A Sunday Times Wine Club crisp refreshing whites case (£60) produced this rather cheap looking Sauvignon Blanc from Chile’s Valle Central. It was cheaply packaged and very pale with hardly any aroma.
And it wasn’t just cheap looking it was cheap.
I used to love the Sunday Times Wine Club regular cases. I still admire their marketing and I still order plenty of wine from them. I just think that, once a member for a couple of years or so, one is better placed to select wines personally, than take the pre-mixed cases. Having said that, the mixed cases are by far the best value. What a dilemma.
I reconcile this dilemma by continuing my subscription to a single mixed case programme. The “President’s Cellar” delivers 6 bottles every six months at about £20 a cork. It does encourage me to try new wines occasionally. Generally the wines are for drinking, rather than laying down, and just occasionally they are not from Bordeaux or Burgundy.
This is how I acquired this St Joseph Rhône Ranger – I don’t know whether it is still available. The 2003 is still on the website at £16.91 per bottle. I have no idea whether this represents any better value than the 2001.
Made from 100% Syrah (I think) and aged in 50% new oak and 50% older oak casks, the 2001 is subtle with no strong aromas. The taste is spicy and fruity. Black pepper, fresh mint leaf and basil, with some bilberry, fig and peach.
Intense and concentrated flavour, it lasts forever in the mouth and is superb with rump steak. But, then it should be for the price!
Boiled eggs.
Still reading?
It is sometimes the simple, apparently yawningly boring, plain and ugly things in life that give the most pleasure.
I regularly eat boiled eggs at the flat because they are:
1. Cheap;
2. Easy to prepare;
3. Easy to consume; and
4. Tasty
Giving fair exception to the last horseman of my ovate apocalyptic quartet, many people allege that Chenin Blanc welcomes only the first three riders onto its lazy back.
Accused of blandness, and being a Jack of all trades but master of none, how does Chenin Blanc stand in the dock against horseman number 4’s indictment? It is a grape I largely ignore, but I am not entirely sure why.
Regular readers know that I sampled the Auction service at Virgin Wines with mixed results. I discovered recently that they have started auctioning Cloudy Bay 2007. Fabulous idea! Everyone knows the price of Cloudy Bay. Although Harvey Nichols sells it every year for about £16-18, other retailers struggle to keep it below £20. The Sunday Times Wine Club sells it at a rip-off £26.95! Virgin Wines? You can start bidding at £1 for 6 bottles!
So I raced to the site and discovered with disappointment that, with 18 hours still to go, the bidding was already at £131 for a half case (£21.83 per bottle). It only took me 1 minute on Google to find it at £18.99 at lebonvin.co.uk. I am not saying that £131 for 6 is bad value, though. It just pays to keep an eye on availability elsewhere if you value your coins. Well worth visiting Virgin and placing a bid of £50 or so, just in case! I am going to keep going back for a look.
Anyway, the cricket saison est arrivé, and tomorrow I managed to get a ticket (sold out) for England vs New Zealand at Old Trafford (Manchester). I know what you are thinking, how on earth is he going to tie all this nonsense back into a post about a wine from Touraine? Listen carefully, I am about to begin…..
Purely in the name of research, you understand, I’ve been sampling a range of Pinot Noirs from different corners of the globe. I say “corners” because I am still not sure that Magellan got it right. The Earth is about as round as an American Football, otherwise where does Everest come into the picture – surely it’s more than Mother Earth’s nipple? And imagine what the “globe” might look like without the levelling effect of billions of gallons of briny ocean.
Reading, Berkshire, is an oenological corner of the UK that has cornered the market in bizarre Pinot Noirs including this one, courtesy of the Sunday Times Wine Club and via Reading from a far away corner of Europe known as Moldova. Described as “Burgundy rivalling” by the STWC, I am not sure which corners of Burgundy they are talking about – presumably the darkest and dingiest ones. There is a warning on the page that provides a clue.
Dark ruby colour (much deeper than Burgundy!)
The magic of modern technology means this post is brought to you whilst I am travelling on England’s East Coast Mainline. If only the wireless internet was as fast as the train, though.
The franchise, which used to be run with aplomb by GNER, has recently been acquired by National Express. The first change I noticed was that they had re-priced the wireless connection according to average bandwidth achieved – yes – it is now zero cost, free of charge, 3 bits per second allowing you to download the home page of Confessions in only 12 minutes but at least no negative effect on your wallet (or purse) . Otherwise things seem “same old, same old” and as ever infinitely superior to the west coast service operated (without aplomb) by Virgin. I am in the fortunate position of often being able to choose which service I take to London and that is why I am here right now.
In addition to railways, in life generally, I tend to make choices based on snapshots, mere slivers of experience, and hence I am many times more likely to choose a wine from Burgundy or Bordeaux, than the Rhône Valley. This is a shame – especially on the evidence offered by this bottle.
More from my flirtatious world tour of Pinot Noir, and this one came in a Sunday Times Wine Club Pinot Noir mixed case at £69.99 (the case, not the bottle).
Is Pinot Noir really so fickle? My recent experience says that many areas of the world are successfully bedding this sex kitten of a grape. Adolfo Hurtado has certainly put a notch on his bedstead. For he’s a jolly good fellow!
The gardening season is upon us and this year I am so organised, I had my lawn mower serviced early to beat the rush. Now it’s just a matter of being organised enough to be at home on one of the rare days that it doesn’t rain, so I can mow the lawn.
While I stare glumly out of the window at another English horizontal monsoon, I console myself by sampling eastern European wine. But making decent Pinot Noir is about as Herculean a task as predicting which raindrop will win the race to the bottom of the pane.
This Romanian immigrant was part of the 2006 wine trade and smuggled in via a Sunday Times Wine Club mixed case “pure pinot noir” in exchange for a £69.99 ransom. Not in the exorbitant price category then.
Packaging says a lot about a product. Marketing people really understand that differentiating (demanding a higher price for) a high quality product requires an associated buying and unwrapping experience. Nowhere is this more true than the world of wine.  The ceremony afforded to opening a bottle of wine is a marketing man’s dream. I feel short changed if a wine is not “wrapped” according to its value.
The foil on the cap of this wine was reassuringly thick, I’ve seen lead flashing with less substance. This is a good quality wine already…
All too recently I have learnt just how varied Pinot Noir can be. If Burgundy is the spiritual church of Pinot, then New Zealand is surely the moonie cult. But there are wines from Eastern Europe, USA, South America, in fact just about every wine region feels it has to have a go at this sometimes rewarding but often fickle bedfellow. It seems that everyone loves a challenge and nobody can resist trying to pull the Brigitte Bardot of grapes.
Some of the Chilean Pinot Noirs I have tried recently are extraordinarily good, but not typical of the wines from Bourgogne. Most commentators agree that New Zealand Pinot Noirs are hitting the stratosphere in quality terms. I have found many of these to be interesting too, although perhaps a little nearer, in religious terms, to the Pinot cathédrale of the Côte D’Or.
This bottle of Stonewall, Forrest Estate 2005 came to me from Marlborough via a mixed case from the Sunday Times Wine Club “Pure Pinots” at £69.99 the case. The first thing that struck me was a boring label by NZ standards. However, the taste was far from boring. Strawberry, macaroon, stewed blackberry and grapefruit, is a fantastic mix and this wine added a touch of vanilla ice cream too (or did I serve it too cold?). It took time to open up though. This is worth opening half an hour before drinking, if you can keep your sweaty mitts off it for that long. I couldn’t.
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