

What do the judges know about the wines they are tasting?
All wines are tasted blind: judges do not see the labels, or get any hints of the identity of the wine beyond the fact that they are, for example, Syrah-based blends from the Languedoc. Wines are grouped together in “flights”, so that New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs are judged together, rather than mixed in with white Burgundy, for example. There is no information regarding price of the wines: judges do not know if they are tasting a £40 bottle of wine or a £5 one.

So does one person’s taste decide the fate of a wine?
No: the wines are tasted by a panel of 4 or more judges. All wines in a “flight” are tasted and rated by the panel independently, then scores are compared and each wine discussed in turn. Like a jury in a court case, the panel tries to come to a consensus on each wine, though sometimes a “majority verdict” is the only way to move forward if there are differences of opinion. The International Wine Challenge employs experienced Panel Chairpeople, a fair dollop of Masters of Wine among them, to manage each panel, so plenty of knowledge, experience and expertise is lavished on the wines.

How many wines does a judge taste in any one day?
You might be surprised or horrified to find that many judges assess around 100 wines, or more, a day. How can they possibly maintain judgment and critical faculties by the 99th wine? Don’t forget, the judges at this competition will be very used to assessing this quantity of wines on a regular basis as part of their jobs – yes, it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. And of course all wines are spat out!

Can competitions like this ever be fair?
Wines do get more than one bite at the cherry. During the first week of tasting, wines are either rated as potentially medal-worthy, Commended, or dismissed as not up to scratch. The potential medal winners will be retasted during the second week and assigned either a Bronze, Silver or Gold medal – or downgraded to Commended, or even given nothing at all. A wine will be assessed at least twice on two different days if it is to be judged worthy of any colour of medal.

Equally, wines that have walked away with nothing after the first tasting are all retasted by the inner circle of wine experts who run the competition – to make sure a panel hasn’t been overly harsh and to ensure consistency.

Do the medals mean anything?
During three days of tasting at the Wine Challenge, and well over 200 wines, the panels I sat (or stood) on discussed the possibility of only 2 or 3 gold medals. So medals are not given out lightly, just to reward a certain percentage of the entries. Gold medals in particular are hard to earn and reflect truly impressive wines – regardless of whether they cost £5 or £50.

No competition is ever perfect but, having had the opportunity to peek under the skirt of this particular one, I feel wines are judged as fairly as possible, from the Indian Chenin Blancs (yes, they exist) to the vintage Champagne.

Results of the International Wine Challenge are available from 20th May on www.internationalwinechallenge.com.

Wines for Spring

2008-04-19T16:56:00.002+01:00

Snow and hail showers one minute, bright sunshine the next – it must be Spring. Thinking of wines to drink at this time of year has its problems. Are the skies grey and the temperatures low, making you want to reach for a chunky, comforting red? Or has the sun emerged and you feel that Summer is surely only round the corner? When the weather is “in betweeny” like this, you need versatile wines that can adapt to changing conditions.

My first bit of advice is to have something red and something white and chilled ready for the off. If you’re braving an optimistic outdoor lunch, or even the first barbecue of the year, you probably want something cool to match the mood. But when the sun goes down at this time of year, the cold soon returns, so you might be after a spicy red to warm the cockles. Secondly, I find rosés just too summery for this time of year, so I’d rather hold off on those until the warm weather is really with us.

So, what to drink? For white wines, there’s something innately Spring-like in the herbaceous aromas and zingy acidity of Sauvignon Blanc. We are currently spoilt for choice in this country for Sauvignons, so attached are we to its gooseberry, leafy charms. You still need a little more weight and depth of flavour now than in Summer, when coolness and refreshment are of prime importance, so go for the fuller styles, such as those from New Zealand and Chile. Threshers/Wine Rack has Vidal Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand at £7.99 single bottle price or £5.33 as part of their 3 for 2 offer. Or you could try their Saint Clair Vicar’s Choice Sauvignon Blanc for £11.99/£7.99 for classic New Zealand pungent, ripe fruit. Majestic have a good value southern French Sauvignon Blanc, Les Fumées Blanches, which is £5.99 or down to £4.79 if you buy two.

If you fancy a change from the Sauvignon norm, head to Waitrose to sniff out a bottle of Hatzidakis Assyrtiko from the Greek Island of Santorini for £8.99. Banish all thoughts of evil Retsina and open your mind to the zesty, mineral intensity that the Assyrtiko grape produces on Santorini’s volcanic soils. I’m a big fan of this wine and it’s a great one to give to friends blind and play “guess the country” with.

Viognier is another grape that fits well with this time of year: it has a lovely apricotty/peachy character, plus some spice. When the weather hots up some can lack freshness because of their lowish acidity, but at this time of year their lush fruit is very welcome. Anakena Single Vineyard Viognier from the Rapel Valley in Chile is available at Threshers/Wine Rack for £8.49 or £5.66 if you buy three (when are they going to give up this absurd pricing I wonder, £5.66 is the real price, so don’t let yourself pay the higher one). This made me think more of pineapple than apricots, but delicious nevertheless.

