The Wine Merchant issue 123

Brexit blamed for waning enthusiasm for importing

Many independents decide that costs and complications make direct sourcing of wine from Europe too problematic

Sixteen out of every 100 wines on the shelves of independent wine merchants have been bought direct from producers – a 5.5% decrease on a year ago.

This year’s Wine Merchant reader survey reveals a growing hesitancy among many independents towards direct imports, with Brexit cited by many respondents as the chief stumbling block.

Indeed 60% of respondents believe that Brexit will ultimately diminish the success of the UK wine trade, and 70% say the UK should rejoin the EU at the earliest possible opportunity.

Tom Jones of The Whalley Wine Shop in Lancashire says: “We stopped buying directly after the Brexit vote and the crash in the value of sterling.

“Now, with the incredibly complex paperwork, customs declarations and other elements there is almost no incentive for a business our size to navigate the challenge of buying directly.

“If the currency drastically improved then perhaps the rewards would outweigh the risk and hassle, but right now they don’t.”

According to the survey, 3% of all UK merchants expect to stop all direct buying from producers this year, while another 8% say they will reduce such activity. Twenty-

Despite the challenges, a quarter of indies say they will increase their direct imports this year

one per cent will continue to source all their wines from UK importers.

Perhaps surprisingly, twice as many independents – 24% – say they will buy wines this year as part of a formal buying group than as part of an informal collective with other merchants.

Not everyone is feeling gloomy about imports and in fact a quarter of indies say they will increase direct sourcing in the current year. The figure is much lower than recorded last year, when more than a third of respondents said they planned

to increase imports. But it reflects a mood among many merchants that going direct is an important part of their purchasing mix.

“We’re happy with the wines we import,” says Jonathan Sutton of Michael Sutton’s Cellar in Dartmouth.

“Brexit has made no difference either positively or negatively to importing wine from Europe. In the last six months the importing process has been at its quickest that I can remember.”

• Our concluding reader survey coverage starts on page 22.

An independent magazine for independent retailers

Issue 123, April 2023

Dog of the month: Max Caviste, Hook, Hampshire

GRAHAM HOLTER Editorial

The recent increase in indie numbers was a surprise. Maybe there are more to come

Over the past 12 months, the number of specialist independent wine shops has risen by more than people might have imagined.

We now count 1,033 individual branches, an increase of 38 on the figure we recorded this time last year. And that’s taking into account all the shops that have disappeared from the market – of which there have been numerous examples, sad to say, in these turbulent economic times.

Yet despite soaring energy bills, uncomfortably high interest rates and all the endless costly bureaucracy that our leaders see fit to dump on merchants, the independent wine trade is looking pretty robust, at least in terms of its numbers.

In The Wine Merchant we try to keep pace with things as best we can in our Comings & Goings section. Glancing back over a year of back issues, we’ve reported on 32 newcomers to the market, and eight examples of existing businesses expanding.

Five of those 32 new shops opened in London. The rest are spread across the UK: we reported on new ventures in Scotland, Wales, Cumbria, Lancashire, Manchester, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Humberside, Nottinghamshire, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Suffolk, Sussex and Kent.

Should we expect similar growth in the coming 12 months? Perhaps our reader survey can provide some clues. Twelve per cent of businesses say they are considering opening new branches this year. Given that there are 787 companies in the independent sector, that could mean another 94 shops. Subtract the 3% who are considering closing branches –which would equate to about 24 stores disappearing – and we’re still left with 70 new wine shops.

But let’s also assume that this bullishness will largely evaporate as reality bites and that 80% of those openings don’t actually happen. That still suggests that 14 shops might open.

What we have no way of knowing, of course, is how many merchants will call time on their shops this year, or how many new arrivals we will see. So any attempt to predict how many specialist independent wine shops there will be in April 2024 must be based almost entirely on guesswork.

Common sense, instinct and gut feel suggest that another annual net increase of 38 seems improbable. But then we would almost certainly have said the same thing a year ago.

