Jonathan Ray

Water wagon? What water wagon? With Dry January now just a ghastly memory, let’s start cracking open the vino. And, crikey, we’ve a corking offer with FromVineyardsDirect to tempt you. If you don’t salivate immediately, well, I don’t think you like wine at all. FVD need to clear the decks to take in newer vintages and have generously offered Spectator readers first dibs on more than 30 different clarets, all from the excellent 2016, 2017, 2018 vintages, all at least 10 per cent below market price and all worthy of a place in your cellar or glass. 2016 was a spectacular year with fabulous wines produced across the board, a genuine 10/10 vintage. 2017 was a frost-ridden, low-yielding year, but with some very tasty wines produced, albeit not quite as fine as in 2016.

Cooee, we’re back! Come on, wine lovers, it’s time to get cracking! Whether you’re clinging desperately to the water wagon like me or enjoying a liquor-fuelled January like Mrs Ray (she didn’t feel very well this morning, bless her), we have work to do refilling those bare wine racks that were plundered during the festivities. I was felled by dread Covid over Christmas but tried to lend a wan, sickly hand to the assembled lushes as they rampaged through an impressive number of bottles and magnums and goodness knows how many spirits, but I only held them back.

So, this is it, the final offer of the year. Mrs Ray says I can drink whatever I need in whatever quantity just as long as I stop banging on about how miserable a month December is. Thanks to these beauties from Swig Wines, I’ve been silence personified, if a little squiffy, and should just about make it through. I trust they’ll help you too. The 2022 Sauvignon À Peu Près (1) with its jaunty label and immaculate winemaking looks and tastes far better than a lowly Val de Loire IGP should. Produced by David and Shirley Maudry in the heart of the Loire Valley from 100 per cent Sauvignon Blanc, it would be a far grander Pouilly Fumé if only its vineyards were mere yards in one direction or another.

My annual bout of CADDAD (Christmas Affected Doom, Depression and Despondency) struck early this year. It’s a terrible affliction about which I’ve written many times before and it knocked me flat in late September, just as the first mince pies and Christmas puddings appeared in the supermarkets. Stoicism being my middle name, I dug deep and vowed to carry on, only to be felled again outside Fortnum & Mason at the end of October, assailed by their ridiculously premature festive decorations and jaunty carols played on a loudspeaker outside their store. In October! For heaven’s sake.

Tanners of Shrewsbury have one of the finest own-label ranges in the country and with dread Christmas in the offing and belts tight as ever, it seemed smart to look no further. With high quality, low prices and the chance to mix your own case, don’t miss this opportunity to fill your boots. I’m no fan of cava, but Mrs Ray says I should stop being such a ghastly vinous snob and, having tasted the Tanners Cava Brut (1), I realise she might be right. Produced by the Heredad Seguras Viudas winery near Barcelona from Macabeo, Parellada and Xarel-lo, it’s fresh, creamy, toasty and, well, yes, rather tasty. Best of all, it’s a crazily low price for a champagne method sparkler and if it doesn’t float your boat as it is, you can slosh it in a Buck’s Fizz, Kir Royale or Black Velvet.

It has been a gloriously wine-soaked year for us lushes at the Spectator Wine Club, during which we have worked closely with our chums at Private Cellar, the leading independent merchant based on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens. PC’s marketing director, Laura Taylor, was not only headteacher at this year’s Spectator Wine School, she was also entertainments officer on board the ridiculously bibulous Spectator Clays, Claret and Cognac Cruise and barracks-based logistics officer for our inaugural Spectator Wine Club tour of Champagne. The following bottles are the blocks upon which our revelry was built, the vinous highlights of the above events and of many others besides.

Clearly, it was a mistake to taste the wines Corney & Barrow sent for this offer on the same night as Mrs Ray’s book club. We squabbled for space and then squabbled for wine, and while every one of the dozen or so bottles was drained dry, the books weren’t even opened. My wife says I’m an infuriating idiot but her friends seemed to like me. It was indeed a chaotic evening, but happily everyone agreed on the top six wines, with 1 and 4 getting the loudest cheers from my impromptu tasting panel. The 2022 Eradus ‘Ana’ Sauvignon Blanc (1) is classic Kiwi Savvy Blanc from the delightful Michiel Eradus, who hosted a memorable Spectator Winemaker Lunch a while back.

So successful were our ‘defrocked’ clarets from FromVinyardsDirect and so numerous the emails asking us to repeat the offer that it seemed churlish to refuse. As you know, these wines come from some of the finest estates in all Bordeaux, made by the same teams that make the grands vins – using younger vines/excess fruit – with the same care and attention. I’m forbidden to name these great estates but I can hint at them and for those of you who struggled first time round with the anagrams, clues, hints, pointers. No, you’re not getting any help, you’re on your own!

We’ve wines from four countries this week – France, Italy, South Africa and New Zealand – with two contrasting Chardonnays, a pair of Pinots and a brace of Bordeaux blends. Each one is an absolute cracker (you also have the word of Mrs Ray on this since, having run out of gin, she decided she wasn’t too busy to help me narrow the selection down to six bottles, after all) and each one is heavily discounted by those lovely folk at Armit Wines – by up to 35 per cent in one instance. Two contrasting Chardonnays, a pair of Pinots and a brace of Bordeaux blends.