What about reds?
Very light reds, like Beaujolais, which work really well slightly chilled, are, for me, all about Summer drinking: we’re not quite there yet. That rather dull-sounding term, mid-weight, is what it’s all about and here are some of my favourites.

The Loire is mostly known here for its white wines, but it does produce a fair amount of red. We are generally not as keen on them as the French are themselves, but they are great “wine bar” wines (as in good to drink on their own or with a token amount of food) and just right for Spring. Threshers/Wine Rack offers the uninspiringly-named Haut Poitou Rouge, made from a blend of Pinot Noir, Gamay and Cabernet Franc at £6.99/£4.66. Plenty of juicy fruit with a smoky edge to it and (important for lighter-bodied reds) low tannins. The vintage I tried was 2005, which was particularly good, so try to make sure you find the same one. Joguet Les Petites Roches from Chinon in the Loire is a 100% Cabernet Franc, available at Waitrose for £8.35. It’s rather more weighty and serious than the Haut Poitou Rouge, so one to have with food.

Pinot Noir is a supremely flexible grape which can suit many different foods and occasions. I recommended it to go with Christmas turkey and I make no apologies for bringing it up again now. Pinot Noir’s low tannin and softly spicy fruit are the keys to its adaptability – it’s great with or without food, and is light-bodied enough to match up to warming weather. Villa Maria Private Bin Pinot Noir from Marlborough, New Zealand is available from Wine Rack at £11.99/£7.99 and is certainly worth the 3 for 2 price. From Chile, Waitrose have Valdivieso Pinot Noir Reserva at £8.99, with plenty of ripe, but not overdone, fruit.

A final note: I’ve checked all prices for accuracy as far as possible at the time of writing. However, due to budget increases on duty as well as rising costs in other areas, wine prices are in a rather fluid state – be aware that prices may have changed by the time you go shopping!

Organic and biodynamic wines

2008-04-04T08:30:00.000+01:00

In the Autumn, collect some fresh cow manure, put it into a cow horn and bury it in your vineyard on the Autumn equinox. Six months later, at the Spring equinox, dig up the horn, remove the manure and put it in a barrel of water. Using a long stick, stir vigorously for one hour: the biodynamic preparation 500 (cow horn manure) is now ready to spray on your vineyard, preferably when the moon is descending and in front of a “fruit” or “root” constellation. This is just one example of a variety of preparations used by biodynamic wine growers, used in harmony with the movements of the moon and planets.

Sound a bit weird? Certainly not mainstream and surely only practised by muesli-eating, goat-wool sock-wearing hippie types? Well, the news from the wine world this week is that Domaine de la Romanée Conti, in the heart of Burgundy and makers of the most expensive wines in the world, have converted all their vineyards to biodynamics from the 2007 vintage.

So what is biodynamics and where did it come from? Biodynamic agriculture was inspired by the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (best known in this country for Steiner schools) at the beginning of the twentieth century. In essence, it takes organic cultivation as a starting point and adds elements of Astrology (the influence of the Moon and planets) along with Homeopathic techniques and principles. Despite sounding New Agey, it can be seen as an attempt to return to an earlier era of agriculture, before mechanisation, before agro-chemicals, before calendars even, when farmers relied on the movements and phases of the moon to guide their activities.

What is the difference between organic and biodynamic?

To drastically over-simplify, organic viticulture essentially lists what a grower CANNOT do: they must not use any man-made chemicals to produce their crop of grapes. Incidentally, there is legally no such thing as “organic wine” in the EU: the technically correct term is “wine made from organically-grown grapes”.

Biodynamic growers do not have to be certified organic (though many of them are), but they should use biodynamic preparations, such as the cow horn manure above to ensure the health of the vineyard soils and vines. The annually produced Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar provides information on planting times (based on the position of the moon) and categorizes each day as either flower, root, leaf or root to guide vineyard operations. If all this sounds too wacky to take on, consider this: Thresher’s/Wine Rack, not noted for sandal-wearing tendencies, make sure they run their wine-tastings for the press on fruit days, as they find wines taste consistently better then than on, say, leaf days.

How do you spot a biodynamic (or organic) wine?
Easier said than done sometimes. Some biodynamic growers choose not to become certified by either Demeter or Biodyvin, the two official bodies. Even some who are certified choose not to mention the fact on their labels: their decision to use biodynamics is to make what they consider better wine, it’s not a marketing technique to appeal to the consumer. In general, each country has its own organic certification body, such as Ecocert in France. Again, though, not all organic growers choose to be certified, or to put any official recognition on the label, preferring the wines to do the talking. My own experience leads me to the conclusion that, the bigger the word “organic” is on a bottle’s label, the poorer the wine will be.