Editor and Publisher: Graham Holter graham@winemerchantmag.com

Assistant Editor: Claire Harries claire@winemerchantmag.com

Advertising: Sarah Hunnisett sarah@winemerchantmag.com

Accounts: Naomi Young naomi@winemerchantmag.com

WIN A TRIP TO ARGENTINA

Calling all indies interested in promoting organic and Fairtrade wines from Argentina in store and online this autumn.

Bodega Argento and Bodega Otronia are inviting independent retailers, no matter what their size, to run a special promotion between September and October 2023.

Five lucky winners will travel to Argentina to visit the beautiful organic vineyards of Argento in and around Mendoza, before flying 1,000km to explore some of the most southerly vineyards on the planet in Chubút, located in extreme Patagonia.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to get under the skin of winemaking in Argentina and visit some of the iconic terroirs of the country, courtesy of its leading producer of organic wines.

CRITERIA

To win a place on the trip, you must commit to arranging a three- to six-week promotion in-store and online, including a minimum of three organic wines from Bodega Argento (Mendoza) and three organic wines from Bodega Otronia (Patagonia). This promotion can run at any time between September 1 and October 31. Judges will be looking to reward the most effective promotions.

APPLY NOW

Email charlotte@winemerchantmag.com to register your interest. Entries will remain open until September 1.

You will be able to taste the range of wines available for this promotion at the Walker & Wodehouse trade tasting in London on May 3. If you can’t make it, samples can be sent to you on request – please use the email above. Your orders can be shipped out to you anytime between June and October 2023. Lucky winners will be announced in November 2023 and will head out to Argentina for a sevenday all-expenses-paid trip in March 2024.

Paul’s Excited of Tunbridge Wells

Paul Adams at Fine Wines of Mayfield has opened a second shop, in Tunbridge Wells.

In addition to relocating his Enomatics to the new shop, he is also planning lots of tastings for the year ahead.

“We stopped using [the Enomatics] in the Mayfield shop,” Adams says. “The footfall was so light, but there’s no doubt that they are a great tool.

“Given the footfall we’re already getting at Tunbridge Wells, we will have a rolling programme of mostly local producers,” he adds.

“We’re sitting on the Kent-Sussex border so we’ve already had Gusbourne in here

and we’ve got Nyetimber and Rathfinny lined up for early summer.

“There are local cidermakers and a plethora of distillers around the place. We’ll have some international winemakers in as well, and this will all be backed up with the Enomatics.”

Adams accepts that “it’s an interesting and challenging time” to be expanding. But it’s something he’s always intended to do, and he says the “potential within Tunbridge Wells is very good for a wine merchant”.

He adds: “It’s a good catchment area. Everybody needs a good wine merchant and, while people buy online, the idea that you can pop in and pick up a special bottle, among a whole range of other things, I think is still a very strong retail proposition.”

• Doxi, a Norfolk-based producer of bottled cocktails, has submitted plans for a shop at Hellesdon Barns in Norwich. If approved, the premises would sell cocktails, wine and craft beer for off-site consumption. Doxi currently runs an evening bar at a coffee shop.

Amy Hargreaves and Steven Cole of Doxi

Indigo unveils its second wine store

The Sourcing Table opened a second store earlier this month, this time in Crystal Palace, south London.

The brand, owned by Indigo Wine, initially launched in Peckham last April.

The new location will have seating for 24 guests with a rotating menu of wines served by the glass. The retail element offers around 400 wines which will also be available to drink in for a flat corkage fee.

Snacks from artisanal suppliers including Mons Cheesemongers, Cobble Lane Cured and Brindisa will be served to accompany the wine.

• Graeme Woodward and Michael Jelley, the owners of the two Grape Minds stores, have now opened their Summertown Wine Bar on Banbury Road in Oxford, near one of their branches. As reported in our September edition, the project is a partnership with former Majestic colleague Emily Robotham. The premises offers 300 wines by the bottle and 30 by the glass.

Noble Fine Liquor bids fond farewell

Noble Fine Liquor in Hackney has closed after a decade of trading.

Launched by Liam Kelleher in 2012, the company announced the closure on social media last month. P Franco and Bright, the company’s other London venues, have also closed.

