Wine Club

Order your wines by email There are many ways of buying cheap wine, though fewer means of buying good cheap wine. Supermarkets often have bargains. Recently, however, I went to a tasting by a very downmarket chain — they had Châteauneuf du Pape for £6.99 and a Chablis for £5.99. These tasted of nothing, and I was amazed at lax appellation laws which allowed them through. You can go over to France, and that works fine if you want quantity rather than quality. In a highly competitive market, the better French wines tend to be sold abroad or else by specialist merchants; the hypermarchés frequently sell stuff you would not strip paint with. Or you can go for one of those apparently amazing ‘£40 off per case — our special introductory offer!

This week’s mini-bar is from a new company, titled in the modern fashion, FromVineyardsDirect.com. It’s been set up by David Campbell, who is the publisher of the Everyman Library, and Esme Johnstone, one of the founders of Majestic Wine Warehouses. They have made up a very short list — fewer than 20 choices, though this will no doubt increase — and offer them all online or by post direct from the growers. It’s impossible to compare prices precisely, since these vary wildly according to who’s selling, but David reckons he charges roughly 20 per cent less than you would pay other merchants. Virtually all their wines are French classics, and for this mini-bar offer I have chosen some splendid bottles from Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhone.

Order your wines by email I’m pleased to say it has become an annual tradition: our February offer of the new vintage of Chateau Musar with Lay & Wheeler. It has been a tremendous success with Spectator readers. The wine won’t be in the shops until May, but it can be shipped to your door a month earlier, and at a reduced price. This year’s crop is the 2000. The red is, perhaps, slightly more austere than usual, closer to a fine Bordeaux, but it will age gratifyingly well for a very long time. And you can drink it with great pleasure now: all that soft, velvety, peppery, spicy, earthy, even chocolaty quality is already there in spades. The white has become increasingly popular too.

The festive season is long over, so it’s time to stock up on less expensive but delicious wines that will be gluggable through the cheerless winter months. Last year one of our most successful offers was with Averys of Bristol, who offered terrific discounts, largely to reduce stocks of wines that were first-rate but weren’t flying off the list. They have done the same again, and some of the reductions are boggling. It’s the perfect opportunity to refill your post-Yuletide cellar at a very modest price. You might get the sample case, try them all, and order more of the ones you like best. The offer will be open for five weeks, so there’s plenty of time. First up is the La Tours des Dames Viognier, from the Pays d’Oc, 2005. This is a tremendous find.

Click here to send an order by email This is our last Christmas offer for 2006, and contains a great many wines, starting with Corney & Barrow’s house white1 and house red6. Both are highly popular with Spectator readers, being inexpensive and quite delicious. The white is lemony and zestful, the red soft, mellow and possessing real depth. They are both — like all wines in this offer — discounted and, if Adam Brett-Smith will excuse me, they are an excellent way of padding your order to qualify for the fabled Brett-Smith Indulgence. This year we are offering a mixed case of the two, just right for a smallish party or to have on hand for the holiday period. The next two wines are hardly more expensive and are both remarkable value.

Click here to order online We have two Christmas offers this month, both from top-ranking wine merchants. The first is by Lay & Wheeler. Nearly all the wines have been reduced by 10 per cent (with free delivery); there are further discounts if you buy more than one case, and two of the reds represent astonishing value. Both are over-production of famous names. The strict French appellation system limits the amount of wine that can be sold under any particular label. This must be infuriating if, for example, you make white wine in one of the great Burgundy districts and in a particularly good year you produce more than you’re allowed to sell under its real name. It ends up labelled as a generic Burgundy.

Click here to send an order by emailThis is the first of our Christmas offers — a little early, I know, but a chance for you to stock up on pleasingly discounted bubbles for the festive season. It’s a very flexible offer from Armit of Notting Hill — you can buy most of the wines by the half-dozen, or acquire our two tasting cases: the Luxury and the Grand Luxe. The only requirement is that, for free delivery, you have to order at least a dozen bottles. The Prosecco La Riva dei Frati NV1 is a delicious example of this plump, moussy, zestful and fruity wine, from the Prosecco grape, of course. It needs to be drunk this year, and will be perfect for parties on its own, as a Buck’s Fizz or as the classic Bellini with peach juice.

Click here to send an order by emailStone, Vine & Sun of Winchester is one of my very favourite wine merchants. I’ve never tried anything of theirs that wasn’t first rate, and I was not remotely surprised when they won the Best Small Independent Wine Merchant award from Wine International this year. What they do brilliantly is fossick around for amazing bargains in unexpected places, and there are few discoveries more pleasing than a delicious wine at a price that allows you to buy plenty. White wines need to breathe as much as reds, but generally people are afraid of them getting too warm — though they should never be iced. Probably you should decant any decent white some hours before drinking, then maybe give it an hour in the fridge.

