#wineandfood

Jul 15, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: TerraNoble Gran Reserva Carignan 2018, Maule, Chile

£14.50, Vintage Cellars It's so good to see growers nurturing and valuing old Carignan vines, not just in Chile but in Lebanon and Languedoc-Roussillon. For decades, it was a grape variety so deeply out of step with consumer tastes and winemaking fashions that even old vines were pulled up, or simply neglected, and grapes from younger vineyards and sky-high yields were blended into oblivion. The fruit from old Carignan in Mediterranean climates with suitably poor soils is som

Jul 8, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Wolf & Woman Chenin Blanc 2019, Swartland, South Africa

£19.68, Justerini & Brooks You can pour this and drink it straightaway with pleasure, but it repays time in the glass handsomely. Decanting is another option. It's also best not to chill it too heavily. At first, it's linear, taut and savoury with salty wet rock and crunchy green apple flavours. After 5–10 minutes, while losing none of its crackling energy and steel, sweeter apple and peach emerge alongside fresh lemon and preserved lemon, hints of honey and spice and a textu

Jul 7, 2021

Prime Time for Pink: Summer 2021 Rosé Roundup Part 1

Now that winemakers all around the world treat rosé with as much respect as red and white wines, there are so many good rosés in such a diversity of styles that I'm dividing this year's round-up into two posts, with a cross section of styles, grape varieties and origins in each. And in a break with the past, I'm going from high to low in price this year because I don't want the more expensive pink wines (the first five in particular) to be missed. Scroll to the bottom and go

Jul 1, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: The Society's Exhibition Langhe Nebbiolo 2018, Piedmont, Italy

£13.95, The Wine Society If you're about to move on because you think that Nebbiolo isn't a summer wine, please give me a moment. It's true that the grape famous for Barolo and Barbaresco has a savoury, autumnal side to its flavour and goes well with lots of autumn foods - game, mushrooms, truffles – but that's only part of the story. It also has a wonderful fragrance – ethereal and haunting, as so often described – and in the Langhe hills it has notable elegance, as it does

Jun 24, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Domaine Vendange Jacquère La Côte 2020, Savoie, France

£14.50, The Daily Drinker Bright, breezy and light as a feather, this is a delightful example of the Alpine purity and flavour of the Savoie region's Jacquère grape. It's as pale as snow with just a hint of green, smells of spring blossoms, jasmine and summer orchards and glides across the palate in ripples of pear and citrus fruit and mountain-stream stones. It's quietly insistent in flavour, soft textured and effortlessly fresh. You could drink it alongside simple salads an

Jun 23, 2021

Picks for English Wine Week 2021

Chardonnay vines in The King's Vineyard, Rochester, Kent, recently planted on the site of the vineyard of the medieval priory. Simpsons Wine Estate, near Canterbury, will be making the wine on behalf of Rochester Cathedral (photo taken on 24 June 2021) I'm limiting this selection to new wines, wines that aren't necessarily new but which I hadn't previously tasted and a pair that I hadn't tasted for a while and was delighted to discover still in fine form. It was the only way

Jun 17, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Summer Road Old Vine Grenache 2020, Riverland, Australia

£8.49, Waitrose Clear a space in your fridge for another chillable red this week – unoaked old-vine Grenache at its most engaging and accessible, and accessibly priced too. Give it a light chill to emphasise its winning strawberry perfume, succulent summer-pudding fruit and the sapid white pepper note that adds a savoury lick. It comes from Thistledown Wine Company in South Australia, a small-batch producer founded and run by two Masters of Wine, Giles Cooke and Fergal Tynan,

Jun 10, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Château du Hureau 'Tuffe' Saumur-Champigny 2018, France

£15.20, Tanners Wines In summer, drunk distinctly cool, red Saumur or Saumur-Champigny is vital. In winter it's an essential punctuation point between bigger reds. In spring you need it to lead you you into warmer sunnier days and come the autumn you need it to take you gently towards the darker, colder months. On my increasingly crowded desert island there has, therefore, to be one such red Loire and for some time to come it's going to be Château Hureau's Tuffe, a Saumur-Cha

Jun 3, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Pazo Torrado Albariño 2020, Rías Baixas-Val do Salnés, Spain

£12.50–£13.50, The Grape & The Good, Cheers Wine Merchants, Guest Wines, Shaftesbury Wines, Talking Wines You can almost feel the breeze from the Atlantic on your face when you drink this succulent, energising example of Galicia's Albariño grape. You can certainly taste (or at least I can) rich and tangy lemon-curd, salty preserved lemons, juicy ripe peach and briny oyster shell. It's produced by Terra de Asorei, an association of six growers who've pooled Albariño resources

May 27, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Tio Pepe Fino En Rama 2021, Jerez, Spain

£14.99-£15.50, Amps Wine, Lea & Sandeman, Master of Malt, Tanners, The Wine Society, Majestic En rama sherry is all about drinking pale, dry sherry as they do on its home turf in Jerez: newly bottled and barely filtered so that you get engaging freshness together with fuller flavour. In fact, because the flor was particularly healthy in the bodega over the winter, the quintessential, yeasty flor flavours in this year's bottling, the 12th edition, are even more intense – thin