Part of the announcement reads: “Our focus at this stage is to try to do right by our staff and suppliers whilst we try to navigate our way down a path we never thought we’d have to walk.

“To our guests and customers, we extend our thanks and love. London is a big city, with many thousands of restaurants and shops. Every visit you made to us was appreciated and never taken for granted.”

But it might not be the end of the road for P Franco. Former manager Will Gee has launched a crowdfunder to reopen the premises, with the aim of raising £30,000.

He describes P Franco as “a meeting place for winemakers, drinkers and lovers since 2014”.

When bladders go bang

For all the independent trade’s ecocredentials, we’re still a long way off the point at which bulk wine shipping is given a warm embrace by merchants.

It is, of course, much better for the planet to ship wine from the other side of the world inside massive bladders, and then to do the bottling at the point of destination. But that only works if the wine isn’t bubbling and refermenting, and causing the membrane to expand.

That seems to be what happened with one unfortunate consignment from California not too long ago. Our spies inform us that the spectacularly exploded container was on display at the car park of Greencroft Bottling in County Durham while technicians worked out what exactly to do next.

A cracking afternoon out

A wine merchant in London tells us a lovely story about the crack den that used to operate within viewing distance of his enoteca.

For many happy months, customers would assume their window seats, order a bottle of Sancerre and perhaps some nibbles, and be entertained by the furtive scurrying of the den’s clients.

But it seems it wasn’t just ladies who lunch who were keeping an eye on proceedings. Much to the merchant’s chagrin, police raided the crack house and shut it down, meaning new forms of amusement are now being sought.

Everybody loves the DRS

Preparations for Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme were still going swimmingly as The Wine Merchant went to press.

It seems that people have different ways of gearing up for the new system. A video circulating on social media shows a man placing a plastic bottle into a reverse vending machine, claiming his 20p and then retrieving the bottle with the string he’s tied around it. Rinse and repeat.

One canny Scots merchant says: “I did sign up but I lied about my turnover. So I got in for free. I’ve ticked the box, but it’s the wrong box. That’s my top tip.”

Artisanal snacks are on the menu at The Sourcing Table in Crystal Palace

DAVID PERRY

Irregular Thoughts

The sermon I preach to customers who insist that sulphites in wine are evil

Ishould perhaps start by stating that the following has not been very carefully researched and more citations may be required. This is my perceived wisdom, though, and is what I preach to customers.

In a nutshell: sulphites are a good thing. They occur naturally in many things, including the human body, and have antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. Less than 2% of the population have sulphite sensitivity causing asthma-like symptoms. Not many people die. They don’t give you a headache – it’s the alcohol that does that.

The demonising of sulphites appears, like many things, to have started in the USA where restaurants liberally sprinkled sulphur compounds on salad bars to keep vegetables green and crispy. After a few incidents of anaphylaxis, controls were implemented.

Someone once said something along the lines of “making wine is a battle of fermenting grape juice while avoiding oxidation”. As soon as the grape skin is broken, the air starts trying to destroy the juice. Something to do with entropy and thermodynamics, probably. It’s a very long time since my science degree.

At some point every week someone will ask if we have any no- or low-sulphur wine. If they stay long enough, my reply goes along these lines.

Removing sulphur from wine is an unnecessary process. Sulphites occur naturally on the bloom on a grape skin, so even if you manage to avoid oxidation

some other way during pressing and bottling, it’ll be there. “No sulphur” is about 10mg/litre.

I point to the Greco di Tufo from Vesuvio. What do you think the soil is like here?

The maximum allowed is 150mg/litre. The average for a small grower-producer is likely to be closer to 40mg/litre. That is way lower than in prepared salads, dried fruit, burgers and sausages (450mg/kg), none of which appear to give anyone a problem. I’m sure I read somewhere that at 150mg/litre two glasses of wine would keep you below the limit for a sulphite reaction. On that basis you could have almost eight glasses at a time of a well-made wine, although you would then be well over the government alcohol intake guidelines, so your doctor would still pull a face.

Organic wine (or, rather, wine made from organically grown grapes) is not much different. The problem with organic farming is that you have to use copper sulphate to control mildew. You can’t use the synthetic treatments that biodegrade, don’t build up in the soil and don’t kill earthworms.

