Jonathan Ray

I haven’t been to Le Marche for yonks. Heck, I haven’t been anywhere for yonks. Who has? My last jaunt abroad was an overnight flit to Paris in February last year. It was huge fun, with the opera followed by such an exhaustive bar crawl that I needn’t have booked a hotel. I only went there to retrieve my bag and have a pee before legging it to the Gare du Nord. I pine to go away properly and I pine for Italy’s Le Marche especially. Sandwiched between the Apennines and the Adriatic, Le Marche has everything that Tuscany and Umbria have, minus the crowds and the prices (I’m talking pre-Covid of course).

After the debacle of my crash landing at The Griffin the other week, Mrs Ray has been keeping a frustratingly close eye on me and I’ve been forced to take it easy. It turns out that I’m on some sort of probation and spend much of my time on the naughty step alongside No. 2 son, banished thither for too much cocktail-making and too little A-level swotting. We keep our spirits up by discussing what we’re going to do once his wretched exams and this ghastly lockdown are both over. Next week can’t come soon enough for either of us and we have big plans. Big plans. It’s brilliant timing, then, for this peach of an offer from our chums at Mr Wheeler. We’ve offered the wines of Domaine de la Jasse before and readers greedily hoovered them up.

I think it’s fair to say that I overshot the runway at The Griffin the other day. So excited was I to be out and about, large glass in hand, mixing with much-missed mates on the East Sussex gastropub’s fabled ‘Serengeti’ terrace, that I foolishly didn’t keep as close an eye on the speedometer as I should have done. Bottle followed bottle and by the time the patron’s postprandial limoncello appeared, I was completely undone. Happy, but undone. I slept through most of Mrs Ray’s finger-wagging in the cab on the way home but got the gist — ‘undignified’ and ‘at your age’ being the constant refrains. The trouble is — as I pointed out before dropping off — I love the taste of wine.

We’re so nearly there. This time next month, groups of six will be able to dine the night away indoors and then, just five weeks later, we’ll be free. Hurrah! Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again, dum-de-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. I simply cannot wait. I miss my mates, I miss the bottles we share and I miss the nonsense we spout as the dregs are drained and the kummel is unleashed. Happily, our shackles are being shed just as we enjoy the most beautiful part of the year: spring, in all its hope-inducing glory. In other words, it’s prime rosé season and time for our annual offer from Le Roi de Rosé himself, Sacha Lichine, proprietor of everyone’s favourite pinkers: Whispering Angel.

Crikey, I worked up quite a sweat putting this one together. But you know me, always the team player. After selflessly draining dozens of bottles on your behalf, I finally cracked it with this bumper Antipodean selection showcasing two countries, seven regions/producers and ten different varieties/blends. Don’t say I don’t try. We in the UK drink more Aussie wine than we do wine from anywhere else and we spend more on average per bottle on New Zealand wine than on anyone else’s. In short, we Brits love the wines from Down Under and the following bottles give the perfect illustration of why. The Kiwis have grown Sauvignon Blanc only since 1974 and the SBs of Marlborough in particular are celebrated the world over.

The last time I drank mead was 7 April 1978. It was my 18th birthday and —unforgettably — it was snowing heavily. My chum Mark had bought me a bottle of Lindisfarne Mead which I knocked back on top of several Tequila Sunrises, a bottle of Black Tower and a few Brandy Alexanders. This toxic mix took its toll and I was violently sick during an all-comers’ snowball fight the length of the Fulham Road, before getting arrested for being drunk and disorderly outside the Café des Artistes at 3 a.m. I only mention this because my younger son, Ludo, is now 18 and has developed a serious mead habit.

Mrs Ray and I are barely speaking. When she accompanied me to my appointment with the vaccinator yesterday, she loudly declared that when it comes to needles I’m something of a fainter and that she had stay and hold my hand. This is utter tosh of course, unless you count that time my dentist thought it would be funny to mutter ‘Is it safe?’ from the film Marathon Man whilst waving a massive seven-gauge syringe in my face and I collapsed in a heap. ‘We’ve got a fainter!’ yelled the security guard yesterday and the shout went down the line until the head nurse was called and I was ushered into a private room complete with bed, vaccinator and a 20st rugby player called Kevin, there to catch me when I fell.

Hold on to your hats folks for this is one heck of an offer, nothing short of a good old-fashioned Spectator scoop. I humbly suggest that you must be either crazy or teetotal to overlook it. We’ve five wines, all from Anthony Hamilton Russell in South Africa, of which two — the 2020 Hamilton Russell Vineyards Chardonnay and the 2020 Hamilton Russell Vineyards Pinot Noir — are not available to buy anywhere else in the UK until Easter at the earliest. Our old mates at Private Cellar have cannily sourced the initial UK allocation of both wines (50 six-bottle boxes of each) and Laura Taylor, PC’s marketing director, has generously agreed to offer first dibs to readers of The Spectator. Laura, thank you!

