Simon Hoggart

The other day I had one of those awkward moments. We were guests at dinner. ‘You’re a wine writer!’ said our host. ‘I’d like your opinion on these two!’ You’re still supposed to say, ‘Goodness, these are delicious! What did they cost? Only £4.99 a bottle! That’s amazing!’ Instead you cast round for words that won’t offend or actually lie. ‘Never had anything quite like that before!’ might serve. Your host presses: ‘But do you like it?’ The only reply is, ‘Well, wine is a very subjective thing. As I always say, “If you like it, then it’s a good wine.” ’ In this case the red was a thin, mass-produced plonk with a fancy label.

Adam Brett-Smith of Corney & Barrow says this offer contains two of the least expensive fine wines in the world. He’s probably right. We are offering both, plus a couple of less pricey wines for parties, restoring the tissues, or any occasion. Prices are reduced, and there is the Brett-Smith Indulgence, whereby you can knock £6 a case off an order of three cases, or two within the M25. Hurry before the falling pound really begins to hurt. The very classy white is the Mâcon-Verzé from Domaines Leflaive 2008 (3). This is made from grapes grown in the Mâcon by Anne-Claude Leflaive, scioness (is there such a word?) of arguably the greatest dry white wine estate in the world.

An excellent selection of European wines this week from Private Cellar, the first-rate East Anglian merchants who sell loads of fine, established wines but always keep an eye open for less expensive bottles which often are as good, if not better, than their more famous neighbours. And with the pound down against the euro yet again — why can’t it go back up to €1.50, where God intended? — we do need to keep an eye on prices. Many growers are happy to keep them down to hold on to the market, but they can’t hold out for ever. To encourage you, Private Cellar have discounted almost all of them, in some cases very generously. Unusually, I have picked just two whites but four reds.

The annual offer of Château Musar is here, and The Wine Company of  Colchester has again given us some very generous discounts. I never recommend wine as an investment, partly because I believe it is for drinking rather than money-making, and also because I don’t want to be blamed for you losing your life savings. But I would point out that some of the older vintages of Musar are now going for ridiculous sums, such as almost £1,500 per bottle for the 1956, and £145 even for the 1978. This is a wine that just goes on improving. The days when you could pick it up for, say, £5 a bottle are very long gone.

Around twice a year, I visit the Swig world HQ (an office in Chiswick, west London) and taste some of the most delicious wines known to humanity. Next day I consult my notes, and realise that it is going to be almost impossible to make a choice. They are too good, too delectable and such amazing value that anyone would want to snap up cases of them all. But maybe if you try this selection — two South African and two Italian wines — you will be tempted to browse Swig’s catalogue and find even more treasures. Take this delicious 2012 Sauvignon Blanc made in Constantia, South Africa, at Hussey’s Vlei (1). You will have to buy it by mail order, because few of us could pronounce its name, Buitenverwachting, meaning ‘beyond expectation’.

Our new offer comes — this always sounds like a misprint — from  FromVineyardsDirect, the terrifically popular wine merchants which sells vast quantities of wine to Spectator readers. And no wonder; their list is fairly short but impeccably selected. They track down delectable wines and buy them directly from the people who make them, which means their prices are very good too. They are especially adept at finding declassified bottles: overproduction from famous vineyards which can’t, because of strict French wine laws, be sold under their real names. They’re not the absolute cream of the crop, but they come very close, for a fraction of the price. There’s one in this offer.

Some people think that Southwold, that tranquil seaside town in Suffolk, is hopelessly middle class. So what? I love it. I like staying in the Swan hotel, with its great gilt swan on the outside, eating from the adventurous menu in the Crown, walking on the eccentric pier, admiring the strand of beach huts, and I really enjoy going to the Adnams Cellar and Kitchen Shop, one of those stores where you want to buy everything. Especially the wine. Adnams’ choices match, I believe, the tastes of Spectator readers, being full-flavoured while subtle, piquant yet satisfying, altogether delicious. To draw you in, they have knocked a generous tenner off the price of the brilliant sample case.  The first white is Basa 2011 (1), from the Rueda region of northern Spain.

I’ve always been baffled by the French attitude to wine. Either they drink too much or too little. When I was a student, a long time ago, I spent some months travelling around the country, including a few weeks at the house of a friend of a friend of my father. Every day my host drank an entire litre bottle of red — probably Algerian — with his lunch and another litre bottle with dinner. I would have been insensible, round the clock. But if you were in a restaurant, people would assume that a single bottle was ample for three or four diners, possibly preceded by a small scotch. If you were lucky. And these days the French are drinking less and less wine. In the past 30 years, consumption has more than halved to barely more than one bottle a head per week.

