Jonathan Ray

Order today. I’ve been banished upstairs. Mrs Ray has turned our ground floor into an art gallery in which to show her and her friends’ paintings, prints and pottery during Brighton’s annual Artists Open Houses, and I’ve been told not to come down and talk to visitors ‘or otherwise spoil things’. What can she mean? So it is that I sit in my lonely eyrie with just my thoughts and my bottles as company. I foolishly left the spittoon downstairs so the delectable selection supplied by Corney & Barrow for this offer left me merrier than usual and more indecisive too. Indeed, so tricky was it to whittle the wines down that we’ve ended up with nine rather than six, so I’d better get cracking.

Order today. I had my regular May meeting with the accounts department (Mrs Ray) the other night and it did not go well. The general gist was that I’m a profligate fool and that I need to drink less, not to mention less expensively. And no, she did not appreciate me quoting the late, great Errol Flynn’s line: ‘My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.’ She looked at me long and hard and I feared a lengthy dissection of my failings, but she simply muttered something about me being no Errol Flynn before leaving me with my thoughts and the dregs of a rather tasty claret (see below). The upshot is that this week I’m focusing on wines that give particularly good value. Each wine below is a corker and, in my view, massively undervalued.

Order today. As you know, when it comes to champagne, Pol Roger is pretty much The Spectator’s house pour. Indeed, a dog-eared sign on the door of the office fridge demands that staff always ensure there are two bottles chilling within it for emergency celebrations and commiserations or simply for whenever the moment strikes. It’s a rare occasion at 22 Old Queen Street when a bottle of Pol isn’t broached, then, and the fabled Spectator summer party is fuelled by little else. But one can’t live on Grande Marque Champagne alone and much as we adore PR, there are other effervescent treats out there that should not be ignored.

Order today. I don’t know how well you know Amsterdam, but there’s a frightfully swanky hotel there called The Dylan in which I was lucky enough to blag myself and Mrs Ray a jolly weekend a year or so ago. There are many fine things about The Dylan but that which tickles me the most is their tradition of High Wine, the hotel’s delightfully decadent version of High Tea, served mid to late afternoon and comprising four different amuses-bouches elegantly laid out alongside four cleverly matched glasses of wine. I’ve never been one for non-alcoholic hot drinks at elevenses, much preferring alcoholic cold ones at what Mrs R and I term sevenses, so The Dylan’s tradition chimes perfectly with ours.

Email your order today. It’s flipping well snowing as I write, but my Glyndebourne tickets have come and my MCC pass has just plopped on to the mat so it must surely be spring. And where a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, so this old soak’s fancy lightly turns to just how many bottles I need to get me through Easter. Growing up in Kent I lived near Romney Marsh, a special place that I still love for its windswept acres, lonely churches and tales of smugglers, revenue men and Dr Syn, the mysterious vicar of Dymchurch, who was not quite who he seemed.

Order now. A reader upbraided me gently the other day saying he felt I was overly effusive about the wines I feature in these pages. He hinted that I must be in the pay of the merchants in order to endorse quite so heartily whatever six random wines they care to offload on me. Well, I promise I’m not in anyone’s pocket. Just to be clear, the offers work like this: I chat to whichever merchant we’re featuring and between us we try to come up with a pertinent/interesting theme, region, country or producer. The merchant sends me – or we taste together – anything up to a couple of dozen wines that we think might work, out of which I choose my favourite six. These we then offer to you at as keen a price as I can bully the merchant into.

Order today. My father loved nothing more than a smutty limerick. Indeed, he delighted in penning lewd lines whenever he was encouraged to do so. This being a family magazine, I won’t sully your breakfast with his verse on Verdicchio – tame though it is – but can happily send under plain brown-paper wrapper or via email if such things appeal. This is a cracking example of how tempting a wine proper Gavi di Gavi should be It’s just that said lickerish limerick was brought to mind on tasting the first wine of this very genial selection – three Italian, three French – from our old mates at Honest Grapes.

