With the need to stock up for Christmas in mind, we have gone all trad this week with a brilliant selection of classic French wines from our old friends Berry Bros & Rudd.
And I’m delighted to report that having softened up Mark Pardoe MW, Berrys’ wine buying director, with a large, chilled glass of his very own Extra Ordinary White, he has lopped between 10 and 20 per cent off the list prices. This really does represent a substantial saving on what weren’t steep prices in the first place.
Berrys’ have been trading for well over 300 years and have built up rock-solid relationships with long-standing producers and suppliers, and I would argue that their own-label wines are as good as you will find anywhere.
Indeed, Berrys’ Good Ordinary Claret is rightly famous and has remained the firm’s runaway bestseller ever since it was launched in 1973. We used to drink gallons of it when I worked in the Berry Bros shop in St James’s Street all those years ago, although I would like to put paid to the vile slur that we were in the habit of using three bottles of GOC as the wicket during our in-store-lull-between-customers cricket matches. We used the house red.
The 2012 Berrys’ Extra Ordinary Claret (4) is the sophisticated, worldly wise elder brother of GOC. Made by the celebrated JM Cazes family at Château Villa Bel-Air in the Graves, it is soft and approachable thanks to a high proportion of Merlot in the blend, with added Cabernet Sauvignon for backbone and structure and a dash of Cabernet Franc for spice. It is certainly a claret of some considerable style and worth every penny. £11.50, down from £13.65.
Its sister wine, the 2013 Berrys’ Extra Ordinary White (1) is no less tasty, being the classic white Bordeaux blend of Sauvig-non Blanc (mainly) and Sémillon.
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