A question I’m often asked is -whether a particular wine is ‘worth it’. The answer, generally, is ‘no’ if the wine costs £3.99 and resembles alcoholic dishwater; ‘yes’ if it costs £19.95 but tastes like nectar and fills you with joy as you sip it. I mention in my book, the second edition of Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine (-Quadrille, £12.99), that Chateau Pétrus, often the most expensive of all Bordeaux wines, is not remotely worth the £9,000 plus you might pay in a restaurant, unless you are a monstrously rich oligarch or a hedge fund manager who needs to show off to his friends, in which case it’s worth every penny.

Father Christmas this year comes disguised as Mark Cronshaw of The Wine Company in Colchester. He has offered some huge savings on fine wines for yuletide glugging, and so while this Mini-Bar costs somewhat more than our usual offers, it does include special treats for your holiday feasting. There are three great Burgundies, and that rarity — a really fine, mature Rioja. First up is a delectable Chablis 1er cru Fourchaume 2011 (1), from the Domaine Séguinot-Bordet. It’s only when you taste wine of this standard that you realise how luscious Chablis can be, compared with the alcoholic chalk dust sometimes sold under that name. Here flavoursome -plumpness is perfectly matched by the -flintiness that derives from the soil where the grapes are grown.

Four delicious wines from the estimable Private Cellar. Three are from France, and one from Italy. A mixed case would, I think, cover all your drinking needs for quite a few days. The Italian is a Soave. That’s Italian for ‘suave’, but much of the wine sold under that name is less boulevardier than chav. It comes from vast co-operatives, where the growers bring in truckloads of grapes which go into hoppers, and most is made with less care than a cup of motorway tea. By contrast, the 2011 Soave Gregoris, made by Antonio Fattori (1), is a delectable, golden, peach-and-apricot wine, bottled nectar. It could not be more different from the generic Soave sold in dreary Italian restaurants.

My colleague and friend the late Alan Watkins was for a spell wine writer on the Observer. Though I had not yet taken up the Spectator job, we disagreed on some important oenophiliac issues. I liked full, rich, strongly flavoured wines, often from the New World. He said they were all well and good, but you couldn’t enjoy more than one glass at a time. They rushed at you like your new best Aussie friend, -demanding all your attention, never letting up. The point about the French classics was that they were subtle, offering up their pleasures slowly, the third glass being even more satisfying than the first. These days I enjoy both. And this offer, from Yapp Bros, combines the understated and evanescent, the massive and the powerful.

This is a splendid offer made by FromVineyardsDirect, always a favourite with Spectator readers. It’s a little more expensive than some recent offers, but each wine is such tremendous value that I have no hesitation in recommending them all, heartily. As we move into autumn and winter approaches I’ve picked three terrific reds and just one white. But what a white! This has a simple label saying just ‘Graves Blanc 2011’ (1) which doesn’t even mention that it is made by one of the great white Bordeaux specialists, Denis Dubourdieu, whose estates include  the superlative Doisy-Daëne, for which you would pay a great deal.

An offer from Corney & Barrow, with their amazing range of wines and wonderfully efficient service, is always welcome. Corney & Barrow specialise in some of the finest wines available to humanity (© Withnail and I) — think Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Pétrus — but here I have made a selection of medium-priced bottles which demonstrate the company’s ability to sniff out excellent wines at agreeable prices. Adam Brett-Smith has again knocked 5 per cent off list prices, as well as offering his celebrated Indulgence, by which you get an extra £6 per case reduction if you buy three or more cases, or just two cases inside the M25.

August is a slow month for wine sales, which no doubt is why Mark Cronshaw of The Wine Company in Colchester has slashed so many prices in this offer. These six wines are all delectable. One is reduced by a remarkable £48 a case. (Often this happens because a wine is absolutely first-rate but largely unknown, with the result that it doesn’t sell off the page, so to speak. So it is heavily reduced, and the people who snap up the bargain are thrilled by their luck.) Three of my choices this week are from France, two from South Africa, and one from Chile. Two are what I think of as party wines: moderately priced bottles which will still leave your friends delighted at your generosity and good taste.

Earlier this month we held a wine fair at The Spectator, using the tents that next day sheltered the magazine’s summer party. It was great fun, and our six principal partners sold plenty of wine. The event is free; come next year! There were some terrific bottles, many discounted, such as the gorgeous Chilean Pionero Pinot Noir sold by The Wine Company of Colchester – an incredible £6.99 — luscious Château de Sours and Nyetimber from Private Cellar, stunning Menetou-Salon and Côte Rôtie from Yapp Bros, the glorious Maiden Flight, also from Chile, one of the few Gewurtztraminers that really works outside Alsace, and a host of gluggable summer wines from Corney & Barrow.