Anthony and Olive Hamilton Russell love The Spectator and we love them. They have hosted more Spectator Winemaker Lunches than any other producer (they’ll be in our boardroom again next week) and it was only the afterglow of the splendidly bibulous Spectator/Hamilton Russell dinner at Tate Britain the night before lockdown that kept me going during the dark days that followed. Anthony is a long-time subscriber to our organ and, through the kind offices of Laura Taylor – marketing director of Private Cellar – who has known and admired AHR and his remarkable wines for 25 years, he has paid us the enormous compliment of offering the latest vintages to us and us alone.

Readers (and writers) of The Spectator have long adored the wines of Château Musar, the cult winery of Lebanon. Indeed, thanks to our chums at Mr Wheeler, we have such a close relationship with the estate that our loyalty is being rewarded by yet another bona fide Speccie scoop: for the next month, this is the only place in the UK from which to buy the newly released 2016 Château Musar. This great wine is simply not available anywhere else currently and once it goes, it goes. So get cracking and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Dry January is but a memory and, nearing the end of a demi-sec February fortnight — just a precaution to check that everything is working as it should be — I’m pretty much match fit once again and raring to go. I certainly loved choosing these delectable Yapp Bros wines on your behalf and, with the help of Mrs Ray, made sure that none of the bottles went to waste. As befits a Loire specialist, Yapp Bros have had a top quality Muscadet on their list for 50 years and their current staple is the 2020 Jean-François Baron Muscadet Sur Lie (1), complete with its jolly Quentin Blake label.

Well I don’t know about you but I’m just that little bit overexcited. In a couple of days I’ll be free of this ridiculous, self-imposed, puritanical water wagon regime and I’ve the wheelie suitcase dusted off and ready in anticipation. Roll on Wine Time Friday! If Boris leaves us nothing else to remember him by except this joyful and alternative use for the acronym WTF, then that’s a legacy of sorts, I suppose. And what finer bottles to cram into the perambulating portmanteau than these select beauties from our old chums at FromVineyardsDirect?

Cooee, we’re back! And back in some style with a corking offer from Swig, stalwarts of the Spectator Wine Club under my sainted predecessors. I’m so pleased we’ve tempted them back, especially in this, their 25th anniversary year. Founded by Robin Davis in north London’s Belsize Park, Swig has become one of the country’s finest independents and is Decanter’s 2021 Best Midsize Online Retailer. Just saying. As always, only the best is good enough for Speccie readers. Like you, I’m sure, I rather overcooked it during the festivities.

OK, so this is it folks, the final offer of the year and quite a toothsome one it is. Tom Harrow, the genial wine hound behind Honest Grapes, has a knack of unearthing overlooked gems on his travels, and after a quick flit to Bordeaux, he’s done it again. Not for nothing is Honest Grapes the Drinks Business’s 2020 Fine Wine Retailer of the Year and Decanter magazine’s 2020 Outstanding Wine Retailer of the Year. As I keep saying, your continued happiness is all that we crave and I only want you dealing with the very best. Anyway, T.H. came back from Bordeaux full of beans, having been tipped the wink by one of his spies about the Siozard twins, David and Laurent, sixth-generation artisan winemakers with 60 hectares of vines over two estates — Ch.

Forget the blasted Advent calendars and the vile tat in the shops, it’s the time-honoured festive offer with Corney & Barrow which tells us that Christmas is really on its way. And hurrah for that! No, not Christmas, silly, we could all do without that, I mean hurrah for the offer, which is nigh on indispensable. As always, we concentrate on C&B’s own-label wines because they’re so darn good and such remarkable value, produced to Corney’s exacting standards by some of the finest producers in the business. I love these wines. The C&B Blanc de Blancs Extra Dry (1) is an old favourite and I don’t know how they do it for the price.

The last bell of term has rung and that’s it for the Spectator Wine School for another year. Conducted via Zoom over four successive Thursdays, the sellout course was expertly taught by Laura Taylor, marketing director of our partners Private Cellar. Truancy rates were almost nonexistent — but then three 75cl bottles of wine per pupil per class is quite an incentive. Our learners even got a commemorative edition of the late, great Michael Broadbent’s seminal Wine Tasting, published by the Académie du Vin Library, as a primer. Each 90-minute session was devoted to one of four major grape varieties, namely Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, and thanks to Mrs Taylor’s genial, lightly worn expertise, we learned an enormous amount.