So, it can be hard to spot an organic or biodynamic wine, and the most clearly-labelled ones may not be the best. The good news, however, is that you don’t need to fork out for wines from Domaine de la Romané Conti in order to get a taste of high quality biodynamic wines. Here are some of my favourite wines as well as tips on where to look for organic and biodynamic wines.

If buying organic is important to you, then you should head to www.vintageroots.co.uk. This online specialist stocks only organic or biodynamic wines (a s well as beers and ciders) and all are clearly identified as biodynamic, where applicable. Les Caves de Pyrène, in Artington just outside Guildford, is a happy hunting ground for those who are interested in what Les Caves like to call “real wines”. They stock plenty of organic and biodynamic French wines, but also have a great range of Italian wines and some crackers from New Zealand – including the biodynamic Felton Road Pinot Noir at £21.27.

Of the supermarkets, Waitrose is the best at offering a wide range of high quality organic and biodynamic wines. I would pick out Domaine Huet’s delicious whites from the Loire, made from the Chenin Blanc grape: Le Mont Sec is £15.25. They also have what is, as far as I know, the only biodynamic Champagne: Fleury NV at £24.99. Vintage Roots stock the entire Fleury Champagne range, including their delicious rosé at £28.

If reading about biodynamic wines gives the impression that only highly-priced wines could possibly be made in this way, think again. Emiliana Organicos is the largest organic and biodynamic winery in Chile and its Adobe range of wines is available from £4.99 at Majestic. Adobe Carmenère and Merlot are great value wines, but if you want to see what a couple more pounds a bottle gets you, check out the Emiliana Organicos’ Novas wines at Vintage Roots.

Australia in general seems to shy away from organic and, especially, biodynamic wine – with notable exceptions including Cullen in Western Australia’s Margaret River. Vanya Cullen’s reds are the stars of her range and you can get a taste of them at Godalming-based merchant Imbibros, who list her Ellen Bussell Red at £10.95.

Chapoutier is one of the best-known producers in France’s Rhone Valley, but many of its fans don’t know that it is also the largest French producer of biodynamic wines. Their top wines, Hermitage, Cote Rôtie and the like are well in excess of £25 a bottle, but Chapoutier make a huge range of wines and Vintage Roots lists their Côteaux du Tricastin for £7.25. Just a word of warning: Chapoutier make wines from their own vineyards, which are all organic and biodynamic. But they also make wines under the Chapoutier label where they have bought in grapes from other growers: there are no guarantees on organic/biodynamic credentials for these wines. It’s not easy to tell which you’re faced with – sometimes it’s not easy being green!

Easyjet and the Gentleman's Club

2008-03-25T10:03:00.001Z

Easyjet and the gentleman’s club: modernity versus tradition in Spanish wines

There was a neat illustration of the clash of tradition and modernity at a seminar at last week’s annual Wines from Spain tasting. Telmo Rodriguez, an arch moderniser unafraid to explore new wine regions and wine-making techniques, was very nearly late for his speech because his Easyjet flight was delayed. At the other end of the table, Javier Hidalgo, whose family has been making sherry in pretty much the same way since the time of Napoleon, was going to be making his way to his gentleman’s club in London that evening, to dine on beef cheek.

Spain, for many UK wine drinkers, is synonymous with a single classic wine region: Rioja. Rioja’s wines are traditionally made of a blend of grapes, dominated by Tempranillo, which is then aged in oak barrels and in bottle for an amount of time prior to release. The longer a wine spends in oak and bottle before it is sold determines its rung on the quality ladder of Rioja: Joven (or young wines) have no oak and little time in bottle; a Rioja Crianza must spend a year in oak and a year in bottle; Reserva a year in oak and two years in bottle; at the top of the ladder is Gran Reserva, which must spend two years in oak and three years in bottle. In the UK we are most likely to see Crianza and Reserva wines. Don’t worry too much about the details: even Telmo Rodriguez, who has been making wine in Rioja all his adult life, says he can’t recall exactly what all the regulations are!

This illustrates one of the complexities of Rioja: not all Riojas abide by the rules and a growing number of winemakers are ignoring the Reserva/Gran Reserva framework and simply making their wine in the way they wish, with just the word “Rioja” on the label. Even within the traditional quality labels winemakers are striving to make a different style of Rioja: using 100% Tempranillo instead of the traditional blend, using 100% new oak barrels to give a more intense vanilla gloss to the younger wines. To further complicate matters, the Spanish wine authorities are planning to allow an additional three grape varieties to be added to the traditional blend of Tempranillo, Garnacha (Grenache), Graciano and Mazuelo. You probably haven’t heard of those last two varieties – and I can guarantee you won’t have come across any of the new varieties either. In today’s environment, it’s getting harder and harder to predict the style of wine you’re going to find in the bottle when you see the name Rioja on the label. Is Spain in danger of over-complicating its most famous wine and in the process driving away wine-drinkers?