Order the wines onlineI’m just back from my annual trip to Adnams of Southwold. It’s one of those events that makes the end of summer rather more tolerable. Their shop in town (they are soon expanding into other parts of booming East Anglia) is cool, elegant and stuffed with exciting wines which Adnams’ buyers have found all over the world. A tasting of a few dozen wines is followed by lunch at the Crown Hotel, which has some of the best food in the region. And I am invariably spoiled for choice; every single one of the wines they suggested this year was of the highest standard, and trimming the number to eight was almost impossible. But we did it.

Order the wines online Private Cellar is a very classy company. Its four principals all worked for Corney & Barrow, and its buying director is a Master of Wine with the magnificent name of Nicola Arcedeckne-Butler. I assumed this indicated Eastern European origins; in fact it’s an old English spelling of ‘Archdeacon’. Nicola and her colleagues have created a list that is short but very carefully chosen. France still dominates, but in the past year or so they have moved into the New World, with excellent results, which is why three of the wines in this offer come from South Africa — now soaring around the world in both prestige and price — and one from the amazingly inventive Argentines.

How should wines be sealed? This issue continues to fret the trade. Those who believe in screwcaps correctly argue that they make it far less likely that wine will go off. Up to 5 per cent of all bottles are ‘corked’, as oxidation and sourness result from air penetrating an inadequate cork. Sometimes the effect is almost undetectable; sometimes it’s gaggingly horrible. We don’t get many complaints here at the wine club, but when someone writes, ‘This wine you recommended so highly tasted like vinegar’, I know the bottle was corked. Incidentally, all our merchants will change any bottle that’s off, without quibble. Supporters of cork say that the opening ritual is a traditional pleasure for the wine-drinker.

The French are finally coming to terms with generic wines. The bottles, instead of being labelled with the name of the grower and location, have names that are either trendy (Fat Bastard or Le Freak) or else amiably meaningless, such as Chamarré, a kind of butterfly. The labels also show the grape variety. This information was previously thought unnecessary; if you didn’t know that, say, Chablis was made from Chardonnay, or Condrieu from Viognier, you probably weren’t fit to drink it. But these wines, it’s thought, will be welcome to confused drinkers everywhere, in Britain, the US or in France itself. But it will be a slow process.

This offer is, I think, exceptional value. Merchants occasionally overstock on first-rate wines which don’t sell off the page. Order the wines online This offer is, I think, exceptional value. Merchants occasionally overstock on first-rate wines which don’t sell off the page. For example, if you saw, on the list published by the old and distinguished house Averys, something called Rare Spice Petit Verdot at £71 a case, you might wonder what on earth it was, and why you should pay nearly £6 a bottle for a grape you’ve never heard of from a winery you don’t know. But seeing it at £4.58, and being told that it is a delicious, round, spicy, violet-scented and beautifully balanced wine for cheery glugging or sipping with food, you might try it.

Organic wine is increasingly popular, in spite of the fact that few people know what the term actually means. The rules seem to be strict but variable, work differently from country to country, and are monitored by a bewildering number of autonomous organisations. Some of these allow a handful of additions, such as preservatives. But others ban certain physical processes, even if these don’t involve chemicals at all. If the word has any useful meaning, I suppose it’s something like: ‘made from vines to which almost nothing artificial has been added’, and for some people that is very important. Does it affect the taste of the wine?

Yapp Brothers is one of the country’s more distinguished wine merchants. Yapp Brothers is one of the country’s more distinguished wine merchants. It has a short but choice list, almost all coming from the Loire or southern France. Robin Yapp, who is now retired, used to select all the wines by touring vineyards, some in appellations so small that few outside France, or even in France, had heard of them. Deals to buy the produce of a tiny property would be secured over a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese and a bottle. The results were as far away from mass-produced supermarket plonk as it is possible to imagine.

Our mini-bar offers from Waddesdon Manor, that magnificently ornate, opulent and over-the-top Rothschild gaff in Buckinghamshire, have always been highly successful. There could be some snobbery here: if you have a bottle that declares ‘Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite)’ along the top, you wouldn’t want to decant it. You would want your friends to admire it. Or it could be that the wines are just first-rate. This is a slightly pricier offer than before, but it is heavily discounted by Waddesdon’s Christopher Campbell. All are well worth the modest extra cost. I loved the Austrian Grüner Veltliner ’05 from Stasse Hasel in Kamptal1, one of the best regions for this exceedingly fashionable grape, sold in painfully posh London restaurants.

Australian wines now firmly lead French in British off-sales; but apparently we still prefer French wines in restaurants. My guess is that there is a race on, as some superlative wines made in the more obscure French regions compete with the best from the New World. Sommeliers, or whoever they have in the kind of eateries that do not boast sommeliers, will find themselves saying, ‘Ahem, I think Sir will find that the Costières de Nîmes is quite as robust as the Margaret River Chardonnay.’ Some Oz wines are not very nice (I name no names, but the Jacob’s Creek people know who I mean). Some are much more than OK, and I’ve offered many in this column. But others are truly first-rate wines that have a degree of extra depth and power.