Simon Hoggart

December Wine Club | 5 December 2013

A good wine, as I say in my book Life’s Too Short To Drink Bad Wine (now in a new, revised, nifty-looking edition) is a wine you like drinking. Which sounds obvious, but isn’t; a lot of people seem to suspect that there are objectively ‘good’ wines, and if they haven’t been inducted into that mystery, it demonstrates their ignorance. In fact, if you truly enjoy a £3.99 bottle, you’ll save a lot of money. But it can’t make you oblivious to the delights of something finer.

Take the Beaujolais in this offer. You might drink a Beaujolais Nouveau (now in some of our more outdated bars) and take pleasure in it. But once you have -sampled the Juliénas here, with its ripe fruit, its -evanescent perfume all held together by a gentle undertone of earthiness, you will I think be converted. And since this beauty is discounted, a bottle costs roughly half what you would pay for a greatly inferior, paint-stripper nouveau in a restaurant or pub.

This offer comes from The Wine Company of Colchester. They are slightly pricier than normal, but are to help you celebrate Christmas, and in any case all are -discounted, sometimes by a massive amount. We kick off with a fine 2011 Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc (1), the flagship wine from this grape made at the Highfield estate in -Marlborough. The seesaw between French versions (very dry, flinty, sometimes mouth-puckering) and the NZ style (smoother, fruitier) continues, but I think they’ve got the balance right here. A good food wine, but a nice aperitif too. Reduced by £24 a case to £11.99.

Our Chardonnay is also from New Zealand, where they are making great strides with this grape. The Moa Ridge 2011 (2) is from the Clayvin vineyards, and it has real subtlety — balanced, just oaked enough to add depth without being remotely overwhelming.

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