Here are our three favourite wine presents for Christmas. Gifts that look as good as they taste and that we would want to be receiving ourselves.
Lucy waved our stock sheet at me yesterday and out fell an awful lot of white burgundy ….. which is completely delicious, but perhaps not the most refreshinglytastic white for lazy Summer days and al fresco dinners. ….. but 65 bottles of this delicious Sancerre fell out too.
The Loire is right up there in my list of favourite wine producing regions. I’m head over heels in love with what it can do with Chenin Blanc; I love simple Muscadet for it’s vitality and zippiness and I’ve got a puncheon for Cabernet Franc too but I’d forgotten that we bought this slug of Sancerre a few months back and it’s as good and as honest to its appellation as Sancerre gets. Like Chablis does with Chardonnay, Sancerre stands pretty much alone with what it can do with Sauvignon Blanc. It’s the only region that can coax those ‘freshly mown grass’, ‘hedgerow’, ‘elderflower’ notes that make drinking it a bit like lying in a meadow in Summer with your feet dangling in cool gently flowing stream. My perfect Summer white - lazer sharp with wonderful gooseberry, greengage fruit and that perfect scent of freshly cut grass. My tasting note’s a masterpiece and reads –YUUUUUUUM
This isn’t the time of year for super posh red for me - the beautiful Bordeaux, Burgundies and Barolos can sleep until September (we’ve got lots of these btw) …. instead it’s time for red that works as well out of a Riedel Sommelier glass as it does from a plastic beaker on the picnic rug and it looks a bit like this …… Côtes du Rhône
Like Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône can range in quality from sewage water to sensational. It has suffered a good few years of neglect allowing a plethora of mediocre, wishy washy, £4.99 reds out the door, masquerading under the Côtes du Rhone label. But wherever you have big wine producing regions (and Cotes du Rhone regularly pumps out over 3 million hectolitres a year), you’ll find really great wine growers using that appellation for their most basic wines, which are often far from basic. We visited Stephane Ogier in May of this year and managed to snaffle the last 25 cases of this epic Côtes du Rhône ‘Les Temps est Venu’ whilst tasting his £100+ a bottle single vineyard Cote Rotie. We got a few bottles of that too but I’m almost more excited about this Côtes du Rhône. It's a far cry from sewage water and gives an affordable insight in to the wines of a properly talented, artisanal wine grower who’s rapidly becoming a star, if not the star, of the Northern Rhone.
Our hosts know a lot about wine, but that’s just the beginning. Anyone can attend 6 months of courses on viticulture and fermentation techniques but what we think is really important is the ability to make that information fun and engaging.
Our hosts all have the ability to make wine come alive and we can’t wait to show you.