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 Rhône and Provence. FromVineyardsDirect are absolute masters at tracking down small parcels of this and that from classic regions and great vintages. Some wines become stalwarts of their list and some are gone in the pop of a cork, so small is the number of cases they get their hands on. The selection below is a fine representation of what FVD are about and since they trade on very fine margins indeed, discounts are hard won.

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. Happily, Private Cellar is on the case and after an exhaustive tasting we have come up with four beauties with which to sustain ourselves during such strange times. The Réserve de Sours Sparkling Rosé NV is charm incarnate from a producer dear to Spectator readers’ hearts. A glorious salmon pink Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot blend, made in the traditional Champagne method, it spends 16 months on the lees before disgorgement and has style in abundance.

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 been something of a heatwave in Shropshire because Tanners’ private sales director, Robert Boutflower, has clearly had too much sun. With barely any recourse to thumbscrews or water-boarding, he offered generous discounts on the already remarkably modest RRPs, ensuring that every wine is well under eight quid. This means that the mixed case comes in at paltry £89, delivered. A bargain!

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 most famous customer was Sir Winston Churchill who, the company estimates, got through more than 500 cases in the last ten years of his life. Of his titanic consumption of Pol Roger, Churchill’s daughter, Lady Soames, memorably remarked, ‘I saw him many times the better for it, but never the worse.

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 Greece, for example, and was the first major merchant to list serious Chinese wine. They have done us proud here, not least because the wine buying director, Mark Pardoe MW, being the soft-hearted, easily persuaded, Spectator-loving chap he is, has lopped up to 20 per cent off the RRPs. The 2012 Domaine Lyrarakis Dafni (1) from Crete is typically off-piste, Lyrarakis being the producer and Dafni the grape (yep, it’s new to me too).

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 special discounts for Spectator readers only. A fine plan, I said — depending, of course, on the quality of the wines and the generosity of the discounts. Well, I’ve tasted them and they’re an excellent, well-varied bunch, whittled down to six from The Wine Company’s top dozen sellers — a surprisingly tricky task. And MC’s arm was well and truly twisted on the discounts.

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 Proseccos of late, most of them far too sweet and far too pricey. The whole point of it is that it should be light, easygoing and charming. And inexpensive. Well, this is as good a Prosecco as I can remember and the first I’ve recommended here. Zesty, appley, lemony and exhilaratingly refreshing, it has plenty of body and a crisp, clean, dry finish. A great aperitif, it’s also an essential part of a fine Bellini or Sbagliato. £11.65.

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, 2014 IWC Loire Specialist of the Year, is perfect springtime fare. Jason Yapp has lopped a quid off every bottle and I hope you find as much to enjoy here as I did. There’s nothing duller than a dull Muscadet, oh, except maybe a dull Soave, but the 2013 Muscadet Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie, Domaine de la Mortaine (1) is anything but, being full of vim and vigour.

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 lists in the country when it comes to cru classé claret, grand cru burgundy and vintage champagne but, with an unparalleled eight Masters of Wine in the company, their expertise is much further-reaching than perhaps one might imagine, something which is demonstrated perfectly by the vino below. First we have the 2013 De Martino Reserva Sauvignon Blanc (1) from the Casablanca Valley in Chile.

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 from anywhere else other than France. New Zealand accounts for less than 1 per cent of the world’s total production, but it must all come here. The 2014 Tummil Flat Sauvignon Blanc (1) from Marlborough is unmistakeably Kiwi, being full of ripe gooseberry, cut grass and nettle aromas. And it is just so drinkable with perfectly balanced fruit and acidity coupled with an exhilarating freshness.

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 runners-to-ground of hidden treats and treasures. I don’t know what the vinous equivalent of a truffle hound is, but FromVineyardsDirect must have a few in the kennel, because nobody is better at coming up with bargain parcels from the unlikeliest of places than FVD’s Esme Johnstone and David Campbell. The 2011 La Réserve Claret (1) is a case in point.

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 and I sat down for a lengthy tasting in order to choose some seriously tasty fare for the first Spectator Wine Club of the year. And I am really chuffed with the final six that we picked, for they are excellent examples of what regional France has to offer the discerning drinker. All three reds and one of the whites are organic. We didn’t pick them because of this — it just turned out that way.

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 UK, which is one heck of a compliment and one with which many of our readers would agree, certainly the readers who joined us the other week to taste a dozen or so of their wines, of which the following selections were the highest scorers. The Henri Chauvet Brut Blanc de Noirs NV Champagne (1) is something of a favourite at the Speccie, having been featured in a number of Private Cellar’s tastings with us.