Jonathan Ray

We seem unusually focused this week — never an easy task after one of our Wine Club tastings — with all six wines coming from France. We didn’t plan it that way. It’s just the six bottles that shone brightest and sang loudest to us were all French: three from Bordeaux and one each from Burgundy, the

We are in the middle of a heatwave as I write. Roads are melting, rails are buckling and tempers are fraying. My train to London today took twice as long as normal thanks to ‘adverse weather conditions’. A blizzard? Fog? A flash flood? Nope, sunshine in July. What an unexpected shock for poor Network Rail.

We’ve a selection of simple summer quaffing wines this week, full of bright flavours, courtesy of our old chums Tanners of Shrewsbury. I am confident that you will find the wines as amenable and easy to get on with as I did and that you will find them very keenly priced. Indeed, there must have

Pol Roger is The Speccie’s favourite fizz and no event here is complete without it. In fact, judging by the heroic amounts we get through — notably at the summer party — I’d say we could almost be Pol’s best customer. This is The Spectator after all, not the New Statesman. Of course, Pol Roger’s

Despite being the old man of St James’s, Berry Bros & Rudd is anything but stuffy. Yes, of course Berrys is traditional, selling plenty of cru classé claret, vintage port and so on, but it’s imaginative too, championing neglected regions as much as it does emerging ones. It has over a dozen wines from long-ignored

When I was pondering a theme for this week’s offer with Mark Cronshaw, operations director of The Wine Company, he sucked his teeth, stared into the distance and came up with a brainwave: why not simply offer The Wine Company’s best-sellers? Wines that have been tried, tested and loved by their customers, but offered with

We’ve four lovely wines this week that virtually chose themselves, so spot on are they. FromVineyardsDirect are great at this kind of thing — finding little treasures that others have either overlooked or were too slow to grab first. The Prosecco Collalbrigo Brut (1) is a typical example. I’ve come across a lot of lousy

For some inexplicable reason, the Loire remains a woefully underrated area. The longest river in France, its banks are home to a remarkable variety of grapes and wine styles — red and white, sweet and dry, sparkling and still. Lightness and freshness is the region’s signature and the following selection from the inimitable Yapp Bros,

Berry Bros & Rudd have done it again and come up with six fascinating wines at very generous prices. A couple are almost 25 per cent cheaper than on Berrys’ list and the mixed case is almost 20 per cent cheaper. And it’s a quirky selection all right. Berrys might have one of the finest

We’re heading south for the winter this week, specifically to South Africa and New Zealand, courtesy of Tanners of Shrewsbury. First to New Zealand, a country whose wines I adore. I’m not alone: we in the UK are New Zealand’s biggest market and happily spend more on each bottle of Kiwi wine than on wine

The end of the month is nigh and the sorry few still on the January water wagon are no doubt clinging to it by their fingertips, knuckles ever whiter. I’m not trying to tempt any of you to jump off prematurely, I promise, but we’ve some cracking wines this week courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect, those crafty

I’ve so many mates on the wagon this month that there is hardly anyone left to play with. It turns out that even my old chum Jason Yapp is doing a detox. More baby steps really, he tells me, a day at a time, but even so. Happily, though, before Jason went all virtuous, he

Just in case you missed it last week we’re showing again the details of the final Wine Club offer of the year, courtesy of Private Cellar, the East Anglian wine merchant which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The great Jancis Robinson recently declared the company to be the finest independent merchant in the