Spectator Wine Club
Auberon Waugh
Perhaps it is the time of year, but I find myself taking white wine more seriously than ever before, and have chosen to inflict an All Whites offer for June. Cheap white wine is notoriously dangerous, and the search for a good white cheapie usually involves considerable suffering. Under the circumstances of having offered a good, strong, Toscano Bianco at £2.50 last time round, I decided to give the cheapies a miss this time and weigh in with a massively sweet near-Sauternes from Loupiac (1), just across the river from Barsac, at the extraordinary price of £3.39 the bottle. To be honest, I had never heard of Loupiac until discovering this bottle, and only recently made the acquaintance of Cerons, the other near-Sauternes dessert wine which is just beginning to find a market over here. Both are half the price of wine with the Barsac or Sauternes appellation; such experts as David Peppercorn agree with experienced Bordeaux tasters it has in practice been impossible to distinguish Loupiac from Sauternes.
While Cerons is markedly lighter than its neighbours and the cheaper the Sauternes the lighter it becomes, this wine, grown on high slopes above the Garonne, has such a concentration of natural sweetness as I have seldom found from the Semillon grape except in the most expensive Sauternes drunk far too young. 'Sump- tuous' is the word wine merchants use to describe wine as sweet as this, but I can't help feeling that 'unctuous' might be closer to the mark. There is a good smell of Semilion and even a hint of botrytis on the nose, but you have to search for it in the mouth where the overwhelming impression is of concentrated sweetness. It is the sort of wine which could be kept for 20 or even 100 years until it is the colour of brown sherry, growing more interesting and pos- sibly less unctuous with every year that passed. At present it is God's gift for those who like Sauternes but cannot afford it. I believe it may disappear soon, as there is no profit in making sweet wines at this price — the same vines can produce a dry wine with half the labour and wastage.
Those who have not yet discovered Alsatian Riesling could scarcely start with a better one than the 1983 Schlossberg from the Co-operative of Kientzheim Kay- serberg (2). This wine won a gold medal at Macon last year, and it is easy to see why. Schlossberg was the first area in the whole of Alsace to be awarded grand cru status, and 1983 is universally acknowledged to have been the best year in Alsace since 1976. This is a brilliantly refreshing wine with a slight prickle on the tongue also detectable on the nose and exactly the right balance of acid to make it acceptable as an aperitif, as a pick-me-up after an exhaust- ing game of croquet or at any other time of the day or night.
Last of my Great Discoveries this time round is the Mâcon-Clesse (3), somewhat fuller than the Macon-Villages I offered so cheaply last February — a beautiful, clean,
fresh Chardonnay, without any of the elusive sweetness or complicated butter- and-cigars aromas of expensive white Bur- gundy, but quite magnificent in its concen- tration on the pure white Burgundy taste. I jumped for joy when I found it as I knew the Maconnais had been doing wonderful things in 1983 and was beginning to despair of finding a really good example at under £4.
Now for the more expensive stuff. I include the premier cru Chablis Beauroy (4) because many people are happy only with Chablis and I suspect that the way prices are going we may not see much Chablis in the future — 1984 was a filthy, rubbishy year but prices are up 50 per cent on the decent '83s. This is a fair example of the '83s which will improve with keeping 18 months — a fine, appley smell and definite pretensions to a high-class taste but only just enough of it, by my reckoning, to justify a price of £5.52, cheap as this is by current premier cru Chablis standards, and• spectacularly cheap as it will appear to have been in a year's time.
I was much more impressed by the Rully (5), a village which has seldom been able to delight me very much in the past. This wine won first prize in the Concours de Sadne et Loire in 1984 and is a truly magnificent rich, fruity Chardonnay with a golden colour which would not disgrace a much more famous label. The trouble is that £6.43 strikes me as a hefty price to have to pay for a wine, however good, which comes from a Chalonnais village which is chiefly famous for a fizzy red Burgundy of indescribable nastiness. But it really is a lovely wine, strong, healthy and full, with- out any of the thinness creeping into the more famous names. I leave punters to wrestle with the problem.
I include the Puligny-Montrachet (6) as representing a range of tastes in white Burgundy which I don't particularly like but many do. Experts call it 'oak', I call it 'cardboard'. There is a hint of honey on great application and even of cigar smoke if you try hard enough, but the cardboard taste predominates. Personally, I think the price of £9.79 is a scandal, but you won't find it cheaper anywhere else. Chanson seems to specialise in this cardboard taste — I tried three Chanson white Burgundies in Exeter last month and thought all three thin, overpriced and over-oaked. Last week I opened a bottle of Chanson's 1978 Chassagne Montrachet from my own cel- lar, where it had been lying in a neglected corner, and decided I might as well have
eaten the cardboard packing case it arrived in four years ago. Perhaps it is time someone gave Chanson a kick up the
backside — the pere and the fils and the pigeon — but I am afraid that this is what
happens when a corner of the wine market prices itself beyond English pockets. MY own advice nowadays, is to avoid any white
Burgundy with Montrachet in its descrip- tion, and avoid all red Burgundy with a label which includes the words Romanee Conti. It should be left to the Americans.
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