In the past Rioja was one of the most distinctive and easily understood wine styles. The blend of grapes, coupled with barrel and bottle ageing give a soft and harmonious wine with distinctive strawberryish fruit and a vanilla edge from the oak. Progressing from the younger, more fruity, Crianza styles, the vanilla, leather and spice flavours come to the fore as you move onto the Reserva and Gran Reservas. You can still find Riojas in this style if this is what you’re looking for: Marques de Murrieta is probably the best known of the traditionalists: their Reserva is around £13 and up, depending on the vintage, while Marques de Riscal’s Reserva 2002/3 is at Majestic for £13.99. Cune is also a reliable name to watch out for: their Crianza 2004/5 is stocked by Majestic for £6.99, or £4.99 if you buy two. Waitrose have the consistently enjoyable Vina Herminia Crianza 2003 at £7.49.

If you’d like to have a try of the more “modern” styles of Rioja out there have a look for Muga’s Rioja Seleccion Especial 2003, £18.99 at Majestic. Telmo Rodriguez’ Riojas are available at Adnams (www.adnams.co.uk) starting at £6.99.

So why has Rioja become more complex to buy and, arguably, more interesting to drink? Humans are curious creatures, prone to experimentation and competition – it’s only natural that winemakers should feel the urge to push the boundaries of their wines and not simply slavishly copy the practices of their fathers and grandfathers (not many female winemakers in Rioja) simply because they are “traditional”. If a winemaker feels they can make a better wine by using more new oak, or ageing for less time in barrel, wine laws alone are not going to stop them.

The end of cheap Aussie wine?

2008-03-07T15:12:00.002Z

When you think of Australian wines, what comes to mind? Big, beefy reds, mostly made from Shiraz and rich, tropical fruit whites, probably Chardonnay – right? And what about price: around £5 or less?

The bad news
Well, we may have to rethink our ideas of what Australian wines are, as things are about to change for the world’s most successful exporter of wines. For the past fifteen years or so we have relied on Australia to provide large quantities of bargain-priced, competently-made wines. We’ve looked to them for easy-to-like, ripe, alchoholic wines, without worrying too much about where exactly in Australia they come from. You know, Australia is about the same size as Western Europe and yet we’re perfectly happy to pick up a bottle of wine that says its origin is simply “South East Australia”. Have a look for that in the atlas – you won’t find it on any map of Australia, because the term has been coined to cover wines made from grapes from any or all of: New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. We’re happy with that, yet most of us would turn our noses up at a wine labelled: “Produce of more than one EC country”.

Australia has managed to produce huge quantities of cheap wine because it has traditionally harvested huge crops of grapes produced in irrigated areas such as Riverina, Mudgee Irrigation Area and Riverland – don’t see those names on the label do you? These areas have been highly productive, producing a glut of cheap grapes to make into cheap wine. As the climate is hot, the grapes get very ripe very quickly, maybe too ripe – but, no worries, as the Aussies say, acidity levels, even tannin levels, can be adjusted in the winery. In the past 3-4 years, though, Australian grape harvests have been hit by the effect of severe drought – and when supply drops, prices increase. Australia’s big winemakers are going to struggle to keep their big name brands at current retail prices. Fosters, which owns Lindeman’s, has even been using Chilean wine to provide some of the Lindeman’s blend here in the UK since 2006.

The droughts which have caused the immediate supply problems look set to continue. In any case, it is becoming clear that an industry (and it is an industry at this scale) which relies on producing a crop by using precious river water for irrigation, thereby causing environmental damage to surrounding land, is far from sustainable. To cap it all, the wine trade has received warnings from the Treasury of above-inflation rises in duty on alcohol in the March budget. The days of bargain-basement Aussie wines look well and truly numbered.

So what’s the good news?
We are going to get used to seeing real Australian wine regions on our wine labels: weird and wonderful names like Gippsland, Tumbarumba and Geelong. Wine production will, in general, move out of the hotter central irrigation areas and out towards the coast, as well as up into the hills, where the cooler temperatures will produce wines with the right balance of acid, fruit and tannin – without over-reliance on irrigation and winemakers’ adjustments.

If you’re a fan of heavy-weight Barossa Valley or McLaren Vale Shiraz – don’t worry, these wines are not going to disappear. But the range of wine styles we will see from Australia will be broader: we’ll see more crisp, mineral Sauvignon Blancs, and elegant, scented Pinot Noirs. More choice and greater regionality, coupled with more sustainable winemaking have all got to be good news.

But the new Australians are just not going to be as cheap as they once were – and we are a nation of bargain hunters when it comes to wine. So maybe one effect is that we’ll find more shelf space devoted to other countries, while the Australian section shrinks. Wines from France and Spain, who can still produce wine relatively cheaply in some regions, may be the ultimate beneficiaries.

