Wine Club

It has been a gratifyingly wine-soaked week. Our Pol Roger-fuelled dinner celebrating the mighty Michael Heath’s 90th birthday was followed by a brace of Spectator Winemaker Lunches, one featuring Marimar Torres’s sublime Sonoma Pinots and Chardonnays, the other, at Boisdale, focusing on the glory that is Lebanon’s Ch. Ksara. Fearing toxic shock if I stopped,

The boardroom clapometer said it all. Hosted by the winemaker Louisa Rose and the sixth-generation family member Lucy Hill-Smith, our Spectator Winemaker Lunch featuring the wines of Yalumba – Australia’s oldest family-owned winery, founded by Samuel Smith in the Barossa Valley 175 years ago – was one of our finest. I’ve never heard such riotous

We’re just back from our stout-hearted Spectator assault on Porto and the Douro Valley, of which more in these pages anon. Suffice to say that it was mission accomplished and everyone in our highly motivated, well-drilled unit more than deserved their mentions in despatches. Indeed, so gung-ho were the troops on the flight home that

Our two Spectator Clays, Claret, Cognac, Cigars (and Carnage) Cruises down the Thames last week were an uproarious success. Much fun was had and, apart from a couple of walking wounded – suffering not from gunshot wounds, you’ll be glad to hear, but simply a surfeit of claret and kummel – there were no casualties.

Ring out the bells, hang out the bunting! Drop whatever you’re doing and pay attention! It’s that time of year again, marked in red on wine-loving readers’ calendars: our annual offer of declassified or so-called ‘defrocked’ clarets from our canny chums at FromVineyardsDirect. You know the form but I’m going to remind you anyway, as

Salute! It’s an all-Italian offer this week thanks to our fratelli nel vino at Honest Grapes, whose speciality is that great country. We could, of course, offer nothing but Italian wines all year and still not cover every region and every grape variety, but we’ve done our very best on this occasion to give as

Mrs Ray is worried. Although she’s finally accepted that I drink too much when I’m out and about or at home with company, she’s fretting that I drink too much tout seul. Some misguided saps regard drinking on one’s own as the start of a very slippery slope, but I believe it to be one

Lunch at the Academy Club with my wicked chums Mark Slemeck and Charlie Grey was probably not the best preparation for tasting a dozen or so wines for this offer from Corney & Barrow. Mark likes his wine but likes his caipirinhas better and Charlie is more of a Pinot Grigio/Newcastle Brown Ale kind of

With a seemingly endless round of lunches, dinners and tastings, it has been a punishing few days of far too much vino. Even dear Mrs Ray expressed her concern, although I thought that a bit rich given the state of her after Book Club. We decided, though, to take it easy, and I even foreswore

Hurrah! At last, I’ve persuaded the mighty Wine Society to grace our pages, and I’m delighted. Founded in 1874, the WS is the world’s oldest cooperative wine club, famed for sourcing top-quality wines at modest prices and for championing lesser-known regions. I’ve said it before: if, for whatever bizarre reason, I had to buy wine

If it’s Thursday, it must be Budapest. Vienna of the other week is but a memory – and a rather sketchy one at that thanks to all those Corn ’n’ Oils – now superseded in the hippocampus by our wine-soaked Spectator tour of Budapest and the vineyards of Eger and Tokaj. We had a hoot,

I’ve been in Vienna, drinking Grüner Veltliner, Zweigelt and Blaufränkisch like a fish. It’s thirsty work being a lush and I also patronised the fabled Loos American Bar rather more often than I should have. It’s such a seductive spot, LAB, and their Corn ’n’ Oils are very fine, and I can never resist a

I know I keep saying it, but Alsace is my favourite of all French wine regions. Heck, it might even be my favourite in all the world. It has everything: a remarkable history, glorious scenery, chocolate box-pretty towns and villages, fabulous food, extraordinarily fine eaux-de-vie and stunning, smile-inducing wines. Oh, my goodness, the wines. Produced

It has been a punishing couple of weeks, with two Spectator Wine School Masterclasses, a brace of Winemaker Lunches and a cracking Winemaker Dinner with Ch. Pichon Baron in the library of our new venue above Old Queen Street Café, hosted by mighty Christian Seely himself. My old pa, faced with such an onslaught, would

I love champagne and I love English fizz – and long gone are the days when you wouldn’t dare mention both in the same sentence. We Brits can hold our heads up: much of what we make is world-class. I’m delighted, then, that thanks to Honest Grapes, we can feature here one of my all-time

The wretched flashbacks plague me every time. I love Yapp Bros and I love their wines but line up a dozen or so of their bottles, uncork them and pour, and I’m immediately covered in a cold sweat recalling whatever shameful adventure it was that ensued last time I got stuck in, egged on by

Mimi, where have you been? It’s been too long! You never ring, you never write, you never text… But what a treat to bump into you at Vintners’ Hall the other week and what a treat, finally, to welcome Averys of Bristol to the Spectator Wine Club. I last worked with Mimi Avery – the

We at Spectator Towers love Château Léoube, the Provençal estate founded by Lord and Lady Bamford (of JCB and Daylesford Organic fame) in 1997, the wines of which we serve at Spectator Writers’ Dinners in the boardroom. So popular are these wines at 22 Old Queen Street that I apologise for taking so long to

Private Cellar, supplier to the Spectator Wine Club and partner in many of our jaunts and jollities – not least the notorious Clay, Claret and Cognac Cruise (CCCC) – turns 20 this year and corks are popping. Director Laura Taylor works so closely with us (she’s head teacher at our masterclasses, quality control at our

Iwasn’t so much a kid in a sweet shop as a lush in a winery. I was at the Armit Wines annual portfolio tasting and, with 50 different winemakers presenting some 300 different wines, I was in vinous heaven. I had a clean glass in my hand, a free afternoon ahead of me and the