Confessions of a Wino

If you look at any wine list with a sweet section, you have a better than evens chance of seeing Beaumes de Venise. But, it is rare to see reds from this Rhone village, especially in UK and US restaurants.

I’ve been ordering a Jaboulet BdV en primeur for years. At about £10 a bottle it stinks of value to high heaven. A fresh young juicy red that goes great with spicy pork or lamb dishes and is generally best drunk within a year or two of receipt.

With ‘spooky coincidence’ written on the packing receipt, a few days before my annual Jaboulet instalment arrived from the 2010 vintage, a sample of another marque arrived. I like taste tests.

Domaine la Brune is rich, deep and devious and contains more Scary Spice than a Portuguese Douro. Went well with Lincolnshire sausages and mash. The Jaboulet is lighter, brighter faced and more fruity, in an Emma Bunting sort of way. Both wines have a creaminess often experienced by men viewing the Spice Girls in their prime…

Take your pick, or explore other BdV reds. Maybe you will find Geri or Victoria.

I paid The Wine Society £11.28 per bottle (en primeur) for the Jaboulet. The Domaine de la Brune is available from Christopher Keiller at £117.50 per case (equiv. £9.79 per bottle).

Rhone wines can be easily overlooked, and yet many rival the finest Bordeaux, as anyone who has tried Hermitage La Chapelle will tell you.

This Vinsobres comes from the Southern Rhone, is inky in colour and robust, spicy, tannic and plummy in taste. It’s a George Galloway of a wine. Feisty, intelligent, slightly unbalanced and available for purchase. Which you can do at Berry Bros. and Rudd for £14.95. At this price it’s a steal, but, unless you like wines that go with a blue steak, or that make you feel like you are doing a Vito Corleone impression with wet tea bags in your cheeks, I would recommend holding on for a few more years or so before drinking.

The serving temperature of wine is so important to its enjoyment that 250 members joined a Facebook group dedicated to the subject. As the owner of said page, I appoint myself Chief Evangelist and poster boy for raising awareness of the Wine at Right Temperature (WART) campaign. Part of my duties include throwing brickbats at restaurants who serve red wine from the top of the Pizza Oven and white wine from the liquid nitrogen cask. A happier task is to publicise places where thought and care is put into wine service. For example, I recently dined at 44 The Calls in Leeds where they were delighted (possibly even relieved) that I asked for my Catena Alta at cellar temperature. Not as delighted as I was to drink it.

Another good Yorkshire experience occurred last Sunday at The Three Acres in Shelley. I ordered a bottle of Jaboulet-Aîné Hermitage La Chapelle, 2001, a legend of a wine – rich and fruity flavours of nutmeg, cinnamon, apple and hints of Indian and Chinese spices – intoxicating but never overpowering, it is a wine that makes you go oooh – but I digress. This is supposed to be about temperature. Oh, I should add that the price was £107.95, which maybe sounds a lot, but compared to an average retail price in the UK of about £75, is amongst the most reasonable of restaurant markups (another of my bugbears) I have ever seen. Compared to central London restaurants, where 200% and upwards is added, it is great to see wine prices inflated by less than 50% out here in the provinces.

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It’s easy to be suspicious of restaurants that inhabit buildings with a past, especially those that use it as a theme. Former banks, embassies and even car showrooms have proudly displayed elements of their previous lives in the rush to find kitsch spaces for the entertainment industry of the zeitgeist.

Under 40s will find it hard to believe, but dining out has not always been so in vogue. My childhood caught the end of the movie-going era. Any self respecting date was played out in the back row while some Woody Allen film droned on in the background. Nowadays, sharing a rib of beef and some polite chatter has replaced a silent and clumsy fumble in the dark. How times have changed.

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Quite earthy and rich and tasting of beetroot and tomato purée with some plummy fruits and vanilla thrown in, this Côtes du Rhône Villages goes brilliantly with Heinz tomato soup, which if you are over 9, only really tastes acceptable when accompanied by a tipper truck load of ground black pepper and a toasted white pitta bread.

