Jonathan Ray

Yet again we have been cruelly misled. All the wild assurances from those supposedly in charge that Christmas had been cancelled — thanks to Covid, Brexit, Insulate Britain, leaves on the line or whatever the current mismanaged crisis is — turn out to be complete bunk. Unfortunately, despite no petrol, no delivery drivers and no space at Felixstowe docks, we’re told that Yuletide is firmly back on track. Bloody Boris, yet another promise he’s failed to keep. Of course, some twits continue to panic-buy bog rolls and mince pies and there will inevitably be gaps on the supermarket shelves.

Yippee! It’s that time of year again which canny, wine-loving readers pine for. No, silly, I’m not talking about Christmas. That’s still yonks away, even though the shops are already full of ghastly festive tat. Indeed, only last week, in search of a Soho loo stop after a magnum too many in the Academy Club, I found that Liberty, of all places, has an entire upper floor dedicated to Christmas. And, with the streaming September sun spotlighting plastic trees, fake wreaths, tacky tree toppers and sundry generic baubles, it looked like a pretty cheap and rubbishy Christmas they had in mind too. How the mighty are fallen.

Alsace is my favourite of all French wine regions. There, I’ve said it. Bordered by the Vosges and the Rhine, it’s achingly pretty with rolling, wooded hills and exquisite medieval villages. The food is sublime (26 Michelin-starred restaurants), the climate benign (second lowest rainfall in all of France) and the wines, well, they’re stunning, from bone dry whites to sumptuously sweet late harvest wines and tasty Pinot Noir reds. Apart from a smattering of excellent co-operatives, the wineries are nearly all family-owned, boasting long, unbroken histories despite Alsace having been the battleground of Europe for centuries, enduring such bust-ups as the Thirty Years War, the Franco-Prussian War and two world wars.

We had the first of our new season’s Spectator Winemaker’s Lunches last week and what a rip-roaring, shirt-popping success it was. Held in the Jacobite Room of Boisdale Belgravia (our extremely congenial temporary home while the unfortunate flood in our boardroom dries out), it featured the extraordinary wines of Joseph Phelps Vineyards in California and was beautifully curated by Laura Taylor, marketing director of Private Cellar. Nobody likes a show-off and I hate to brag, but we knocked back five gloriously tasty wines including the 2018 Joseph Phelps Freestone Chardonnay, the £200-a-bottle 2010 Joseph Phelps Insignia and the 2018 Joseph Phelps Insignia, surely one of the finest ever incarnations of this striking Bordeaux blend.

My longed-for trips to Greece and Spain are booked, England thumped India in the third Test, Spurs are top of the league (and Arsenal are bottom, that’s to say last, 20th out of 20, the back marker), and, having long abandoned any attempts at Alcohol-Free August, I’ve been drinking the wines of mighty Mas de Daumas Gassac all week courtesy of our friends at Honest Grapes. I can hardly stop grinning. M de DG is generally acknowledged to be the ‘Lafite of the Languedoc’ and if you’re new to its remarkable wines, crikey, you’re in for a treat. I envy you discovering them for the first time. The 2020 Moulin de Gassac Picpoul de Pinet (1) is as fine an example of this increasingly trendy grape/wine as you’ll find.

I keep pinching myself. After the misery of the last 18 months, things really do seem to be on the up. Everyone I know is double-jabbed, they’re all desperate to carouse and I’ve been out on the toot five nights (and three lunches) on the bounce. Spurs beat mighty Man City in their season opener (fnarr, fnarr), Joe Root got 180 at Lord’s (I was there), no. 2 son nailed his A-levels, I got a parking ticket overturned and — saving the best for last — Tanners of Shrewsbury are back in the warm embrace of the Spectator Wine Club. Landlord, drinks all round! Family-owned and run since 1842, Tanners are one of the UK’s leading independent merchants and it has been too long since we joined forces. I’m thrilled they’re back.

I have quite the spring in my step as I write and no, clever clogs, not just because of my regular mid-morning sharpener, satisfying and restorative though it was. What do you take me for? No, it’s because I have nothing but good news to impart this week and I’m confident that your happiness is secure. We have six very tasty, exceedingly easy-going wines on offer this week; we have an extremely generous 20 per cent discount on all bottles and — yippee! — our celebrated Spectator Winemaker Lunches are back with a bang, kicking off on Friday 17 September with many more to follow.

Klaxon alert! Calling all wine lovers! Whatever you’re doing, stop it this instant and read this immediately for we have a bona fide belter of an offer this week: an exclusive on the newly released 2015 Chateau Musar. Thanks to our chums at Mr Wheeler and their longstanding relationship with the estate, Spectator readers have first shout on this magnificent wine and if you like Musar — and come on, everyone likes Musar — I beg you to get stuck in. I’m assured that the 2015 vintage cannot currently be bought anywhere else in the UK.

We’re looking back so as to look forward this week. It has been such a rotten 18 months that in order to greet our longed-for freedom in appropriate bottle-draining style, we’re revisiting highlights of past FromVineyardsDirect offers. Previous vintages of all the bottles below have been huge hits with readers and I have every confidence these new incarnations will hit the bull’s-eye too when the shackles finally come off on 19 July. It’s a sort of vinous These You Have Loved. The 2020 Rive Droite, Rive Gauche (1) from vineyards on both banks of the Rhône is as tasty a Côtes du Rhône Blanc as you will find. A blend of Grenache Blanc, Bourboulenc and Viognier, it’s dry but creamy with delicate hints of apricot. £9.

Robin Yapp, the dentist-turned-wine merchant who founded Yapp Bros in 1969, used to scare the pants off my poor father on forays to France. A somewhat insouciant driver, Robin would belt along in his ancient right-hand-drive estate car, foot to the floor, with his mind on other things. Every now and then, mid-anecdote, he would drift languidly into the left lane to overtake whatever French fool impeded his progress. My father, white-faced in the passenger seat, would gulp at the oncoming camions and yell ‘No, NO, back, BACK, something’s coming!’ as Robin coasted casually back to the correct side and continued his story.

After a monumental, liver-challenging but heart-lifting and even tear-inducing 12-hour lunch with Fuzzy, Nigel and co, we’re back with a bang. We drank, we danced and we hiccoughed our happy way home as if Covid and the long, spirit-sapping lockdowns had never happened. And so, jabbed and double-jabbed, drinks in hand, here we are strolling on the sunlit foothills of Mount Hope. Everything is possible and normality is just around the corner. Hurrah! Indeed, let me present to you my reworking of that beloved acronym SNAFU: Situation Normal All Fabulously Uplifting. The sun is out, the birds are singing and it’s hard, even for a grumpy pessimist/realist like me, not to feel happy and excited.

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.