“Organic wine” can have up to 100mg/litre and may well contain more sulphites than a well-made non-organic wine.

Recently a customer asked for organic wine as she had asthma and her doctor had told her to drink organic wine. You would hope that her doctor was well versed in medicine, but just what the hell does he know about wine? You wouldn’t expect a wine merchant to offer an opinion on that nasty rash.

The one that really gets me is, “ever since they started using sulphites …” What? Since Roman times, when they used sulphur candles to disinfect their amphorae? Or do you mean since 2011 (2005 regulation) when any of a dozen or so notifiable allergens had to be shown on the label? Thank goodness wine is not included in food labelling laws – or maybe that would be a good thing. Our wines may have a line or two. Mass-produced wine would have to have a fold-out label: “May contain traces of potassium ferrocyanide.”

Contrary to my belief, there is no evidence that wine made from grapes ripped from vast prairie-like vineyards and pumped into tankers to be taken to processing plants contain more sulphites. Damn!

Not many customers stay for the whole sermon. Maybe I should stock one or two no- or low-sulphur wines just to save time. Well, we have looked at some, but they have been universally awful. One Pinot Noir had disclaimers all over the label basically explaining that it didn’t taste like Pinot Noir. The first glass was not impressive but just about drinkable. The second was worse. By the third glass it was undrinkable. The rest went down the sink.

On another occasion I was offered a taste of an “experimental” no-sulphur wine. A work in progress with a lot more work to go. It was undrinkable, but the most notable thing was the following morning the line of unwashed glasses included one that was now furry.

If we do find a no-sulphur wine that is stable and drinkable I might only sell it after being shown a certificate from the 2% club.

David Perry is the owner of Shaftesbury Wines in Dorset

David disinfects his rockery

The rise in wine duty Unwelcome, but is it all bad news for indies?

Three merchants offer different perspectives on the August tax hike

of “a deeply depressing situation for more than one reason”.

He calculates that, as a wine merchant, he is paying 14 types of tax, personally and professionally.

“When we were part of the EU, Brussels made a recommendation that fellow members stopped charging and paying excise duty between each other by 1999,” he adds.

But the UK government has usually increased wine duty with every Budget, raising “a few pennies” in the process but adding disproprortionately to the costs of the wine trade.

“Merchants, importers and bonded warehouses have an unnecessarily onerous task of recalibrating computers, printed lists and physical pricing,” Meyer says. “Whatever the increase is, any change simply costs us more time and money on top of an already onerous and timeconsuming system.”

Tuggy Meyer Huntsworth Wine Co, London

For Tuggy Meyer, “44p or any increase is a slap in the face because we pay excise duty on the wines almost immediately,” he says.

He points out that both duty and VAT on any corked or damaged wines is always money lost.

“Yes, technically we can reclaim it but that is a bullshit position because the bureaucracy involved to genuinely reclaim is – deliberately – so time-consuming that it is a pointless and actually detrimental exercise,” he says.

“This is solely about revenue raising and any pretence about health or healthier aspects are sadly just that – pretence. We lag behind our Continental cousins and this is a major contributory factor as to why that is the case.”

Meyer argues that, below £10 a bottle, “the customer is getting an atrocious return on their wine”.

“In Europe you can easily buy a drinkable wine at, say, €8. By contrast, a £7.50 wine

correctly priced in the UK is probably less than €1.50 of actual wine.

“In Europe, moderate drinking is typically viewed as a reasonable healthy option but in the UK it is viewed as detrimental to one’s health, and the taxation as it is simply compounds this.

“We have one of the most sophisticated wine import markets in the world. Yet the vast majority of wine drinkers in the UK are typically drinking often chemicallyfilled crap.”

Meyer believes the new duty hike is part

Meyer dismisses the idea that the current duty increase will be more problematic for lower-priced grocery channel wines than it will be for more premium wines in the independent trade.

“Disproportionately hitting the supermarket wines means we simply continue the ill-education of wine drinking for most UK drinkers,” he says.