Our Spectator Wine Time Friday/BYOB lunch last week was a belter, with 15 of us managing to see off 21 bottles quite comfortably and with no apparent ill effects. Indeed, we all left pretty much as steadily as we arrived, and I was proud that several readers still had it in them to enjoy a few post-prandials at the Two Chairmen. I politely declined to join them, having promised Mrs Ray that I wouldn’t be late or in a state, but was utterly undone by bumping into the two Nicks on the train to Skid Row-on-Sea and helping them polish off their M&S Chardonnay before shouting them cocktails in Bar Valentino. Mrs R was far from impressed and icily insisted on an alcohol-free weekend.

It’s been something of a liver-challenging few days for the lushes of Spectator Towers. A fascinating volumetric tasting of 2013 Château Angludet (served to 60 readers during lunch from halves, bottles, magnums, double magnums and an imperial) was followed by the first day of term at the Spectator Wine School and by a memorable Spectator Wine Club lunch with Henry Jeffreys presenting his excellent new book on the pioneers behind the English wine revolution, Vines in a Cold Climate, alongside some appropriately fine English vino. When I tell you that I then dashed home to taste 18 wines for this offer, courtesy of Mr Wheeler, you’ll probably understand why my supposed Sober October has been such a washout.

So how’s your sober October going? No, nor mine. I ticked two consecutive days off the calendar, which is more than I’ve managed since, gosh, January. Baby steps, I know, but it’s bloody difficult. Mrs Ray is not helping. One minute she’s chiding me for being a lush with no self-control; the next she’s hovering around with a corkscrew muttering about what a dry old ship it is and asking what a girl must do to get a drink round here. It’s fair to say that tempers have been a trifle frayed. We perked up immensely, though, when we came to taste the wines for this offer courtesy of Field & Fawcett of Grimston Bar, York, both agreeing that we should start with a clean slate and spit on the inside. Hurrah!

Phew, we made it in one piece. Nobody was seasick, nobody fell overboard, and nobody got shot. I’m talking, of course, of our Spectator Clays, Claret and Cognac Cruise in Thames sailing barge Will, during which 30 or so readers and a crack Spectator team blasted at clays with pump action shotguns and blunderbusses before drinking the boat dry. We even managed to see off a double magnum of Delamain Pale & Dry Cognac as Tower Bridge opened. I was so proud. Next morning, feeling, yes, a trifle delicate, it was straight back to the vino, tasting our annual FromVineyardsDirect ‘defrocked’ claret offer.

It was the mighty Andrew Edmunds’s memorial last week – he of the eponymous restaurant and the Academy Club, those last vestiges of old Soho. All the great and the louche were there paying their respects to this delightful man of many parts – restaurateur, clubman, wine lover, fine print purveyor, flower arranger, fly fisherman and scourge of poets and golfers. Among those saying goodbye were Robin Yapp, his son Jason and his stepson Tom, the founder and his two successors at Yapp Bros. Robin used to lead my father badly astray and Jas (who introduced me to the Academy over a ten-hour lunch) and Tom have kept up the family tradition by doing likewise with me.  These boys know their wines.

I’m just back from a week in Alsace and I can’t stop grinning. It’s my favourite of all French wine regions, ridiculously pretty and warmly welcoming. The winemakers are just so genial and – unlike many other regions we can all think of – inherently collaborative, forever bigging up the wares of their rivals, who are invariably also their close friends. I’m delighted, then, that one of the wines that Laura Taylor of Private Cellar put up for tasting for this offer was the 2021 Domaine Allimant-Laugner Pinot Blanc (1), a bottle of which I shared with the owner-winemaker Nicolas Laugner only the other day. A blend of Pinot Blanc and Pinot Auxerrois, it’s fresh and fruity with that inimitable creamy, peachy ‘Alsace-ness’ that I love so much.

So, there we were, my chum and I, nearing the bottom of our second bottle of perfectly chilled Franciacorta, that wonderful Italian fizz that knocks spots off prosecco. It was a gorgeous wine, we both agreed, from a gorgeous country, full of gorgeous people, eating gorgeous food and living gorgeous lives. In a perfect world, we concluded with a deep, longing sigh, we would have both been born Italian. Since it isn’t and since we weren’t, we pledged to do the next best thing: to eat nothing but fine Italian food and drink nothing but fine Italian wine and think nothing but fine Italian thoughts for the rest of our lives.

Mustard’s Grill on the St Helena Highway, Napa Valley, is a top spot. Self-described as a fancy rib joint with way too many wines, its most celebrated dish is the Truckstop Deluxe – ‘always meat, sometimes potatoes, rarely vegetables’. I can never get enough of it and have popped many a shirt button there. It was in this glutton’s/lush’s paradise that I encountered the Decoy range of Duckhorn Vineyards. I was instantly smitten. They are impeccable wines from a great Napa estate. Expressly made to be enjoyed young, they ain’t cheap, but compared with other Napa wines of similar quality they are remarkably good value, especially with the discount that Mr Wheeler are generously offering.