CHRISTMAS WINE CLUB
SIMON HOGGART
This is our last Christmas offer for 2006, and contains a great many wines, starting with Corney & Barrow’s house white1 and house red6. Both are highly popular with Spectator readers, being inexpensive and quite delicious. The white is lemony and zestful, the red soft, mellow and possessing real depth. They are both — like all wines in this offer — discounted and, if Adam Brett-Smith will excuse me, they are an excellent way of padding your order to qualify for the fabled Brett-Smith Indulgence. This year we are offering a mixed case of the two, just right for a smallish party or to have on hand for the holiday period.
The next two wines are hardly more expensive and are both remarkable value. The La Combe de Grinou blanc from Bergerac 20052 also packs bags of fruit, and manages to have overtones of honey while remaining bone dry. Just £5.67 a bottle. The Domaine de la Jonction Syrah 20047 from the Pays d’Oc is sensational and at £4.69 ridiculously cheap. I noted ‘tastes of nectar’ which may be an exaggeration, but not much. A wonderful sign of how the French are at last meeting, and here overcoming, the New World challenge.
We now move to our pricier wines, which you can buy either by the unmixed case or in a luxury sample case. I’m going to make another stab at selling German wine, which used to be as popular as claret but — perhaps because of a dreadfully dorky advertising campaign — remains a drug on the British market. Yet when you try this Riesling from Schloss Schönborn 20043, costing only £6.96, you’ll be amazed at what you’ve been missing. Fruity, floral, easy to drink yet with a powerful Riesling weight. Another perfect, happy party wine.
The Lofthouse Sauvignon Blanc 20064 from Marlborough is a huge blast of the grape, drenched with rich, ripe, tropical flavours and with undertones of grass, flint and gooseberries. If you want something understated, and many people do, pay two or three quid extra for a Sancerre. But it won’t have the oomph of this tremendous wine. Reduced to £8.23.
The St Aubin Dents de Chien 20055 from Olivier Leflaive, is a classic Burgundy. I love St Aubin for its toasty, hazelnut flavours, but also because it is still underrated and costs less than other appellations of similar quality. Leflaive never bottles a substandard wine, so you are in good hands. A considerable treat for Christmas dinner.
Now the reds. The Hawequas Mont du Toit 20048 is from South Africa, whose wines are just beginning to achieve the prices they merit, so get in quickly. This is a delicious blend of four different grapes. Blend can equal bland, the equivalent of mixing differ ent colour paints to create grey sludge. This is the opposite: each component brings something extra to the party.
The Spanish are rapidly bringing their culinary excellence to this country — brilliant new London restaurants such as the L-Bar in Kensington and Fino in Fitzrovia. The gorgeous food there would be perfectly complemented by this equally gorgeous Petalos del Bierzo 20059 made from the Mencía grape by the Palacios family. I recommend this wine very highly indeed. Decant it, let it stand an hour or so, and you’ll be rewarded with a richness, a silkiness, a complexity and a perfume which are astounding for £9.43 a bottle.
Finally, the Château Carignan Prima 200310 from the Premières Côtes de Bordeaux, is that rare discovery: a truly firstrate claret at a reasonable price. Cedars, smoke, damsons — everything you’d expect at far more than £13.75 Again, a wine to match the finest Norfolk bronze turkey. Or goose. Delivery as ever is free, and the BrettSmith Indulgence brings a discount of £6 per case on two cases or more delivered within the M25, three cases or more outside.
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