When the then-mayor Jean Taittinger twinned the city of Reims with Canterbury in the 1950s, it presumably never crossed his mind that 60 years or so later his family would be embarking on an English sparkling wine venture in the Kent countryside nearby. But that's what happened when his son Pierre-Emmanuel joined with his UK importer and longtime friend Patrick McGrath to create Domaine Evremond

New Dawn is the creation of multi-award-winning Cape winemaker Rüdger van Wyk, whose vision is to make affordable wines that you can open without any faff or ceremony – wines that don’t need fancy food matches, but which don’t compromise an iota of quality for the sake of accessibility and price point.

Could the red wines of Cahors finally be having a moment in the UK? I hope so. It feels long overdue. I love the wines now, but I didn’t always. And it’s not because they’ve grown on me, but because they’ve changed greatly for the better in the last 15 or so years.