Simon Hoggart

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 of a fine, fizzing champagne and an excellent port. The good news is that this brilliant dozen has been reduced to under £200, a saving on list prices of £66, give or take a few pence. But the less exhilarating news is that to snap up this bargain you need to act fast. BBR cannot deliver in time for Christmas in the UK any orders received after this Wednesday, 18 December. So get on the phone or go online, lickety split, and you’ll be fine.

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 mystery, it demonstrates their ignorance. In fact, if you truly enjoy a £3.99 bottle, you’ll save a lot of money. But it can’t make you oblivious to the delights of something finer. Take the Beaujolais in this offer. You might drink a Beaujolais Nouveau (now in some of our more outdated bars) and take pleasure in it.

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 he renamed the bar El Vino, after his sherry-importing business. He got the gig. Now with several branches, it is still owned and run by the family. One sprog leapt for freedom; Graham’s brother Andrew was the Chief Whip who resigned over ‘plebgate’. Now Graham has come up with a Christmas case which demonstrates his ability to spot high quality wines others have missed. All are discounted.

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. So this Yuletide offer from Corney & -Barrow seems almost too late. I do hope you find that seven weeks gives enough time. It features wines to see you through jolly parties, Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, plus superb bottles for the big meal.

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 of mediocre booze at knockdown prices. If you see a wine advertised at £4.95 a bottle, reduced from £7.50, believe me you’ll be lucky if it’s even worth £4.95. And Yapp’s have kindly knocked £1 a bottle off every selection which, with free delivery, makes for a handsome saving.

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 inside, such as the Italian ambassador’s residence. These prices are not discounted, though FVD claims that their policy of buying direct from the growers keeps costs very low, and I do have to say that — without poring over their spreadsheets — what you get for your money cannot be questioned. Take the Bascand Riesling 2013 (1) from Waipara on the South Island of New Zealand. At £8.

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 good bottle. Most restaurants believe that the mark-up on wine is the only thing that keeps them going, but I rather admire those who charge, say, a flat £10 or £12 above retail, so that while a house white at £17 might seem pricey, for £25 you can get a really good wine. That said, we still need wine for glugging at home, in quantity, and this is where our offer from Tanners of Shrewsbury comes in.

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 company of creaking -servitors. (No, I made that bit up! In the company of enthusiastic, helpful young -persons!) BB&R do not do cheapo. You would not pop in and ask for something to go with your chicken vindaloo, though if you did I am sure the staff would try to accommodate you. You are more likely to see, as I did a couple of Christmases ago, a well-dressed man buy two bottles of Château Palmer at £200 each. This is not Tesco.

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’ is a stupid term, at a time when sandwich bars claim to be ‘passionate about food’. And ‘terroir’ is often a smart-alec excuse for thin, weedy wines which taste of the stones on which they were grown and little else. Anyhow, none of these words are applied to our selection of six terrific wines from Private Cellar, a very high class merchants in East Anglia.

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 you didn’t know needed performing. I’m rather proud of these wines, since although I didn’t discover them I did choose them, and every one is delicious in its own distinctive way. They are all discounted. For example, with a £10 case reduction, the white Rioja 2011 (1) from the Riojanas winery costs only £7.17 a bottle, which is amazing for this lovely, somewhat oaked, lime-scented, vanilla, slightly smoky delight.

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 at remarkable prices, then they are your boys, or in the case of Lucia, your girl. As always, when I went round to Swig world headquarters in Chiswick, they offered me 20 or so different wines, and I wanted to offer you every one. So it’s been an agonising choice. All of them reflect the remarkable developments in wine-making everywhere. There is just too much good wine swilling about the place for us to make an easy selection.

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. First is a Champagne from a small grower, Michel Guilleminot (1). It’s non-vintage but tastes to me fuller and richer than most of the famous brands. Unsurprising, since it’s a blanc de noirs, made from the insides of Pinot Noir. French people tend not to buy the grandes marques that fill our shop shelves; they prefer to find their own vigneron, and when you try this you’ll see why. Reduced by £3 a bottle to £21.99, less than most well-advertised names.

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 served the same wine twice but were told that the first cost $10 a bottle and the second $50. They greatly preferred the second. Or the tasting in Norfolk at which serious wine experts discussed three decanters of claret, chewing over the year and provenance, before being told that all were from the same Chilean bag in box. As for the descriptions of wines, don’t get them started. It is always difficult putting flavours into words.

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 got a note back saying, ‘Those were the best mince pies I ever ate!’ So he’s not the monster he is on television. I hope he doesn’t sue me for saying so. I mention this only because our first choice this week (from the amazing FromVineyardsDirect) is house wine in all of Ramsay’s three-star restaurants. It’s Château Bauduc 2010 (2), a delectable white Bordeaux made by a British couple, Gavin and Angela Quinney.

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 chance she found herself sitting on a plane next to a buyer from one of our biggest supermarket chains. She asked him. He replied with a chuckle that it was easy. The actual cost to the supermarket of the wine in the bottle would be around 87p. Everything else was extra: shipping, bottling, distribution, advertising, duty, VAT, and of course the mark-up. In other words, the wine was not remotely worth £9.

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 proud and humbled to be there. And as Jancis Robinson said, the wines we drank were far, far better than they would have been back in 1363. It’s a guess, but I suspect none of the stuff imported then would have made it into a modern supermarket, including their two for £3.99 range. Even over the past decade, standards have shot up.

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 perfect summer package, fine wines for the season, at a sum almost everyone can afford. As usual prices are reduced by 5 per cent from the list, and there is also the Brett-Smith Indulgence, whereby Corney & Barrow’s boss, Adam -Brett-Smith, offers an extra £6 a case -reduction if you buy three cases or more, or just two cases if delivery is inside the M25.

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 their own inferior fluids. There is no trickledown effect in wine prices. The rest of the world is making dazzling wines which can retail here for £7–£10, so why should we bother with their thin, chalky, mouth-puckering effluents? Which is why the merchant Simon Wrightson has tracked down three clarets, all from the golden years of 2009 and 2010, which really are delicious and excellent value.

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 menus has made me nostalgic. I’d love to have eaten at 235 Kings Road in 1968 — avocado vinaigrette 4/6, prawn cocktail 4/6, followed by coq au vin or sole meunière, 12/6 each, rounded off with a syllabub also at 4/6. Yum! And what would we have drunk? Possibly some of the nostalgic wines provided for us this month by the wondrous Tanners of Shrewsbury. But then we’d have drunk them because we supposed they were good.

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 the Millennium Bridge. You can also taste their delectable cheeses and jamon. I have asked for an unusual sample case, designed to let you try a range of the wines at a reasonable price. And reasonable — indeed, staggeringly cheap — is how I’d describe the 2011 Vega de la Reina Verdejo white (1). Spain isn’t famous for its whites, but it should be. This has won every award going, and when you taste it you’ll see why.