Jonathan Ray

Last week’s Spectator Winemaker’s Lunch with Sami Ghosn of Massaya was an instant a sell-out. For some reason it was also our first ever all-male lunch; more fool the girls, for Sami is nothing if not a charmer and his wines are outstanding. Almost everyone has heard of Chateau Musar, which famously blazed the Lebanese wine trail, and very fine its wines are too. My late, greatly lamented predecessor, Simon Hoggart, was a huge fan and we ran a very successful Musar offer only the other week. Massaya (meaning twilight) might not boast Musar’s history, being a relatively new kid on the block, but it has been a true game changer and has done much to bring Lebanese wines to a wider audience. Where Musar led, Massaya followed in dramatic style.

I reckon Robert Boutflower of Tanners has the measure of The Spectator. He knows exactly what tickles our fancy. He put up a dozen wines for our tasting, any one of which I’d be delighted to recommend to readers. Price was ultimately the deciding factor, though, and — hooray! — we nailed the mixed case for a cheering, knockdown £108. Yes, yes, I know there’s no longer an R in the month and we’re not to eat oysters until September, but I’m still jolly well going to recommend the 2014 Domaine Fief de la Brie Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine Sur Lie (1).

I have a particular fondness for the Chapel Down Winery near Tenterden, Kent. I was brought up just down the road in Rolvenden, although in those days it was of course all hop gardens and orchards rather than vineyards. The landscape of southern England is certainly changing. Chapel Down is the UK’s largest producer of wines and, with a massive expansion underway, will soon overtake Denbies in Surrey in terms of vineyard acreage too. And, gosh, the wines they make are good. I led a heavily oversubscribed Spectator visit to Chapel Down on St. George’s Day and we had a hoot (one couple even came specially from Brussels).

Mark Pardoe MW, the wine-buying director of Berry Bros. & Rudd, has a touching fondness for The Spectator. Either that or his maths is terrible. He shows me some excellent wines, all of which I love. I narrow them down to six and ask whether he might see his way to knocking a few quid off. I suggest a figure and he quadruples it — the discount, that is, not the price. I’m not a great haggler but I thought the way it worked was for the customer to ask for the world and the merchant to give away peanuts, not the other way around. Anyway, the result is that all the wines have socking great discounts. Mark insisted that each bottle should have the same price (£9.95), meaning that he then had to lop a full seven quid off one wine, six quid off another and so on.

Chateau Musar is an extraordinary wine boasting an almost fanatical following. It’s made in the most unlikely of places – Lebanon’s sun-baked, war-torn Bekaa Valley – and my much-missed predecessor, the great Simon Hoggart, adored it, his enthusiasm doing much to bring it to a wider audience. We at the Spectator Wine Club are fortunate that one of our partners – The Wine Company is one of Musar’s partners and the first to offer the most recent vintage, exclusively through these pages and at the best possible price. Ah, me, there’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned threesome where everyone goes home happy with a smile on their face. The 2012 Musar Jeune (1) is from the new range of young, unoaked, easy-going wines designed for immediate drinking.

Join us for an intimate and exclusive Spectator lunch at Chapel Down’s vineyards and winery in Kent. On your visit you will be accompanied by Chapel Down’s head winemaker, Josh Donaghay-Spire, and The Spectator’s drinks editor, Jonathan Ray. Chapel Down is England’s leading wine producer, offering a world-class range of sparkling and still wines, together with an award-winning range of Curious beer and cider produced using winemaking expertise. 12.30: A guided tour of the Chapel Down vineyards and winery. You will learn about the production of English wines, the winemaking philosophy of Chapel Down and the intricate traditional process of sparkling wine production. 13.

Join us in the Spectator boardroom on Tuesday 12 April for the next in this year’s series of Spectator Winemaker lunches with Beltrán Domecq, President of the Consejo Regulador de D.O. Jerez/Sherry. Sherry is undergoing a remarkable resurgence and is as popular in the trendiest of Britain’s cocktail bars as it is in the new Spanish restaurants, tapas bars and sherry bars that are busily cropping up. As a former International Wine and Spirit Competition Winemaker of the Year and holder of a Royal Warrant to supply sherry to HM The Queen, Beltrán is well placed to give us the lowdown on this wonderful, most food-friendly of wines.

Ok, so first things first. Jeremy Clark didn’t fall overboard after all. He did, though, dance all night every night (almost), have everyone in stitches and host a rip-roaring High Life vs Low Life pub quiz. He even wore a fez with unexpected aplomb. Taki forwent the delights of his own High Life to join ours. He was exceedingly generous to his dining companions with his wine choices and had us enthralled with his insider’s tales of Spectator days gone by and libel actions lost (mainly) and won (occasionally).