Wine Club

All six wines this week come from the Languedoc, courtesy of Jason Yapp, that canny wine hound who understands the twists and turns of France’s largest vineyard area better than anyone I know. And so happy is he with our selection that he’s lopped a quid off every bottle. The Domaine Collin Crémant de Limoux Cuvée Rosé Brut NV (1) is a stunningly fine pink fizz from just south of Carcassonne where they were making sparkling wines almost 140 years before they worked out how to do it in Champagne. A bottle-fermented blend of Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc and Pinot Noir, it’s full of lush, ripe raspberries and wild strawberries but with only 6g of residual sugar per litre (Brut champagne usually starts at nine).

I write this from my sick bed. Laid low with a vile lurgy, I feel far from well. And, sad to report, Mrs Ray is far from understanding. She says I should learn to be more stoical. I say she should learn to be more, well, sympathetic. It’s not my fault that I feel my ailments slightly more keenly than she does. Laura Taylor at Private Cellar was a darn sight more solicitous, I can tell you, and on hearing my plight when sending me a dozen bottles to taste for this offer, strongly commended the Réserve de Sours Sparkling Rosé Brut NV (1). I was dosed up to the eyeballs on Day Nurse, Night Nurse, Any-Time-You-Like-Nurse, and alcohol was the last thing on my mind. But blow me, I took a tentative sip of the fizz, then another, then promptly drained the glass.

It’s spring and that means it’s time for rosé. Sales of the pink stuff continue to rocket and we’re all out and proud rosé drinkers these days, darling. That’s not to say there aren’t some dire bottles on the shelves. Like that vile Blush Zinfandel from California (shudder) or the weirdly coloured one from the corner shop that glows in the dark and numbs your gums. A fine rosé, though, is a wine of great beauty — and no rosés are finer than those from Sacha Lichine’s Château d’Esclans estate in Provence. The sole aim of Sacha and his partner Patrick Leon, former head winemaker at Château Mouton-Rothschild, is to produce the finest rosés in the world. Many believe he has succeeded.

A wonderful offer from Berry Bros & Rudd, this. Wine-loving readers will know that once or twice a month we hold Spectator winemakers’ lunches at 22 Old Queen Street. A well-known winemaker will bring some wines and chat about them to a maximum of 14 readers over lunch in the boardroom. These entertaining affairs must surely be the best value in town: just £75 a pop for four courses of jolly fine grub and as much wine as you can drink; not to mention the chance to chat to some of the world’s leading winemakers and to meet like-minded Speccie readers. Little wonder that we always have to flick the lights to turf folk out as afternoon turns into evening.

We start this week with the ever reliable 2015 Corney & Barrow House White (1), largely because if we didn’t I would get angry letters asking why not. I really do wonder why my mother doesn’t just pick up the phone instead. She’s got my number. A blend of 70 per cent Colombard and 30 per cent Ugni Blanc, produced by Producteurs Plaimont in Gascony, this has been Corney & Barrow’s best-selling white for over 20 years and is pretty much the Spectator Wine Club’s too. It’s light, zesty, fresh and uncomplicated; perfect, in fact, for springtime drinking. It’s also a cracking price at £6.63 with the Brett-Smith Indulgence (whereby you get £6 off an unmixed case) or £7.13 without, down from the list price of £7.50.

Spectator readers, being wise wine-lovers, are particularly fond of Château Musar, that extraordinary wine born of the Bekaa Valley in the Lebanon. Whenever we offer it in these pages, we promptly sell out. This is surely our best Musar offer yet, thanks to the canniness of our Wine Club partners Mr.Wheeler. As readers will know, Musar only releases its grand vin when it’s deemed ready to drink and the mighty 2006 has only just had the nod, held back while the 2007, 2008 and 2009 all matured before it. The Spectator, in cahoots with Mr.Wheeler, has exclusive first dibs on said 2006 Château Musar, two months before anyone else. Not only that, the Château has put aside the last of its 1996 vintage just for us, all 170 bottles of it.

