Christmas Wine Club

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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.