May 20, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Domaine J Boulon Beaujolais Vieilles Vignes 2019, France

£12, Haynes Hanson & Clark Vieilles Vignes are the key to the Boulon family's cracking Beaujolais, or certainly one of them. There's no variety of wine vine that seems to benefit more from age than Gamay. The vines that add depth and intensity to the quintessential exuberant charm and immediacy of this 2019 are all 60–100 years old. It starts with a lovely waft of strawberries and continues with a surge of soft summer-berries, stony, damp earth, a streak of currant leaf and s

May 13, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Château Climens Asphodèle 2019, Bordeaux Blanc Sec, France

£26.50, Berry Bros & Rudd There is joy tinged with sadness in this week's wine. Let's start with the joy, which is that this is a beautiful wine. Elegant, precise, pure, textural and gently rippling with aromas and flavours of blossom, spicier flowers (marigolds), citrus and minerals, turning to red apple, lychee (just a whisper), orange zest and peach – and all emphasised by the silk-smooth texture and long, fresh, mineral spine. You may find other or completely different ar

May 6, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Luigi Bosca Malbec Selección de Vistalba 2018, Mendoza, Argentina

£12.99, down from £16.99 until 1 June, Waitrose I was going to recommend this Malbec a few weeks ago but then spotted the offer that started yesterday: £4 off from now until 1 June – too tempting to resist, especially as the weather hasn't exactly been demanding quintessential summer wines recently. The grapes are from the Bodega Luigi Bosca's estate vineyards at altitudes of 900–1100 metres in the Mendoza sub-regions of Luján de Cuyo and Valle de Uco, the latter giving fresh

Apr 29, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Guigal Côtes du Rhône Blanc 2019, France

£11.50–£12, The Wine Society, Tesco Full-bodied, succulent, Viognier-based dry white from one of the big names in a region much better known for its red wines – and one that doesn't usually major on Viognier in its whites. But it's the 60% Viognier (supported by Roussanne and Marsanne) that leads the way with fleshiness and soft texture, blossomy aromas and lush peach, cream and patisserie flavours. There's a sprinkling of white-pepper spiciness and a squeeze of grapefruit, t

Apr 22, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Tesco Finest Western Australia Sauvignon Blanc Semillon 2019, Australia

£8, Tesco Sunshine would be welcome with this racy dry white, but I'm happy to settle for lesser weather as long as I have the wine in my glass. Western Australian Sauvignon Blanc Semillon blends have a style of their own – energising, positive and aromatic with the incisive green fruit of the Sauvignon filled out by subtle, blossomy softness from the Semillon (24% here) and enhanced, in this case, by a mouthwatering smoky, flinty character, green apple, herb and elderflower

Apr 15, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Selvapiana Chianti Rufina 2018, Italy

£13.50–£17.49, The Wine Society, The Wine Reserve, Old Bridge Wine Shop, The Fine Wine Company, Valvona & Crolla, Theatre of Wine, Cambridge Wine, Noble Green Wines Sometimes. Often. Chianti just hits the spot. I drank this Chianti Rufina, courtesy of the importer Liberty Wines, while attending, virtually, the André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards 2020 (no, no relation). Maybe it was the wine, but it seemed to me that the quality of the shortlisted books this year was on an

Apr 13, 2021

Drilling into Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon with a Viognier guru

Louisa Rose, head of winemaking at Yalumba, where she has worked since graduating as dux from Roseworthy in 1992 Mention the name Louisa Rose in any wine circle and the grape variety Viognier won’t be far behind. Yalumba, where she is chief winemaker and has worked since graduating from Roseworthy in 1993, was the first to plant Viognier commercially in Australia back in 1980, but it was Louisa who put Australian Viognier on the global wine map and established Yalumba as a wo

Apr 8, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Rigal Original Vin Orange Gros Manseng 2019, Vin de France

£10, Morrisons There'a a lot of noise about orange wines – wines made from white grapes fermented with their skins like red wines, rather than without skins – but they're still very much a minority sport, even though it's how wine was originally made whatever the colour of the grapes. It's good, then, to see Rigal in southwest France venturing into the arena and making a success with a characterful local grape variety and the UK's Morrisons supermarkets taking the wine on. In

Apr 1, 2021

WINE OF THE WEEK: Bolney Estate Pinot Noir 2019, Sussex, England

£17.99, Waitrose I scheduled this lovely Pinot for the Easter weekend when I tasted it back in January and it now coincides neatly with the The Big English Wine Easter, a programme of online events – mostly on instagram – designed to support English wineries and raise money for The Drinks Trust and Hospitality Action (producers will contribute a percentage of sales from the weekend). The main event is on Saturday 3 April, from 7pm – 8pm, when wine lovers will open bottles of

Mar 30, 2021

Spring Drinking for Under a Tenner: a Dozen from The Wine Society

This is a selection from a tasting of 48 samples in mini bottles, as you can see above, hosted virtually by the eight Wine Society buyers. I've focused on wines under £10 because I was struck by the value they offered across a range of new, unusual and classic wines, but there was a strong line-up at £11–£16, as well as some more expensive treats. WHITE and ROSÉ Familie Mantler Roter Veltliner 2019, Niederösterreich, Austria, £8.95 Peach and jasmine perfume, peaches and cream