Is it time to pull the cork?

2008-02-18T15:11:00.003Z

Do you look for wines sealed with a natural cork? Or do you go out of your way to buy screwcapped wines? How do you feel about synthetic (plastic) corks? A battle is being waged in the world of wine: a fight to find the perfect wine bottle closure.

Cork has, for centuries, been the closure of choice for wines, from the cheapest plonk to the grandest classed growths. But cork has a problem: cork taint. If a wine suffers from cork taint, you say the wine is corked, or corky. By the way, this has nothing to do with little bits of cork floating in your glass: just hoik those out and the wine will be fine.

Cork taint is something much more serious, caused by a substance known as TCA. TCA can get into natural corks during the process of turning the bark of the cork oak into stoppers that can be put into a bottle of wine – there is still debate about how exactly the TCA occurs. What we do know is that humans are very sensitive to TCA and can detect it in tiny quantities (just a few parts per million).

What does TCA do to a wine? First of all, there is no health implication from drinking corked wine – it’s all to do with the effect on the taste and smell of the wine. The effect on the wine depends on how corked it is: at one end of the spectrum the wine will smell damp and musty, as if a bit of rotten wood had been left floating in the bottle. The taste is unpleasant: musty and rotten tasting, with no fruit flavour. At the other end of the spectrum, low level taint can have a small but pernicious effect: the wine just does not have the fresh, fruity aromas and taste that it should have. This is what drives winemakers and wine merchants crazy about it: if you know what the wine should taste like, you may spot that the bottle you’ve got has low level cork taint and put it aside to return for a refund. If you don’t know it, then you might just think, “Didn’t think much of that wine, I won’t bother trying that again.” In other words, cork taint can damage the reputation of a wine and it is out of the control of the winemaker and retailer.

How often do corked bottles of wine come along? It’s hard to find definitive figures, but estimates vary between 1 in 20 bottles to 1 in 10. Wine makers, frustrated at the cork industry’s seeming inability to correct the problem, turned to alternatives: hence the arrival of synthetic corks and screwcaps.

Synthetic corks are made of plastic and are designed to mimic the look and effect of cork, but without the taint. The trouble is, they’re not very good at the job: plastics just can’t mould to the shaped of the bottle neck in the same way as cork, with the result that the seal is not as good as it should be. What this means for the wine is that, as air seeps into the bottle, the wine can start to oxidise: it won’t taste as fresh and lively as it should. Sound familiar? Plastic corks may not cause taint, but they are certainly not the perfect bottle stopper. However, research is continuing in an effort to make better synthetic corks and the risks of oxidation are lower if the wine is in bottle for a short time. It’s rare to find any wine over about £10 a bottle with one of these corks, which is a sign that winemakers are not (or not yet) convinced that these things are good quality. Personally, I don’t like synthetic corks: they’re hard to get out of the bottle, all but impossible to get back in again – and I hate the way you often don’t know it’s synthetic until you’ve taken the foil off the top of the bottle.

If you shop for wine in Tesco’s, you probably have a fair bit of experience of screwcapped wines. A couple of years or so ago, the supermarket decided to take a stand and insisted that many of its suppliers use screwcaps, if they wanted to remain suppliers. Presumably Tesco were fed up with the number of returned bottles from their customers (even though the wine suppliers pay for them I understand). As we buy so much of the wine we drink from supermarkets, and from Tesco more than any other supermarket, this has had a dramatic effect on the amount of screwcapped wine we drink. Tesco obviously got the mood of the customer right and we have embraced the screwcap wholeheartedly. Now it’s a struggle to find any New Zealand wine that is not in a screwcap bottle. Many Australian and some South American and South African wines have followed suit – some Bordeaux chateaux have even taken them up – for their white wines rather than their reds. Screwcaps no longer mean “cheap and nasty” when it comes to wine, although they are indeed cheaper to produce than the natural cork.

Screwcaps seem poised to take over the world of wine….well not quite. They may not cause cork taint, but there are reports of other problems, known as “reductive aromas” in the trade. Like cork taint, in its worst form it’s easy to spot (a bad egg, sulphurous smell), but in milder cases it just causes the wine to be, well, not as good as it should be. It looks like we are back where we started!

It seems that there is no single perfect solution to stoppering wine bottles, one that never causes problems. So should we just stick to cork? We shouldn’t forget that using natural cork helps to protect the unique ecosystem of the cork oak forests of southern Spain and Portugal, which are under threat. Also, the carbon footprint of natural cork is far smaller than either synthetic corks or screwcaps. The cork industry has also apparently cleaned up its act, literally, in an effort to eliminate TCA from their corks. Screwcaps and synthetic corks may have won a battle, but cork may yet win the war.

Is there more to New Zealand than Sauvignon Blanc?

