This is our positively final offer of the year, and the famed old St James merchants, Berry Bros. & Rudd, have come up with a stunning mixed case which would see you through a deliciously bibulous Christmas. Together we have selected five table wines (there are two bottles each in the case) plus single bottles
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
Graham Mitchell, who calls himself the Wine Explorer, comes from one of England’s leading wine families. His great-grandfather had a watering hole in Fleet Street, and wanted to be Lord Mayor of London. But they told him that nobody who had his name over a pub could rise to an office of such magnificence, so
As a highly trained economist I know the rule: you can tell how fast a recession is lifting by the start of Christmas. This year it began three months early, with the arrival of Heston Blumenthal’s Hidden Orange Christmas pudding in Waitrose. Last month the first gift guides began to flutter from the weekend papers.
This month’s mini-bar is from the estimable Yapp Bros, who specialise in fossicking out first-rate wines, often from small vineyards, in the Loire and the Rhône. These are subtle and sophisticated bottles — serious wines some might say — which you will not find in supermarkets. Nor offered by those allegedly value firms that sell vast quantities
An offer made by FromVineyardsDirect is always exciting, which is why FVD is one of our bestselling merchants. Their list is short, but selected with immense care. And they also have terrific tastings which are more like parties, sometimes in private houses of distinction, sometimes in public buildings which you want to get your toes
It’s a curious fact that the recession has increased sales of the more expensive wines. Merchants put this down to people being unwilling to pay for restaurant meals — and for restaurant wines, which can be three or four times the retail price. So they cook at home, and make the meal special with a
Welcome back to Berry Bros. & Rudd, the unfeasibly posh wine merchants in St James’s, London. They left The Spectator fold some years ago, but are now home again, which is why the other day I found myself pushing through the creaking front door, crossing the creaking floorboards, then climbing the creaking stairs, all in
The magazine The Drinks Business recently published a list of the ten most annoying descriptions of wine. I agree with most of their judgments: for instance, ‘icon’ is just a lazy word for a wine that has an inflated reputation. ‘Reserve’ merely means ‘better than our usual stuff’. Which is the same as ‘premium’. ‘Passion’
Four wines, four different countries, four different grapes. All these come from Adnams of Southwold, the -admirable brewers, who also ship superb wines from around the world. Their selection is a joy, and if you visit one of their shops, you will also find a range of attractive kitchen implements, many designed to perform tasks
This month we have the first full offer from Swig, the adventurous young merchants from west London. You wouldn’t go to Swig if you wanted a list of every vintage of every great Bordeaux chateau over the past three decades or the costliest Burgundies, but if you want to find exciting wines from umpteen countries
Mark Cronshaw at The Wine Company of Colchester has helped me assemble half a dozen luscious wines. They are pricier than our normal range, but by golly they’re good, and generously discounted. You can buy by the case of six, or get a sampler with one of each wine. You will not be remotely -disappointed.
Recent American research shows, as if we didn’t know, that wine tasting is unreliable and scatter-brained. Wines that taste feeble in the morning can be delicious at night. A wine that wins a gold medal in one tasting might be unranked in the next. There are true stories: the test in which ordinary drinkers were
Gordon Ramsay is a terrible fraud. Friends of ours lived near him, and one Christmas their little boy made mince pies. ‘Do you think Mr Ramsay might like my pies?’ he asked, and his parents, a little nervously, assured him he would. So the lad left a plate outside the Ramsay door, and next day
The other day I was chatting to Mimi Avery, of the famous Bristol wine importing firm. She said that she couldn’t understand how some supermarkets can offer bottles of wine at, say ‘£4.95 reduced from £9.95’. If the normal selling price was a tenner, how could they make a profit on a fiver? Then by
I was lucky enough to attend the 650th anniversary dinner for the Vintners’ Company last month. Some of the greatest winemakers in the world (Edouard Moueix, Aubert de Villaine of Romanée-Conti, Patrice Noyelle of Pol Roger — wow!), the most distinguished merchants, the most feted wine writers. As the silly phrase has it, I felt
Corney & Barrow are proud to have the royal warrant, meaning that they provide the Palace with some of the greatest — and necessarily most expensive — wines from around the world. I am pleased to say that they also hold my own warrant, for providing exceptional wines at -surprisingly modest prices. For instance, this month’s offer is
The prices of the top Bordeaux reds are down this year, though you can still pay hundreds of pounds a bottle for the most famous labels. What puzzles me is the way that some of the smaller, unknown chateaux imagine that because Chinese millionaires pay ludicrous sums for the great names, they can overcharge for
I have been enjoying Growing Up in Restaurants by James Pembroke (Quartet), which is largely autobiographical, but also covers the history of eating out in this country, including the darkest days of the last century. But even in the 1950s and 1960s there were people trying to produce edible food, some successfully, and looking at past
These are some of the most luscious wines I’ve ever offered to readers. They are all Spanish, from The Haciendas Company, and if you don’t quite believe me, and if you’re in London, you can try them at the Zorita’s Kitchen, at Broken Wharf, on the north bank of the Thames, a few yards from