October Wine Club

My colleague and friend the late Alan Watkins was for a spell wine writer on the Observer. Though I had not yet taken up the Spectator job, we disagreed on some important oenophiliac issues. I liked full, rich, strongly flavoured wines, often from the New World. He said they were all well and good, but you couldn’t enjoy more than one glass at a time. They rushed at you like your new best Aussie friend, -demanding all your attention, never letting up. The point about the French classics was that they were subtle, offering up their pleasures slowly, the third glass being even more satisfying than the first.

These days I enjoy both. And this offer, from Yapp Bros, combines the understated and evanescent, the massive and the powerful. They are all French (three from the Loire, two from the south, one Rhône) but then, as France has had to compete in the crammed world market, their growers too have started to produce wine with deeper, stronger flavours.