2008-01-30T09:56:00.000Z

Sauvignon Blanc – from anywhere, but especially from New Zealand – has been THE wine success story of the past couple of years. It seems we just can’t get enough of this variety’s crisp, lively, tropical fruit character. New Zealand winemakers must be rubbing their hands with glee you’d think.

Well yes and no. While it’s great being this year’s big thing, there’s nothing worse than being yesterday’s news. New Zealand winemakers know that wines, like clothes, can become out-dated. So they’re keen to let us know that they can do more than produce gallons of appetising Sauvignon Blanc, ready for the time when our tastes are moving on and looking for something new. So what do they have in store for us?

Aromatic whites
New Zealand’s climate of warm(ish) sunny days and cool nights makes it a great place to produce aromatic white wines. Be on the look out for wines made from Pinot Gris and Gewurztraminer, both varieties which originate in Alsace in France. Pinot Gris has a streak of spice along with vaguely peachy fruit and sometimes a hint of almond or marzipan. This variety is now the most rapidly growing one in New Zealand. If you’d like to see what they’re producing, Waitrose offers The Ned Pinot Grigio for £9.99. Gewurztraminer (or Gewurz for short) has opulent aromas of lychee and rose petal. Have a try of ever-reliable producer Villa Maria’s Private Bin Gewurz at £8.49, also at Waitrose.

Another variety to watch out for is Riesling – but it comes with a warning! The problem is New Zealand Rieslings have a bit of a split personality. Some are dry, with delicious lime zesty flavours and crisp acidity. Others are decidedly off-dry, with perceptible sugar levels. Each winery seems to decide which style they are going to produce, so, unless you’ve tried it before, or have a good wine merchant’s advice, you’re in the dark as to which style you’re going to find when you open the bottle. Buyer beware!

Red wines
New Zealanders are keen to show us that their skills extend to red wines as well as whites.

Mainly, but not exclusively, from the warmer North Island, they have been making Syrah, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon for a number of years. There are some good ones, a very few great ones – but there are an awful lot which are just not that enjoyable. Even the North Island seems to be a little too cool in most places to ripen red grapes fully and the wines end up with a green, mean streak to them.

The big noise on the red wine front, though, is Pinot Noir. This grape has a reputation for being fussy about where it grows. Not too hot and not too cool - and healthy growing conditions are needed to prevent rot in this thin-skinned variety. Pinot Noir seems to have found its ideal home in New Zealand. It comes into its own in the relatively new region of Central Otago, deep in New Zealand’s South Island – the most southerly wine region in the world. Pinot Noir is the grape that makes red Burgundy, and it is a great antidote both to blockbuster new world reds and to tough, tannic Old World ones. Pinot is lighter in colour and tannin than most other red wines, but it packs a punch in terms of a harmonious balance of red fruit flavours, spice and perfume. In Central Otago you can practically smell the air the grapes were grown in, by the fresh, clean aromas of strawberry and raspberry.

What’s the drawback? The price: New Zealand is never going to be a low-cost producer and it costs money to make good Pinot Noir, so expect to pay upwards of £10 for a decent bottle. My absolute favourite is Felton Road Pinot Noir, made 100% organically and biodynamically (more on that in another column) since 2002. The wine combines denseness and depth of flavour with a light touch which makes it a complete pleasure to drink. From pleasure to pain: you can buy this wine at Guildford’s Les Caves de Pyrène for £21.27 a bottle, or from Imbibros of Godalming for £21.95.

If this sounds like a few quid too many, have a look for these lower-priced but still delicious examples:
Waimea Estate Pinot Noir £10.99, or £8.79 if you buy two bottles, from Majestic is from the Nelson region at the top of South Island. It offers a good introduction to the New Zealand style.
Waitrose stocks Wither Hills Pinot Noir at £14.99, from the Marlborough region, again at the northern tip of the South Island. For me, Marlborough Pinots have more power, but less in the way of clear fruit flavours than Otago, but you can pick them up a little more cheaply too.

At the moment, New Zealand is riding the crest of the Sauvignon Blanc wave, but it’s betting on other varieties to carry it safely to the shore without a wipeout.

Wine wishes for 2008

2008-01-18T10:18:00.000Z

Wine wishes for 2008

January is not usually a popular time for knocking back a glass of wine, as many people resolve to give up alcohol for the month, or at least start out with the intention of eating and drinking less as part of a healthier lifestyle. With this in mind, I’m devoting this column to good intentions for the year ahead, as far as wine is concerned at least.

1. Shop around now for bargains
Many wine merchants have New Year sales, usually to clear the last bottles of the current vintage before they move onto the new one. Have a look around and see what bargains you can pick up. My top tip is to buy any Champagne you might need (if need is the right word) for the year now – prices are keen, and your wine will only improve with a few months’ ageing under the stairs.