“Multiples will not change their pattern as they are more than happy to use certain wines as loss leaders, such as the almost perennial half-price Ogio Pinot Grigio or

“Any increase simply costs us more time and money”

Tuggy Meyer (left): “It will not benefit independents in the slightest”

Dom Pérignon at less than cost, to gain unpaid news advertising.

“It will not benefit independents in the slightest because, to be brutally honest, the typical wine-buying Tesco customer will almost never buy from an independent. If you doubled the tax or halved it, I do not see any noticeable shift at all.”

Chris Piper

Christopher Piper Wines, Ottery St Mary, Devon

“Supermarkets may ask their suppliers to fund the 44p”

Chris Piper is not opposed in principle to higher tax on wine. “The fixed 44p duty increase is necessary to help contribute towards education, health et al,” he says.

“I agree that it will mean that the supermarkets and high street outlets will have to pass this on and maybe this will benefit us independents, selling more expensive wines.

“However, I do have a caveat which is that the supermarkets may well turn to their suppliers and ask them to fund the 44p through cheaper prices. This will have the effect of seriously damaging some overseas suppliers and also their agents and importers in this country.”

Daniel Grigg Museum Wines, Dorset

He adds: “There will be a knock-on effect in the on-trade where restaurants and

pubs slavishly stick to fixed percentage margins, and we will see prices in some establishments rise by anything between £1.25 and £1.50 per bottle.”

Piper is also waiting for more clarity on the new duty system for wine that is due to come into force at the same time as the duty increase.

“It’s very annoying that we are talking about this when we don’t really know how the government is going to implement it,” he says.

“The already onerous paperwork that importers and merchants like us are experiencing will be ratcheted up even more. Maybe we could have a proper briefing from HMRC about how this is going to work – and then we can react accordingly.”

How each category’s duty will change on August 1

Daniel Grigg believes that the Chancellor’s duty increase is worse news for supermarkets than it is for independents.

“I think that wine has been too cheap for too long,” he says. “If it takes a 44p duty increase for people to familiarise themselves with spending a bit more on wine then I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing.”

He argues that consumers will be more likely to notice a 50p increase on a £5 or £6 bottle of wine – and to question the value it represents – than they will further up the price ladder.

“If a wine goes from £40 to £40.99, then who cares?” he says.

“I would rather the extra money went to producers. But if it gets people spending a bit more on wine then it can only be a good thing for independent wine merchants.

“We haven’t had a duty increase for three years, so if you think of it being 14p a year, it’s about where we would have been anyway.”

“I think that wine has been too cheap for too long”

Calculations supplied by the Wine & Spirit Trade Association The figures are exclusive of VAT. The Treasury plans to introduced a tiered system of duty bands for wine from February 2025

Katia has been in charge of winemaking at Martín Códax since 2005, 20 years after its creation in Rías Baixas. She’s an engineering graduate who went on to obtain a degree in wine production, gaining practical experience around the world before returning to her native region in north west Spain.

Published in association with Enotria&Coe

Martín Códax Lías

From hand-harvested grapes in selected plots that we refrigerate before whole-bunch pressing to obtain a much more concentrated must with huge aromatic potential. The wine undergoes eight-month lees ageing, resulting in an intense, complex Albariño. It is a dense and glyceric wine that is very gentle and long and pairs really well with white meats and poultry.

Mara Moura

We select plots in altitude with granite and schist soils to make a very fresh, complex Godello. The wine undergoes ageing on lees in stainless steel which translates into a fuller body with structure and intensity. We also add a small percentage of Treixadura to increase aromatic complexity.

Mara Moura is a reflection of the diversity the Monterrei DO can offer, showing an intense, complex and modern profile.

Cuatro Pasos Black

The grapes are from Otero de Toral, Valtuille de Arriba and Villafranca del Bierzo. These sloping, bush-vine vineyards are more than 80 years old. Slate soils in Otero de Toral bring freshness, while the deep clay soils in Valtuille de Arriba and Villafranca del Bierzo contribute volume and maturity. The ageing is done in 225-litre French barrels for nine months. The result is a complex and elegant Mencía, with varietal character and very well integrated tannins.

