Wine Club

As readers well know, we love Pol Roger champagne at The Spectator. We like to think of it as pretty much the house pour. It’s used at all our events and also simply to calm our nerves at the end — or, occasionally, the start or middle — of a testing working day. We can’t

Calling all Beaujolais lovers! Yes, that’s you! I mean, we all love Beaujolais, right? Not the scuzzy, naff Bojolly Noovoo that was the grim but standard fare of 1970s wine bars, but the wonderful, fresh, ripe, juicy, new wave Beaujolais from one of the region’s ten crus, full of rich, succulent, damson-like fruit and silky

Heaven help us, it’s barbecue season. You know, that ghastly time of year when testosterone-fuelled hunter-gatherers push the little lady aside and fire up the rusting, bird poo-covered grate in the garden and ask the neighbours over. Never mind that these poor saps never darken the kitchen the other 11-and-a-half months of the year (and

All six wines this week come from the Languedoc, courtesy of Jason Yapp, that canny wine hound who understands the twists and turns of France’s largest vineyard area better than anyone I know. And so happy is he with our selection that he’s lopped a quid off every bottle. The Domaine Collin Crémant de Limoux

I write this from my sick bed. Laid low with a vile lurgy, I feel far from well. And, sad to report, Mrs Ray is far from understanding. She says I should learn to be more stoical. I say she should learn to be more, well, sympathetic. It’s not my fault that I feel my

It’s spring and that means it’s time for rosé. Sales of the pink stuff continue to rocket and we’re all out and proud rosé drinkers these days, darling. That’s not to say there aren’t some dire bottles on the shelves. Like that vile Blush Zinfandel from California (shudder) or the weirdly coloured one from the

A wonderful offer from Berry Bros & Rudd, this. Wine-loving readers will know that once or twice a month we hold Spectator winemakers’ lunches at 22 Old Queen Street. A well-known winemaker will bring some wines and chat about them to a maximum of 14 readers over lunch in the boardroom. These entertaining affairs must surely

We start this week with the ever reliable 2015 Corney & Barrow House White (1), largely because if we didn’t I would get angry letters asking why not. I really do wonder why my mother doesn’t just pick up the phone instead. She’s got my number. A blend of 70 per cent Colombard and 30

Spectator readers, being wise wine-lovers, are particularly fond of Château Musar, that extraordinary wine born of the Bekaa Valley in the Lebanon. Whenever we offer it in these pages, we promptly sell out. This is surely our best Musar offer yet, thanks to the canniness of our Wine Club partners Mr.Wheeler. As readers will know,

I’m going to fess up right from the off and say that, yes, you’re right, we’ve offered two of these wines several times before. But they simply shone in our tasting and refused to be ignored. You loved them last time, dear reader, and these vintages are even better. The other four are crackers, too.

I adore the wines of New Zealand. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if I had to drink the wines of just one country — taking France out of the equation, of course — then New Zealand would do it for me. There are spectacular aromatic whites from Marlborough, Gisborne

Tanners have been around since 1842 and certainly know their onions. Both Decanter and the International Wine Challenge named them ‘Large Independent Wine Retailer of the Year’ in 2016. I mean to say, how lucky are we to have them as one of The Spectator’s partners? Their sales director, Robert Boutflower, put together a list

Phew, done it! Dry January, that is, and 31 whole days on the wretched water wagon, clinging on by my fingertips. Well, 31 whole days apart from a two-day, champagne-soaked trip to Pol Roger (about which more anon on our Spectator Wine Club website) and three days with the missus in the Loire Valley (ditto).

I don’t know about you but my cellar took a pounding over Christmas and on New Year’s Eve. Yes, yes, I know it’s only a cobwebbed cupboard under the stairs. The point is that it’s all but empty apart from a few corks, some half-drunk vermouth, a shattered decanter, a bottle of Bailey’s (where did

Tricky time of year this, with the festivities hoving into view. Never easy for anyone, least of all those of us who suffer from Christmas Affected Doom, Depression and Despondency (CADDAD), a ghastly affliction about which I’ve written at length elsewhere so won’t bore you with now. Suffice to say that it is a dreadful

We’ve a really strong selection this week from Tanners of Shrewsbury. In fact, I was so impressed that it took a heck of a lot of swilling, swirling and spitting (well, not so much of the latter to be honest) to whittle the wines down to six. Tanners’ Robert Boutflower even put up a deliciously

One of FromVineyardsDirect’s finest ruses has been to obtain, quietly and discreetly, small amounts of surplus production from the most celebrated châteaux in all Bordeaux (and I mean the most celebrated) and to sell the wine on under their own labels at extremely reasonable prices. These ‘declassified’ wines (as they like to call them) are

We’re with my alma mater Berry Bros & Rudd this week featuring some of their excellent own selection wines. I was quite bowled over by their quality, as indeed I was by the generosity of wine director Mark Pardoe’s discounts. In fact I strongly recommend you start your festive stockpiling right here, right now. Why

We’re not due a Wine Club offering in the magazine until next week, but so good were the wines that I tasted recently with-FromVineyardsDirect .com that we just had to include them so that readers might join in the fun. It’s an entirely French line-up, ideal for autumn. And despite the plunging pound and the

We have six real treats this week: three from Italy and three from Spain. I would have been happy with almost any of the wines that Private Cellar’s Laura Taylor put up and those that didn’t make my final six only just missed out by inches. And, in the face of a plunging pound, Laura