2. Drink less, but better
It’s been hard to avoid the messages coming from government ministers over the past few months telling us that we need to keep an eye on what we are drinking and to stay within safe limits. There is no getting away from the fact that wine contains alcohol and that it is a large part of wine’s appeal – no-one at one of my wine-tasting evenings has ever said: “I love this wine – I just wish there was a low alcohol version of it.” What we like about wine is inextricably linked to its alcohol content. That said, if all we were interested in was the alcohol, then there would probably be just three or four wines on sale anywhere: a white, a red and a rosé, with no need to provide different taste sensations. Wine is more than just an amount of alcohol: it’s a collection of aromas and flavours. If you make a point of savouring each glass of wine that you drink, I can guarantee that you will get more enjoyment from it – and perhaps end up drinking less.

3. Spend more than £5 a bottle on wine
The average amount we Brits spend on a bottle of wine is just over £4. At that price, the most that can be spent on the actual wine itself is just under£1, once you take out the production and shipping costs and duty. If you pay £8 for a bottle, however, the total that can be spent on the wine goes up to around £4.25 – over half of the price you are paying in other words. I don’t expect every wine drinker to switch suddenly to more expensive bottles – but it’s good to be aware of the economics of any product that we eat or drink. This can also help with the “less but better” ethos.

4. Get to know your local wine merchant
70% of all wine in this country is bought at supermarkets – and why not, given the extent of their ranges and great discounts they offer. In the longer term, though, our choice as consumers will be enhanced if we continue to buy wines through a variety of sources. We are still very well served by local independent wine merchants – but we need to support these guys if we want them to stay in business. If there’s a merchant near you that you’ve never bought from, please make it your goal to buy from them this year. Independent merchants can’t offer the big brands and big discounts of the supermarkets, but they can do things that the big guys can never do: provide great customer service, knowledgeable staff and a fun shopping experience. Whether your local is The Vineyard in Dorking, Taurus Wines in Bramley or The Guildford Wine Company in Shalford or any one of the multitude of independents, please give them a try. They can get to know you in a way that the supermarkets never can – they’ll learn your tastes, your budget and could be a valuable ally.

5. Buy ahead of time
Instead of the last-minute panic of “Oh God, people coming for dinner, better grab some wine at the corner shop/local offie.”, be smug and ahead of the game by buying wine in advance. It doesn’t have to be grand – just keep track of wines you’ve enjoyed, then buy 6 bottles or a case next time. Independent merchants can be a great help with this, by the way.

6. Try something new
Apologies to Sainsbury’s – but it does sum up my final New Year wish. Wouldn’t it be boring if all wines tasted the same? Well if you drink the same wines over and over again, they do taste the same don’t they? If you’re stuck in a wine rut, make a break for freedom in 2008. Never tried a wine from Uruguay before? Are you a stranger to the Grüner Veltliner grape? When did you last try a German wine? Do you think dessert wines are not for you? You’ll never know unless you try!

Christmas wines - part 2

2007-12-21T10:23:00.000Z

In my last article I gave suggestions for wines for festive season parties and entertaining. This week I’m turning my attention to the big day itself and focusing on special occasion wines for Christmas Day and beyond.

Start with sparkling

First things first, many of us like to start off with something fizzy, in the form of buck’s fizz. Can I make a plea to give ANY pre-made bottle of the stuff a wide berth and make up your own? Choose a cheap but dry sparkling wine (Cava is a good bet) and the best orange juice you can find and mix them 50:50. Waitrose’s own label Cava Brut Non Vintage at £5.49 makes a good, fairly neutral base.

Later in the day you might want to splash out on some of the real stuff – Champagne. Here are some of my favourites, in roughly ascending order of price:

Veuve Duval-Leroy NV is nominally £24.99 from Majestic, but goes down to £12.49 when you buy two (and why would you buy a single bottle when two bottles cost a penny less?). It’s well-made in a light style. Waitrose make a range of own label Champagnes which are good quality and offer terrific value for money. I particularly like the Waitrose Blanc de Blancs NV at £18.99 and the Waitrose Brut Special Reserve 1996 Vintage at £23.99 (if you’re a fan of vintage Champagne, you’ll know it’s all but impossible to find 1996 vintages any more). However, there are times when you may not want to have a supermarket’s name splashed over the front of your bottles: if this is you then try Bredon Brut NV, £14.79 from Waitrose. In effect it is an own-label Waitrose Champagne, but there is no mention on the bottle and it offers plenty of depth and flavour for the money. The best value vintage Champagne I’ve found is Heidsieck Gold Top 2002 from Majestic at £31.99 or £15.99 if you buy 2 bottles. However, my favourite Champagne under £30 is Charles Heidsieck Brut Reserve. It’s a sort of half-way house between Non Vintage and Vintage Champagne and tells you when it was “mis en cave” (i.e. put into the cellar to age). Tesco have the mis en cave 2001 and Waitrose the 2003 both at £26.99. For my money the Waitrose version is the better one with lovely weight and depth of flavour and a hint of richness.

