Our nine merchant partners – Armit Wines, Corney & Barrow, FromVineyardsDirect, Honest Grapes, Mr Wheeler, Private Cellar, Swig, Tanners and Yapp Bros – represent the cream of the UK’s independents and boast centuries of experience between them. They all have particular areas of expertise and stock wines that you would never be able to find on the supermarket shelves or local off-licence.
Fashions in wine change, like everything else, so it was inevitable that when New World wines swept all before them, Europe would learn to follow the trend. Which is why in southern France, northern Spain and northern Italy these days you find much more highly flavoured wines — ‘fruit bombs’, some cynics call them —
Order your wines by email. Now, pay attention. We have a lot of wines to get through and not much time, so if you don’t mind, I’ll crack on. All the wines come from the famous City firm of Corney & Barrow, and almost all are generously discounted. And there is the Brett-Smith Indulgence, which
Order you wines online. Stone, Vine and Sun, a modestly sized operation near Winchester, keeps winning awards as the best independent wine merchant, and I’m not surprised. There’s a nimbleness to these smaller companies; chaps (or chapesses) whizz off to investigate some little half-hidden vineyard, and because they need less stock than the giants, they
Order your wines by email. Summer is almost upon us. Ah, the cancerous barbecue smoke drifting from next door’s garden, the stinking, sweaty trains and buses, the yobs with stomachs spilling over their shorts, the never-ending football season. Sorry, didn’t mean that. It was very negative. What I meant to remind you of was the
Order your wines by email Prestige Agencies is part of the admirable Playford Ros company in North Yorkshire. They sell some wonderful wines from the world’s boutique vineyards, often made in tiny quantities, all created with the kind of loving attention you just don’t get in supermarket booze. Because the wineries are so small they
Order your wines by email There are many ways of buying cheap wine, though fewer means of buying good cheap wine. Supermarkets often have bargains. Recently, however, I went to a tasting by a very downmarket chain — they had Châteauneuf du Pape for £6.99 and a Chablis for £5.99. These tasted of nothing, and
This week’s mini-bar is from a new company, titled in the modern fashion, FromVineyardsDirect.com. It’s been set up by David Campbell, who is the publisher of the Everyman Library, and Esme Johnstone, one of the founders of Majestic Wine Warehouses. They have made up a very short list — fewer than 20 choices, though this
Order your wines by email I’m pleased to say it has become an annual tradition: our February offer of the new vintage of Chateau Musar with Lay & Wheeler. It has been a tremendous success with Spectator readers. The wine won’t be in the shops until May, but it can be shipped to your door
The festive season is long over, so it’s time to stock up on less expensive but delicious wines that will be gluggable through the cheerless winter months. Last year one of our most successful offers was with Averys of Bristol, who offered terrific discounts, largely to reduce stocks of wines that were first-rate but weren’t
Click here to send an order by email 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
Click here to order online We have two Christmas offers this month, both from top-ranking wine merchants. The first is by Lay & Wheeler. Nearly all the wines have been reduced by 10 per cent (with free delivery); there are further discounts if you buy more than one case, and two of the reds represent
Click here to send an order by emailThis is the first of our Christmas offers — a little early, I know, but a chance for you to stock up on pleasingly discounted bubbles for the festive season. It’s a very flexible offer from Armit of Notting Hill — you can buy most of the wines
Click here to send an order by emailStone, Vine & Sun of Winchester is one of my very favourite wine merchants. I’ve never tried anything of theirs that wasn’t first rate, and I was not remotely surprised when they won the Best Small Independent Wine Merchant award from Wine International this year. What they do
Order the wines onlineI’m just back from my annual trip to Adnams of Southwold. It’s one of those events that makes the end of summer rather more tolerable. Their shop in town (they are soon expanding into other parts of booming East Anglia) is cool, elegant and stuffed with exciting wines which Adnams’ buyers have
Order the wines online Private Cellar is a very classy company. Its four principals all worked for Corney & Barrow, and its buying director is a Master of Wine with the magnificent name of Nicola Arcedeckne-Butler. I assumed this indicated Eastern European origins; in fact it’s an old English spelling of ‘Archdeacon’. Nicola and her
How should wines be sealed? This issue continues to fret the trade. Those who believe in screwcaps correctly argue that they make it far less likely that wine will go off. Up to 5 per cent of all bottles are ‘corked’, as oxidation and sourness result from air penetrating an inadequate cork. Sometimes the effect
The French are finally coming to terms with generic wines. The bottles, instead of being labelled with the name of the grower and location, have names that are either trendy (Fat Bastard or Le Freak) or else amiably meaningless, such as Chamarré, a kind of butterfly. The labels also show the grape variety. This information
This offer is, I think, exceptional value. Merchants occasionally overstock on first-rate wines which don’t sell off the page. Order the wines online This offer is, I think, exceptional value. Merchants occasionally overstock on first-rate wines which don’t sell off the page. For example, if you saw, on the list published by the old and
Organic wine is increasingly popular, in spite of the fact that few people know what the term actually means. The rules seem to be strict but variable, work differently from country to country, and are monitored by a bewildering number of autonomous organisations. Some of these allow a handful of additions, such as preservatives. But
Yapp Brothers is one of the country’s more distinguished wine merchants. Yapp Brothers is one of the country’s more distinguished wine merchants. It has a short but choice list, almost all coming from the Loire or southern France. Robin Yapp, who is now retired, used to select all the wines by touring vineyards, some in