Despite being the old man of St James’s, Berry Bros & Rudd is anything but stuffy. Yes, of course Berrys is traditional, selling plenty of cru classé claret, vintage port and so on, but it’s imaginative too, championing neglected regions as much as it does emerging ones. It has over a dozen wines from long-ignored Greece, for example, and was the first major merchant to list serious Chinese wine.
They have done us proud here, not least because the wine buying director, Mark Pardoe MW, being the soft-hearted, easily persuaded, Spectator-loving chap he is, has lopped up to 20 per cent off the RRPs.
The 2012 Domaine Lyrarakis Dafni (1) from Crete is typically off-piste, Lyrarakis being the producer and Dafni the grape (yep, it’s new to me too). It shares its name with the bay laurel thanks to its heady, bay-like aromas and oily texture.
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