Jonathan Ray is The Spectator’s drinks editor.
A serious wine merchant stands or falls by the quality of its own-label or house wines. When I worked at Berry Bros & Rudd over 20 years ago, doing shamefully little to help make it the award-winning success it is today, my boss, Simon Berry, used to stress that any fool could source, market and
We have three remarkably fine bottles from the Wine Company this week, each a classic example of its type. First, the Michel Guilleminot Blanc de Noirs Brut Champagne NV, a fabulous fizz from the Vallée de l’Aube. Fresh, vibrant and fruity, with a delicate mousse and a touch of biscuit and brioche, this mouth-filling, 100
Jason Yapp has been even more ebullient than usual, if such a thing was possible, Yapp Brothers having scooped three awards at the International Wine Challenge, including ‘Languedoc-Roussillon Specialist Merchant of the Year’. Jason knows Languedoc-Roussillon like nobody else: he and I had a memorable trip there recently thanks not only to the spectacular wines we
Just in case you hadn’t noticed, the Rugby World Cup kicks off this Friday with England vs Fiji at HQ. The delicious prospect of six weeks of international rugby prompted sports-mad Laura Taylor and Amanda Skinner from Private Cellar to present a fine selection of wines for me to taste drawn only from those rugby
Ok, so first things first. Jeremy Clarke didn’t fall overboard after all. He did, though, dance all night every night (almost), have everyone in stitches and host a rip-roaring High Life vs Low Life pub quiz. He even wore a fez with unexpected aplomb. Taki forwent the delights of his own High Life to join
It’s back to Tanners this month, whose offer in June was such a great hit with readers. We’ve another fine selection this time too. There is no theme as such — these are simply the wines I liked the most and they’re jolly well-priced too, with only one over a tenner. Discounts are hard to
James Franklin of Corney & Barrow presented a very strong selection for this offer, any bottle of which I would have been happy to recommend. We did finally narrow it down to four wines, though, and a tip-top quartet it is too. Readers will be delighted to hear that all prices are discounted, and the
A really strong team of wines from The Wine Company this week, drawn from France, Italy and New Zealand and including two delicious oddities. And so proud of our final choice was The Wine Company’s Mark Cronshaw that he rashly agreed to some very decent discounts. I hope you enjoy the selection as much as
We seem unusually focused this week — never an easy task after one of our Wine Club tastings — with all six wines coming from France. We didn’t plan it that way. It’s just the six bottles that shone brightest and sang loudest to us were all French: three from Bordeaux and one each from Burgundy, the
We are in the middle of a heatwave as I write. Roads are melting, rails are buckling and tempers are fraying. My train to London today took twice as long as normal thanks to ‘adverse weather conditions’. A blizzard? Fog? A flash flood? Nope, sunshine in July. What an unexpected shock for poor Network Rail.
We’ve a selection of simple summer quaffing wines this week, full of bright flavours, courtesy of our old chums Tanners of Shrewsbury. I am confident that you will find the wines as amenable and easy to get on with as I did and that you will find them very keenly priced. Indeed, there must have
Pol Roger is The Speccie’s favourite fizz and no event here is complete without it. In fact, judging by the heroic amounts we get through — notably at the summer party — I’d say we could almost be Pol’s best customer. This is The Spectator after all, not the New Statesman. Of course, Pol Roger’s
One of the most warmly received wines we offered in cahoots with The Wine Company last year was the 2011 Domaine de la Jasse Vieilles Vignes, a beautifully structured, Bordeaux-style red from the Languedoc. Readers, and no few Speccie staff and contributors (including your humble correspondent), lapped it up – so I’m delighted that Mark
We don’t seem to have had a Wine Club offer from Corney & Barrow for a while and, with associate director James Franklin and his wines in cracking form at our Wine School the other day, I’m delighted to welcome them back to these pages. It’s a typically classy selection, too, with three fine French
After the thundering success of our last rosé offer, courtesy of FromVineyarsDirect.com, we make no apology for having something of a re-run featuring once again the pink wines from Sacha Lichine’s Château d’Esclans estate in Provence. Yes, they’re the same wines we offered previously, but they’re the most recent vintages thereof, with some tasty discounts
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
When I was pondering a theme for this week’s offer with Mark Cronshaw, operations director of The Wine Company, he sucked his teeth, stared into the distance and came up with a brainwave: why not simply offer The Wine Company’s best-sellers? Wines that have been tried, tested and loved by their customers, but offered with
It’s a complete recipe for disaster of course. By which I mean being trapped at sea with The Spectator’s ‘Low life’ correspondent for an entire week. That’s seven whole days. At sea. Crikey! Not that Jeremy Clarke isn’t the best of company (he is — everyone adores him) and not that we won’t all have
Private Cellar is the Jack Russell of the wine trade, tiny but tenacious, nipping in and snuffling out first-rate everyday wines that others either miss or require in greater quantities than are available. Private Cellar, based in Newmarket, has no shop to speak of and a staff of just eight, selling online from a commendably
We’ve four lovely wines this week that virtually chose themselves, so spot on are they. FromVineyardsDirect are great at this kind of thing — finding little treasures that others have either overlooked or were too slow to grab first. The Prosecco Collalbrigo Brut (1) is a typical example. I’ve come across a lot of lousy