Wine

Saturday

Peter Grogan

Success problem

Another great Bordeaux vintage on the cards? Peter Grogan examines the unexpected problems created by never-ending success The art of assessing the likely future quality of very young red wines by sniffing away at what are known as ‘barrel samples’ is a decidedly arcane one. I’m no good at it and I haven’t even been within spitting distance of Bordeaux during the current en primeur campaign for the 2010 vintage. This is where the leading châteaux effectively sell their wines as ‘futures’, long before they’re bottled, let alone ready to be shipped to customers. Nonetheless, even from here, I detect among the positive early reports something ineffable playing around the

Saturday

Jason Yapp

Rage against the tagine: Supermarket swipe

Wine is one of life’s great joys – so why, asks Jason Yapp, do major retailers do such a dismal job of flogging it? I have several items to declare: bags of prejudice, a heap of self-interest, a smidgen of latent snobbery and chips on both shoulders. But even accounting for all of the above it can’t just be me who finds buying wine in a supermarket a joyless, soulless and utterly dispiriting experience. Wine is one of nature’s most precious gifts, and its acquisition should be a joy, not an ordeal. Most of the major multiples employ a smattering of Masters of Wine (of whom there are only 288

Natasha Hughes

Hit and miss

Going out for a meal shouldn’t be an occasion for stress; other than first dates or tricky business lunches of course. Yet often, simply being handed the wine list can cause your palms to sweat and pulse to race — and not in a good way. The problem is two-fold. Those of us with limited wine knowledge feel overwhelmed by the range of options on even the shortest of lists. As a result, the temptation is either to opt for the second-cheapest wine on offer — you wouldn’t want to look stingy, after all — or to buy something flash and spend the rest of the meal wondering whether you’ve

Saturday

Interconnect

November Mini-Bar Offer

The late Alan Watkins, in whose ­memory we enjoyed a commemorative lunch at the Garrick Club the other day, was for a spell the wine correspondent of the Observer. He wrote almost exclusively about French wines. I used to chide him gently, pointing out that there were marvellous wines from the New World. He would shake his head, and say that, yes, some were all very well, even quite good. But you couldn’t drink them every day. And in the case of some, you couldn’t drink more than a single glass at a time. French wines, he implied, had a finesse, a degree of class, a touch of steel. To

Wednesday

Simon Hoggart

Savouring the mystique

I have never met Roger Scruton, though I would like to; wine fans are slightly obsessional and enjoy clustering together, like trainspotters, though tasting rooms are more welcoming than the end of a platform at Crewe. We’re also very different. Shortly after I, working for the left-of-centre Guardian, became the wine writer for this conservative magazine, Scruton, a right-wing philosopher, took the same job at the New Statesman. Given the rivalry between these two organs, I took a keen interest in what he wrote. For instance, round about the same time that he pointed out that ‘it is almost impossible to find a decent Burgundy these days for less than