I’m going to fess up right from the off and say that, yes, you’re right, we’ve offered two of these wines several times before. But they simply shone in our tasting and refused to be ignored. You loved them last time, dear reader, and these vintages are even better. The other four are crackers, too. So get stuck in. And I must add that even though FromVineyardsDirect is noted for its rock-bottom prices and tight margins, FVD’s sainted Esme Johnstone is knocking 50p off every bottle as well as keeping prices at pre--Budget levels. Hooray! So to the 2013 Crémant de Bourgogne Brut Millésimé (1), which we’ve not offered in these pages before even though it’s a regular at Spectator lunches and the Spectator Wine School.

I adore the wines of New Zealand. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if I had to drink the wines of just one country — taking France out of the equation, of course — then New Zealand would do it for me. There are spectacular aromatic whites from Marlborough, Gisborne and Nelson; soft, smooth and supple Pinot Noirs from Marlborough, Martinborough and Central Otago; and wonderfully sophisticated Bordeaux blends from Hawke’s Bay. There are also fab fizzes and exquisite sweet wines if you can find them. So, just for the heck of it, thanks to an excellent proposed longlist from Mr.Wheeler, we’ve gone 100 per cent Kiwi this week with six typically tasty wines from the Land of the Long White Cloud. And just so you know, Mr.

Tanners have been around since 1842 and certainly know their onions. Both Decanter and the International Wine Challenge named them ‘Large Independent Wine Retailer of the Year’ in 2016. I mean to say, how lucky are we to have them as one of The Spectator’s partners? Their sales director, Robert Boutflower, put together a list of typically quirky wines, any one of which I would have been happy to recommend. The final six more than pass muster. Added to which, RB was magnanimity itself and tossed in some tasty discounts, with the mixed case just £108. The 2015 La Petite Vigne Viognier (1) comes from near Carcassonne and the Foncalieu co-operative, which boasts some 1,000 growers, drawn from all corners of the Languedoc, Gascony and the Rhône.

Phew, done it! Dry January, that is, and 31 whole days on the wretched water wagon, clinging on by my fingertips. Well, 31 whole days apart from a two-day, champagne-soaked trip to Pol Roger (about which more anon on our Spectator Wine Club website) and three days with the missus in the Loire Valley (ditto). But having spoken to my legal advisers I understand that I’m in the clear. Apparently, because I was drinking outside UK jurisdiction, it doesn’t really count and I can still claim to have had a dry January in this country. Doncha just love lawyers?

I don’t know about you but my cellar took a pounding over Christmas and on New Year’s Eve. Yes, yes, I know it’s only a cobwebbed cupboard under the stairs. The point is that it’s all but empty apart from a few corks, some half-drunk vermouth, a shattered decanter, a bottle of Bailey’s (where did that come from?) and the faint whiff of cordite. I’ve an urgent need to regroup. Thank heaven, then, for Yapp Bros and this timely selection. It didn’t take Jason Yapp and me long to agree that we should look no further than the Loire for this offer. 2015 was a cracking vintage in the Loire Valley, which remains a happy hunting ground for lovers of aromatic Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc and cool-climate Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc.

Tricky time of year this, with the festivities hoving into view. Never easy for anyone, least of all those of us who suffer from Christmas Affected Doom, Depression and Despondency (CADDAD), a ghastly affliction about which I’ve written at length elsewhere so won’t bore you with now. Suffice to say that it is a dreadful burden, often hereditary (invariably passing down the male line with females rarely affected), often undiagnosed and rarely properly treated.

We’ve a really strong selection this week from Tanners of Shrewsbury. In fact, I was so impressed that it took a heck of a lot of swilling, swirling and spitting (well, not so much of the latter to be honest) to whittle the wines down to six. Tanners’ Robert Boutflower even put up a deliciously tasty South African Pinotage, and that’s not a phrase I’m used to typing. Pinotage, a cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsault, is a grape with which I’ve always struggled, but this example (from Doran Vineyards, since you ask) had none of those characteristic burnt-rubber notes; it was just joyously juicy and very drinkable. Anyway, it didn’t quite make the cut but is on the Tanners list if you’re interested.