OK, so that stone I put on during the first lockdown and then managed — very smugly — to lose, thanks to my patented ‘don’t-eat-anything-white-and-ditch-the-chocolate-you-idiot’ diet… well, I’ve put the whole darn thing on again. Every bloody pound. I was 13st 2lb, then 14st 2lb, then 13st 2lb and now I’m flipping well back to 14st 2lb. Grrr! As the pounds fell away, I gaily bought thin clothes online which now don’t fit. And since the fat clothes I used to wear were binned in a fit of misplaced optimism, I find myself somewhat between wardrobes. Thank goodness there’s nowhere to go, no one to see and Zoom — if one’s careful — is only from the neck up.

I don’t know about you but I’m now comfortably back in the saddle after a serious but ultimately doomed attempt at dry January. My corkscrew and I are inseparable friends once more and it’s as if I’d never been away. Wet February here I come! I ache for uncorking time — which Mrs Ray and I have currently set to 7 p.m., with an option to bring it forward an hour if either of us is struggling. I have a daily mantra as I ready myself for yet another night stuck chez nous. Wine is made to be drunk… it’s good for us (I know, I know, in moderation)… we need our pleasures… no need to go crazy… break yourself in gently… drink less but better… such God-given delights are there to be enjoyed… and so on.

Dry January? Are you kidding? What dry January? I’m sorry, but I really don’t think this is the year to be considering such things. Having sought a number of opinions, the consensus was this: don’t be such an idiot, now is not the time. At Mrs Ray’s behest I did try my best, though, and managed almost three weeks before discovering a well hidden but fully stocked bar on my careening wagon. I was undone in a trice and have been grinning ever since. Anyway, we’ve made it to the cusp of February and, courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect, I’m delighted to present the ideal wines with which to fill the gaps left by Christmas, NYE and bloody lockdown. As we all know, a Muscadet keeps the doctor away and the 2016 Comte Leloup du Ch.

Well, it’s almost upon us, the strangest of Christmases. Thrust into our ridiculous bubbles, some folk are stuck seeing the people they don’t want to see and other folk are stuck not seeing the people they do want to see. It’s all going to be very odd and not a little challenging. The key to a passable Christmas, though, remains the same: wine and plenty of it. It’s more important to drink well than to drink heavily, of course, and with this very toothsome selection from Honest Grapes — Decanter’s Outstanding Wine Retailer of the Year 2020 — you can do just that. Drink well, that is. And if you take advantage of the very special Santa’s Selection you will drink very well indeed. What?

Our squabbles at home about Christmas are as traditional for us as carol-singing, roast turkey and stockings are for others. Our current standoff concerns the tree. Our boys think a plastic one is most environmentally friendly. Yes, they argue, ultimately it will go to landfill, but it’s reusable, will last for decades and doesn’t necessitate a real tree being felled. But, says Mrs Ray, creating plastic is a no-no, and think of the environmental costs of its delivery from China. Divide, conquer and I hate Christmas are my middle names, so I sat back, let them exhaust themselves quarrelling before landing my killer blow: what about no tree?

Oh dear, I’m so sorry, I got a bit carried away this week. Now that we’re no longer on the naughty step and Christmas isn’t being taken away from us after all, I’m in a cloud of euphoric indecision. We can finally meet actual, real, genuine people — hurrah! — but what the heck are we going to drink? We need to get stockpiling. The thing is, so tasty were the wines Mr Wheeler sent me and so over-excited was I that I just couldn’t decide which to pick, hence this bumper selection. Trust me, though, for each and every bottle is absolutely first-rate. The 2019 Greenhough ‘River Garden’ Sauvignon Blanc (1) from Nelson, New Zealand, is spot-on.

And it was all going so well. Actually, that’s a complete lie. Nothing’s going well for any of us. What I meant was that since I gave my poor liver such a merciless pounding during the last lockdown, I had decided not to drink a drop during Lockdown #2. Last time there was no apparent end in sight and it was impossible to foreswear the comfort of alcohol. This time, a finite 28 days seemed just about do-able. And it was and I was managing. Each day dragged like the blazes of course but the following morning, I’d scratch another line on the wall of my cell and press on with my empty life best I could. What undid me, though, were these fabulous clarets that Esme Johnstone, the canny fox behind FromVineyardsDirect, sent me to try.

Those naughty Yapps — Jason Yapp and step-bro Tom Ashworth — might be notorious leaders-astray of naive and innocent journalists, but they do know their wine. In particular they know their Rhône wine, and nobody deserves to be International Wine Challenge Rhône Specialist Merchant of the Year more than they do. In honour of said award, we’ve compiled an all-Rhône selection starting with the 2019 Yapp Blanc (1). A cheery blend of Grenache Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc, it’s made expressly for the Yapps by Les Vignerons Ardéchois, an exemplary coalition of wineries in Ruoms. It’s fresh, lively, crisp, clean and dry and as satisfying a house white as you will find. £7.50 down from £8.50.

These are dark days indeed and, with nobody seemingly in control, we’re pretty much back where we started, with lockdown beckoning once more with its bony finger. Well sod that. With a long, lonely winter ahead, I’m stocking up like fury. No, not with bog rolls and baked beans, you fool, with vino! I don’t think any vino suits this time of year better than fine Rioja, and the family--owned Compañia Vinicola del Norte de España (better known as CVNE) and its sister bodegas of Viña Real and Contino make some of the finest.