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Wine Club
Auberon Waugh
After two expensive pre-Christmas offers, I decided to start the New Year with some highly recommendable Price- beech cheapies. The first two wines this time were chosen by me from an enormous field to serve at a hideously expensive Ball for my elder daughter last summer, with a red Rioja Alberdi I found in Truro. All three were a huge success and consumed in vast quantities by the jeunesse doree of Durham University, if that is any recom- mendation. Ideally I would have liked to offer a mixed case, rather than expect Punters to invest in straight dozens of these Unknown wines on my say-so, but Price- Beech proved too butterfingered for the task. At least I have had no complaints of non-delivery from this source.
The Tocai Friulano grape is, I think, Peculiar to Northern Italy, being no rela- tion to the Tokay d'Alsace which the Italians call pinot grigio. The Tocai di Lison is described by Hugh Johnson as 'an attrac- tive light wine of faintly smoky aroma and tYpically bitter "almond" finish, perhaps the best of the Tocais of the region.' Burton Anderson, the great Italian wine expert, confirms that the Classico region produces the best. It has a strong and I think elegant taste — we drank it with leeks in mustard sauce, and it held its own against both Without any hint of sharpness, which is the Main quality to be avoided in dry white Wine. For this reason, it also makes a very good aperitif. People tend to knock it back More than the chardonnay but it is ap- preciably cheaper at £3.12 a bottle and I think a very good buy. If the Tocai di Lison Classico is the Graham Greene among northern Italian whites — virile and apparently good- natured but not much good at rolling its and with a distinctly sombre hint of dying spiders imprisoned in the glass then Enofriulia's chardonnay might be described as the Margaret Drabble. For all that it is a clean, good wine, in- distinguishable from any minor premier cru Chablis, it is a little over-solemn for its voluptuous shape and I would be more en- thusiastic if it came 30p cheaper. At £3.50 it is cheaper than wine of equivalent quality from France but not devastatingly so, and is really offered to those of conventional tastes who cannot quite afford them. It is definitely better than most village Chablis, but still needs to be drunk with a meal, rather than lying on summer grass with a brook babbling nearby.
The Pinot Nero delle Venezie is the same red wine about whose 1979 vintage I raved a Year ago. When that ran out, Price-Beech offered the 1980 but I judged it too fizzy and unsettled to be substituted without a
caution. It has now settled down well with the strong burned slightly sweet pinot taste of a very good Santenay, Regular drinkers of expensive burgundy may find it a little short in the finish, but what on earth do they expect for £3.50? It is a good wine by any standards. I tasted it against a 1959 Volnay Hospices de Beaune called General Muteau which would probably have cost about £18 a bottle if one could find it anywhere. The General was descending sharply, it must be admitted, but for two wines at the opposite end of the pinot spec- trum it was fascinating to observe how they unmistakably belonged to the same club. Burgundy drinkers will be better served by this Italian wine than by any of the house or wine society burgundies I have tasted since the miraculous 1978 vintage.
I offer the Charles Dennery champagne at £6.42 with some diffidence since the great fuss made about Sainsbury's extra sec at £5.95. I would not offer it at all if I did not think it distinctly better. The Sainsbury's wine owed its success, I fancy, to the fact that people are fed up with sour brats at the cheap end of the market, and probably prefer extra sec in any case. This Dennery brut is not sour at all, has more taste than the Sainsbury wine and comes in a much prettier label. I feel it is an exceptionally good bargain for a real champagne taste many of the cheapies might just as well have come from Limoux or Spain — and am irri- tated by the fact that many will think they are being clever when they buy the grocer's wine.
The last wine on offer — a six-year-old muscat sweet dessert wine from Portugal is also the one which interests me most, although I cannot believe that many people are going to buy a whole case of any dessert wine for drinking rather than laying down. For the last two years the English have been discovering the delights of Muscat de Beaumes de Venise, the intensely sweet, highly alcoholic Rhone wine which Hugh Johnson identifies as France's best muscat. It was only after I had been raving for some time about this Beaumes de Venise that someone told me about a Portuguese muscat from Setubal, made by Jose-Maria da Fonseca of Azeitao, which was supposed to be even better. With some trouble, I have tracked it down.
Like Beaumes de Venise, the Setubal is fortified, clocking up some 18° against 21.5° in Beaumes. I think it is better for being slightly less alcoholic. But the miracle, as with the very best Beaumes (from Vidal-Fleury or the Domaine de Dur- ban) is that the sweetness never cloys and the alcohol scarcely intrudes on the pure, fresh taste of muscatel grape. Hugh Johnson describes how this 'sumptuously aromatic' wine from Setubal is made in his Wine Companion (Mitchell Beazley £14.95): 'It is a muted wine, its fermenta- tion stopped by the addition of spirit, in which the skins of more Muscat grapes, themselves highly aromatic, are steeped and macerated to give it the precise fragrance of a ripe dessert grape. The wine is barrel-aged and drunk without further ageing in bot- tle... at six years.'
There is also an older version, but I doubt its being any better. Some may judge this highly perfumed wine a bit of a tart's tipple, or a pooftah's Paradiso, but I find it quite delicious. At £3.99 it is scarcely more than half the price which some have been asking for the Vidal-Fleury Beaumes (whose pink colour makes it even more open to this objection) but even so, I shall be interested to see how many people really want a whole case of it. Offers of half a case would add 50p per bottle, and Price-Beech is too dainty, as I say, to mix his cases. Perhaps few of us will ever experience this remarkable wine, as a result.
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