SPECTATOR WINE CLUB
Wine drinkers' wine and slurpers' tipples
Auberon Waugh
Ihad hoped to keep the price of the sample case(7) of this nice, cheap offer at under £5 the bottle, despite the fact that Oxonians require to be paid £2 before they will make up a sample case — a 'handling' charge, if you please. At the last minute, `John Major's' miserable, whingeing Budget added £1 a case and brought it up to the full £5, but I still think it might be a good idea for people to try the sample case before committing themselves to a huge order. This is because although there are three exciting newcomers in this list numbers 2, 4 and 5 — which I am happy to recommend, cheaper reds can be quite tricky, particularly if you go for stronger tasting wines, as I tend to do. Any fool can find a cheap red which is almost tasteless but where the richer, fuller cheapies are concerned — Zinfandel is the obvious example, but even my beloved Château Musar has its enemies — there are always some who object to one or another of the tastes on offer. I received a furious letter from a retired diplomat in Wiltshire this week saying he hated the Vino Laranda, from Penedes, in January's offer. I and the entire panel had found it absolutely deli- cious, if untypical of Penedes in its plumnainess— so much so that on a second tasting I ordered four cases of it. But I hate hearing from unsatisfied customers and urge those who are in doubt to go for the sample case first. There should be plenty of time to re-order.
However, there is nothing remotely con- troversial about the first wine, which is an old friend. The year 1988 was excellent for white burgundies, particularly in the Maconnais, some of which are showing as well as the 1986s showed at this stage. Andre Bonhomme's 1988 Macon Vire) has a nose of Bramleys and honey with a good strong taste, nothing sharp or bitter — a high-class, concentrated wine with a long finish which should really be kept another 18 months at least, but drinks so Pleasantly now that practically nobody will keep it. It comes in a pretty bottle and at £6.75 is smart enough to serve under any circumstances. Since the leap in Australian chardonnay prices I find myself trickling back to southern burgundy, and to village chablis in the north. There is nothing melony or soft — let alone buttery — in this wine. It is simply a very good, high- class white burgundy. My first red, at £3.42, is Chilean, with far more merlot than cabernet in the taste. Villa Carmen's 1987 Seleccion(2) has. a toffee-like smell. The only hint of im- propriety which any member of the panel could detect was a touch of tarred rope in the middle palate, but nobody else could spot it It is a wine drinker's wine rather than a slurper's tipple, which would im- prove with keeping, but it is a good and
interesting wine at this price.
The Grand Vernauie.33, by contrast, is made for slurpers. We had it a few years back and it has not changed much, except in price. It is a blended wine, of course. The blending may be done in burgundy, but the taste is more southern rhonish. It lays no claim to an appellation control& or a year, but the result is clean and very easy to drink. Still very reasonably priced for its quality at £3.25. My next is a deeply interesting Provencal red which has the unusual distinction of not being mentioned at all in Robert Parker's definitive Wines of the Rhone Valley and Provence (Dorling Kindersley 1987). This may explain its extraordinarily reasonable price of £4.08. It has the wonderful black- red colour of the carignan grape at its best, spiced up, I should guess, with a little cinsault and mourvedre. Its smell is of raw meat in a clean English butcher's shop the same smell, oddly enough, that I have often caught in Vacheron's red sancerre, which is made from the pinot grape and could scarcely taste more different. Here we have a decent, strong Provençal taste, closer to a bandol than anything else, with no extraneous vegetation creeping in. The Cuvee Psalmodi from the Domaine du Mas Montel(4) is a well-made wine which will go beautifully with anything oily or garlicky, over-tornatoed or over-herbed. Particular- ly recommended for the newly-married. Next a Chianti Classico(5) which justifies its price of £5.08 by an unusual and welcome whiff of fresh cedar, or possibly incense, in the nose, repeated on the palate. Perhaps not everybody likes their wine perfumed in this way, but I would not recommend it if the panel had not found it a pleasant experience. Next day the per- fume had gone, leaving a solid, fruity example of what is surely an underrated wine.
Finally, Stanley Leasingham's 1984 Cabernet/Malbe& which I have been offering nearly ever year, starting with 1976. The new price of £6.08 is depressing, but 1984 was a very good year in the Clare Valley, which means the Oz blackcurrant smell is more powerful than ever, the colour darker, the taste stronger. Purists may say the taste is too concentrated, but there is nothing unpleasant there. If it were kept long enough it might turn into a very complex and interesting wine, but nobody will keep it, of course. Aging malbec in my experience can be either malty or metallic, the first delicious, the second horrid.
The sample case works out at exactly £5.00 a bottle. Punters might care to look at it before they leap on the Italian or the Chilean.
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