If Champagne is your passion and you want to splash out on something special, then have a look at these: 2003 by Bollinger is a one-off special edition Champagne from an exceptionally hot vintage, available from Majestic at £75 a pop, or £44.99 if you buy two. Threshers/Wine Rack have the same bottling at £59.99 each or £39.99 at the 3 for 2 price (or even less with their 40% off any 6 bottles current offer). The more classic Bollinger Grande Année 1999 is available at the same £75/£44.99 price from Majestic or £74.99/£49.99 from Threshers/Wine Rack.

The main event

Most of us still sit down to turkey and all the trimmings on Christmas Day. Many pre-selected gift boxes consist of the classic pairing of a white Burgundy and a red Bordeaux. I don’t happen to think either of those wines is a great match for Christmas dinner – but I have included some recommendations for them, as I know many of you will want to buy them.

White wines
What will I choose for my own Christmas Day bottles? I prefer red wine with my turkey, but, whatever your own tastes, you need to offer a white wine as well. However, in contrast to tradition I’d plump for a white Bordeaux and a Pinot Noir (the grape that makes red Burgundy). White Bordeaux is relatively unfashionable here, but deserves to be better known. They are usually made from a combination of ultra-fashionable Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon grapes, with some oak-ageing to give a rounded, slightly spicy flavour. Here are my picks:

Waitrose’s Château Saint Jean-des-Graves 2006 at £6.49 offers layers of crunchy, peachy fruit with spicy length. G de Guiraud 2006, £7.99 from Majestic is a revelation: beautifully ripe, complex and rounded yet fresh.

If you want to stick with tradition and go for a white Burgundy (or Chardonnay), here’s my list of suitable candidates:

Pouilly Fuissé L Chavy 2006, £12.99/£8.66 or Jadot Les Climats Chardonnay 2004 £18.99/12.66 both from Threshers/Wine Rack. Tesco has Les Quatre Clochers Chardonnay Reserve 2005 at £6.99 or their own-label Tesco Finest Chablis 2006 at £7.99 – or you could strike out a little and try Evans & Tate Chardonnay 2006 from Western Australia’s Margaret River, £10.99 at Tesco.

Red wines
Pinot Noir grapes produce wines which are relatively low in tannin (the mouth-puckering substance which is very noticeable in red Bordeaux) and have plenty of raspberry or cherry fruit with some spice. These characters make it a good match for turkey (or goose for that matter), where other red wines would be too chewy. Pinot Noir would also be easy to drink along with ham, either hot or cold. It’s hard to make a good Pinot Noir for under £10, so there are few bargains to be had, but have a look out for these:

Majestic gets the ball rolling with New Zealander Waimea Estate Pinot Noir 2005/6 at £10.99 or £8.79 when you buy two. Villa Maria, also from New Zealand, have a reputation for well-made Sauvignon Blanc, but their Private Bin Pinot Noir 2006 (£11.99 or £7.99 3for2 at Threshers/Wine Rack) and Cellar Selection Pinot Noir 2006 (£14.99 or £9.99 3for2, also Threshers/Wine Rack) show what they can do with this grape. Clean fruit flavours, with good depth.

If Pinot Noir doesn’t do it for you, you could try a Rioja from Spain. These oak-aged red wines offer ripe, sweet fruit and soft tannins thanks to their time in barrel. Majestic has Rioja Gran Reserva Torre Aldea 1998 on offer for £9.99 or £6.99 when you buy two bottles, which is a pretty unbeatable price for this level of quality. Or you could plump for the classic Marqués de Riscal Reserva 2002 (I would not be so keen on the 2003 vintage just yet) also at Majestic at £12.99 or £10.99 if you buy two. Waitrose has Marqués de Murrieta Reserva 2002 at £14.95, or you can get the same wine from Threshers/Wine Rack for £17.99, down to £11.99 at the 3for2 price.

If Christmas means claret for you, I’ve provided some recommendations below – although I’d rather serve these wines alongside some rare roast beef.

Waitrose’s superior own-label Saint Emilion 2005 is good value at £8.99. Château Martinens Margaux 2005, £15.99 from Tesco is very approachable, perfumed and good value from a highly-prized (and priced) vintage. Majestic offer La Réserve de Léoville Barton 2001 at £19.99 or £15.99 if you buy two: very “proper” and will impress even the biggest claret-loving visitor.

Bordeaux blends of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc hail from all over the world so for claret style with a twist you could try:

Rustenberg John X Merriman 2005 from Stellenbosch in South Africa, £9.99 at Waitrose. Or create a bit of a stir with Château Musar 2000, from the Lebanon and £13.99 at Tesco.

Whatever your festive drinking, be sure to enjoy it. Cheers!