Wine Club

At dinner the other night, our host spotted a well-priced magnum of fizz on the list and beckoned the sommelier. Alas, it turned out the magnums were no more, the last one having been sold two nights previously. ‘Oh dear,’ sighed my chum. ‘I guess we’d better have it by the half-magnum, then, and see how we get on.’ Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that we got on just fine and ended up having two half-magnums. Crisp, clean, creamy and toasty with an elegantly fine mousse and the most stylish of finishes The fact is that magnums are a real treat, the ideal size for wine lovers, especially at this time of year with parties galore and friends dropping by unexpectedly.

Reports of the demise of our old chums at FromVineyardsDirect are grossly exaggerated. Indeed, those many readers who expressed concern as to their health will be delighted to learn that Esme and David are alive and kicking as part of the Wine Company stable along with that other Speccie partner, Mr Wheeler. And here they are gracing our pages once more with a timely offer comprising their celebrated ‘defrocked’ clarets (and one Sauternes). Readers love these wines with reason, for they boast impeccable pedigrees and provenance, at knock-down prices. As I’ve mentioned before, they are the over-production— from younger vines and newer plantings — of some of the finest châteaux in all Bordeaux. And I mean the finest.

Those naughty Yapp Brothers (actually, proprietors Jason Yapp and Tom Ashworth are naughty stepbrothers) are well known for preying upon unwary drinks writers and leading them astray. One day I’ll tell you about that bull fight in Dax with the bottle-of-rosé-a-head breakfast, the beer and pigs’ trotter lunch and the subsequent salsa festival where — I blush to recall — the wheels came off quite dramatically and only momentum saw us through. In the meantime, we’ll stick to the wines because, wicked as they are, the boys are also well known for the wonderful vinous treasures they unearth on their travels. Not for nothing are Yapp Bros the 2019 International Wine Challenge Rhône and Languedoc-Roussillon Specialist Merchants of the Year.

Our second offer from Naked Wines, the iconoclastic online merchant that funds selected winemakers via so-called angels — wine lovers who pay a sub for distribution to said vignerons in return for fine vino. Since there’s no marketing, advertising, agents, wholesalers etc, RRPs are said to be as low as possible. I’m not entirely convinced that this is the case, but I do vouch for the quality of the following wines, all of which I much enjoyed and which we are offering at prices below even those that the angels pay, thus truly as low as possible. The 2016 Simpsons of Barham Court ‘Beora’ (1) is a cracking English fizz.

We head to Italy this week and the wines of Castello Banfi. The much-admired estate was founded in 1978 by brothers John and Harry Mariani, and remarkably boasts Europe’s biggest contiguous vineyard, stretching from Tuscany to Piedmont. The 2018 Banfi ‘San Angelo’ Pinot Grigio (1) shows just how tasty this grape can be. I love, even adore Alsace Pinot Gris but all too often struggle with Italy’s notoriously naff interpretation, finding it flabby, dull and cloying. This, though, is spot on. Cool fermented and aged for two months in steel tanks, it’s crisp, clean and refreshing. Both peachy and citrusy, it makes a very amenable mid-morning or early evening invigorator. £14.50 down from £16.00.

As you settle down to read this over your boiled egg and soldiers, three dozen or so hardy Spectator readers will be messing about in a boat during our annual ‘Clays, Claret and Cognac’ cruise up and down the Thames. They will be aboard Thames sailing barge Will, blasting at clays (which, fret not, are biodegradable) with a variety of weapons including blunderbuss, musketoon and elephant gun, before repairing below for claret and cognac, served alongside a shirt-popping lunch. We are running the cruise in cahoots with our chums at Private Cellar, and marketing director Laura Taylor and I are so smitten with the wines we are showing that we just couldn’t refrain from offering them here to the wider Spectator readership.

One of the jolliest of our recent Spectator Winemaker Lunches was that hosted by Maria Urrutia, fifth--generation director of the family-owned Compañia Vinicola del Norte de España, better known as CVNE, producers of exemplary Rioja since 1879. Fine Rioja is, famously, one of the most accessible of all wines and the most fairly priced, especially when compared to Bordeaux, Burgundy and beyond. The wines are only released when ready to drink (a punter-friendly concept completely unknown to the Bordelais), with labels and terminology that are easy to understand.

A very tasty offer this week from guest partner Honest Grapes, the multi-award-winning online merchant founded five years ago by Nathan Hill and Tom Harrow, aka ‘Winechap’, celebrated as the nattiest dresser in the wine trade. HG is the antithesis of the aloof, pin-striped wine merchant of yore and the boys are whatever the diametric opposite of fuddy--duddy is. The Honest Grapes’ mantra is Down with Elitism, Join the Revolution! Since these are volatile times, let me reassure you that they’re talking about revolutionising the world of wine, nothing more incendiary than that. I met Tom thanks to a shared passion for Franciacorta, the sublime fizz made near Lake Iseo in Lombardy.