WINE REVIEWS
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Subtly oaked whites
Mat h e
The way forward for a vast number of English wines globe-asia www.matthewjukes.com paper-plane vineyard.ed@kelsey.co.uk Subtly oaked whites are fast becoming my favourite style of white wine. Neither too skinny and sour nor too hefty and oily, these wines manage to cover a vast landscape of flavour and they inevitably possess greater food-matching skills than those without this sometimes-undeclared ingredient, too. Involving every style from those wines where you can sense a certain textural depth on the palate but cannot smell a single stave up to perfumed creatures where the carpentry takes turns with the fruit to romance the drinker, these wines indicate that this is the way forward for a vast number of English creations who have yet to find their mojo. For this reason, I do not have any 100% Chardonnay wines in this month’s column, however, the Chardonnay grape does pop its head up briefly in one of the wines. Instead, I have a cornucopia of grapes all blessed by the lightest of touches of the mighty oak tree. My inspiration for this article came in the form of a wine which I understand a huge number of people liked and it even won a gold medal at the WineGB awards but I really did not enjoy it at all. I am aware that I am breaking confidence as I write the next few sentences but I cannot fully explore my feelings without doing so. I hope that owner of Hidden Spring, David McNally, forgives me for this indiscretion. David asked me what I thought of his 2019 Bacchus Fumé long before it came up trumps on the WineGB tasting bench. I felt compelled to explain my thoughts in email because a simple, ‘I don’t like it’, didn’t seem fair on this occasion. My expression was that it was ‘a little too smoky bacon for me’. While this is a clumsy way of saying that the oak was too pungent and that I felt that it didn’t sit well with the fruit, David didn’t mind a bit. His
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wine sold out, so be it. Each to his own. A year later and the 2020 turned up and I nearly dropped my glass. I sent David an email immediately, this time with a little more of an upbeat theme – what had he done between the awkward 2019 and the graceful and ethereal 2020? He explained, in fascinating detail, how he decided to modify his oak recipe and I have to tell you that if this wine doesn’t
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win another gong then I think that the world has gone mad! This wine and others overleaf are extraordinary examples of just how talented some of our winemakers are when it comes to intricately weaving oak into the core of their magical white proceeds go to The Drin wines. Long may thisAll last. It is anotherraised sure-footed Trusts step in the direction of making elite, still white wines in our land.
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