One of FromVineyardsDirect’s finest ruses has been to obtain, quietly and discreetly, small amounts of surplus production from the most celebrated châteaux in all Bordeaux (and I mean the most celebrated) and to sell the wine on under their own labels at extremely reasonable prices. These ‘declassified’ wines (as they like to call them) are made from estate fruit with exactly the same care and attention that goes into the properties’ grands vins by the same winemaking teams. Understandably, FVD would rather I didn’t say exactly which estates they are, although you might find some clues below...

We’re with my alma mater Berry Bros & Rudd this week featuring some of their excellent own selection wines. I was quite bowled over by their quality, as indeed I was by the generosity of wine director Mark Pardoe’s discounts. In fact I strongly recommend you start your festive stockpiling right here, right now. Why wait until the week before Christmas to buy Berrys’ scrumptious own selection red burgundy for £16.50 when you can buy it from this page right now for £13.95? Not all fine fizz comes from Champagne. Nope, some of it still comes from where it all started: Limoux in southern France where, in 1531, the monks of Saint Hilaire Abbey are believed to have created the first sparkling wine. The Berry Bros.

We’re not due a Wine Club offering in the magazine until next week, but so good were the wines that I tasted recently with-FromVineyardsDirect .com that we just had to include them so that readers might join in the fun. It’s an entirely French line-up, ideal for autumn. And despite the plunging pound and the fact that the wines were very decently priced in the first place, we even squeezed a bit of a discount out of Esme Johnstone and his gang, for which we’re very grateful. The 2014 Clotilde Davenne Sauvignon de Saint Bris (1) is a delightful curiosity, a Sauvignon Blanc from Burgundy in what is really Chardonnay country.

We have six real treats this week: three from Italy and three from Spain. I would have been happy with almost any of the wines that Private Cellar’s Laura Taylor put up and those that didn’t make my final six only just missed out by inches. And, in the face of a plunging pound, Laura has done her very best with the discounts. Thanks, Laura — every little helps! I simply cannot remember when I last drank — let along bought — any Soave. In the late 1970s, Soave was a staple in every wine bar along with Muscadet, Beaujolais Nouveau and those raffia-covered Chianti flasks. It was OK, but dull, dull, dull. Not sure I’ve had any since. I therefore had the lowest of low expectations when the 2015 Soave Gregoris, Antonio Fattori (1) was thrust under my beak.

Although many wine merchants are tightening their post-Brexit belts and rationalising their cellars, Yapp Bros have thrown their net ever wider. They might be the 2016 International Wine Challenge Loire Specialist of the Year and ditto for the Rhône, but Yapps have recently been fishing outside their traditional waters, making first-time forays deeper into France and into Germany and Spain. Wise old truffle-hound that he is, Jason Yapp’s touch clearly hasn’t deserted him and we at The Spectator are the beneficiaries. All the wines below are completely new both to Yapp Bros and The Spectator and each and every one is a delight. And to tempt us even further, Jason has generously lopped a quid off every bottle.

We’ve something a bit different this week: six wines not only from the same region (Burgundy) but also the same producer (Maison Louis Latour). The Wine Company’s Mark Cronshaw presented such a fine selection of Latour’s wines that they were impossible to resist, especially after we’d cornered him to demand some pretty punchy discounts. Maison Louis Latour is one of the great names of Burgundy, family-owned since 1797 and currently in the hands of 11th---generation Louis-Fabrice Latour. The company boasts a vast range of wines and it wasn’t easy whittling them down to the following three Chardonnays and three Pinot Noirs. I’m confident, though, that we have a fine selection.

After three and a quarter centuries in the business, Berry Bros. & Rudd is certainly trad, but it’s also reassuringly innovative. So it is that we have here a classic claret but also a Chardonnay from a part of France that doesn’t grow it, a blended single varietal from Chile (don’t worry, all is explained below) and a wine from Greece which is all but extinct. Best of all, Berrys’ buying director, Mark Pardoe MW, has knocked up to 26 per cent off the list price. Hooray! The 2013 Domaine de Lansac ‘Les Quatres Reines’ (1) is a deliciously uncomplicated, unblended, unoaked Chardonnay from the tiny region of Les Alpilles in the Languedoc. Night-time picking and low fermentation temperatures allow the fresh fruitiness to shine.