So, having set a British & Commonwealth record for the longest opening sentence on a Confessions post, my mind turned to where I may have procured this very decent tasting bottle, and its pecuniary value, given that I (unusually for me) kept no record, nor scrawled any details on the label, and whether I was also going to set a record for the second sentence, and penultimate paragraph before I ran out of breath and all remaining readers had passed out, so I wantonly speculated that this was probably a £7.50 wine and turned to Lord Google.

It is rather nice, so I shouldn’t have really been so surprised to find it at Berry Bros.  They only have it In Bond (for delivery when?) at £130 per case which is just under £11, but normally one must add shipping and VAT, so maybe my estimate is out by a factor of two?  Hmm I might stretch to that for a couple of bottles, but the price does appear to have been influenced by a Parker rating of 88-90.

Amy has been kind enough to allow me to taste a couple of samples from La Gramière in the past, and I loved them, but this is the first time I have actually bought a bottle.  Mind you, at £16.99 from Naked Wines, it better be good!

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Jo le taxi (aka wine delivery driver) this week brought me a small but intriguing parcel I ordered en primeur over a year ago.

The reason I was interested in this wine was threefold…

1) it was by Paul Jaboulet Ainé
2) it was from Beaumes-de-Venise, a well known sweet white wine area but this was a red Grenache/Syrah
3) it was pretty cheap!

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I’m in Dublin for Christmas and for the first time there are several pubs opening on St Stephen’s Day.  There was a time when this holy, but dry, day was almost as sacrosanct as Good Friday.  It’s always fun coming for an Easter break, getting on the plane with a load of stag and hen parties innocent of the complete pub shut down.  Already anticipating a top Friday’s binge drinking, like alcoholic lambs to the slaughter of the Guinness Reaper, the look on faces when word gets around, and if no-one else has told them then I am happy to take on the role of harbinger of doom, that Ireland does not do pubs on Good Friday.  But judging by this St Stephen’s, maybe next year will be different.  Irish Society has changed dramatically in the 10 years I have known it.  Part multicultural immigration, part Celtic Tiger driven affluence (and effluence), it is even possible to find a good selection of restaurants in Dublin these days (although fewer and fewer pubs).

Talking of expectations, I have few when it comes to Rhone reds.  It is probably the single region of France I ignore the most.  But this is not a dislike of wines from the region, simply a blind spot.  By the time I have drooled over various Bordeaux and Burgundy reds, my French Red Wine Budget has such an adverse variance there is nothing left for other regions.

But occasionally a nice looking wine arrives and is debited to my Mixed Case budget.   This one was a double entry in a 6 bottle pack from the Sunday Times Wine Club as part of their President’s Cellar offer – two half cases per year at about £20 per bottle.

Yann Chave Hermitage 2005 is actually reported as £30 per bottle on the STWC website – ouch!  Is this spicy Syrah worth that?

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There’s something uniquely British about November 5th.  Celebrating a failed attempt to blow up one’s house of parliament is a tad eccentric.  Doing so by trying to burn down our own houses and gardens is plain odd, but admittedly good fun.

Our house looks over a valley, so there is never any need to buy fireworks.  I merely park a deck chair on my balcony, sport a warm coat and enjoy them at my neighbours’ expense.

You are probably expecting me to construct a treasonable plot that this Châteauneuf-du-Pape smelt of gunpowder.

Even I am not that cheesy.  There was an explosion on the tongue though.  Red apples, liquorice, milk chocolate and vanilla.  Luscious, opulent, smooth, delicious.  Probably the best wine I have tasted from Virgin although, at £18.49, certainly not their cheapest.

Apparently, living on the side of a valley puts one in a time warp amongst other things, since today we celebrate the one month anniversary of November 5th – sorry this one was a bit late.

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!