Wine Club

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.