Katia Álvarez, Martín Códax

How was the 2022 harvest for you in Rías Baixas?

It was marked by a very warm summer, and it lasted the whole ripening period. It has favoured a riper, aromatic style with a lot of fruit – apple, pear, peach, and some floral components as well –and a very well-balanced palate that will be both ripe and fresh.

How much vintage variation do you get across the region?

The 2022 harvest has been good in terms of both quality and quantity, even if slightly smaller than the 2021 one.

We are in a delimited area with a huge influence from the Atlantic Ocean, creating big differences from one year to another. If we compare 2021 to 2022, for example, the differences are huge. The 2021 harvest started later and it was one of the coolest years in the last 15 years, whereas the 2022 was ripe and started earlier. These differences make our work far more interesting, because we have to interpret those conditions very carefully.

How does Rías Baixas sustain its pre-eminence with Albariño?

After many years of hard work from the DO Rías Baixas and the wineries who belong to it, Albariño is finally getting the international recognition it deserves. But we have to keep working really hard to maintain the positioning we are gaining as well as keep showing that Rías Baixas Albariño is much more than just a fresh and young white wine.

We have a grape that is already showing the amazing potential it has to create grand whites which are being recognised internationally among other very prestigious wine regions.

Are you still innovating and experimenting?

We are always learning and researching with Albariño. We have selected a plot with clay soils and then fermented it in ceramic barrels, which was something we had never done before. It is a very unusual practice in Rías Baixas, and we are seeing it is developing a new expression of Albariño, with a much more mature profile: very floral, lavish, and dense.

Tell us a little bit about your projects in Monterrei and Bierzo. We work with other indigenous varieties from the north west of Spain that also have great potential. We have experience in Atlantic-influenced viticulture and in a winemaking style that highlights the fruit’s primary character, and we are applying it in these regions. Mencía Rosé has been a huge discovery; it has pleasantly surprised both locals and outsiders.

We know that your wines are classic matches for seafood. But are there less obvious matches that you’ve discovered?

Albariño is a very gastronomic variety and, thanks to its clean acidity and freshness, it often acts as a palate cleanser that allows you to enjoy very intense flavours as well. I love having Albariño paired with spicy foods. I often have it with Indian food, spicy Mexican dishes, sushi, ceviches … you name it, I’ve had it!

The PGI Wines of Central Greece

PGI Atalanti Valley - ΠΓΕ Κοιλάδα Αταλάντης

PGI Slopes of Knimida - ΠΓΕ Πλαγιές Κνημίδας

PGI Opountia Locris - ΠΓΕ Οπούντια Λοκρίδας

PGI Phthiotis - ΠΓΕ Φθιώτιδα

PGI Parnassos - ΠΓΕ Παρνασσός

PGI Lilantio Pedio (or Field) - ΠΓΕ Ληλάντιο Πεδίο

PGI Thiva - ΠΓΕ Θήβα | PGI Evia - ΠΓΕ Εύβοια

PGI Ritsona - ΠΓΕ Ριτσώνα Wines

customers we could do without

What I like about it is that you’re actually providing a bit of a lifeline to these struggling farmers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to sell their wine … it’s a bit like adopting a penguin or an African child, I suppose, except you don’t get letters telling you how grateful they are, you get wine, which is much better … well technically, yes, you do have to pay for it, but not very much actually, once you factor in that £75 voucher that fell out of Homes & Gardens … I mean it must work out at pennies per bottle so you’d be crazy not to sign up … I do pay a bit more actually, I think for some sort of welfare fund … they call you a saint or a god or suchlike if you do that, which in my case is very far from the truth as you know, ha ha … no, actually I’m not sure I did get an email from you about your wine club … I’ll take a look … though obviously I can see you’re doing very well indeed without my god-like patronage, unlike those poor blighters in the Languedoc …

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ANAGRAM TIME

Congratulations to the five Wine Merchant reader survey respondents whose names were drawn at random and who each win a Coravin, courtesy of our partner Hatch Mansfield.

Can you unscramble these southern French appellations? If so, you get to devise a comical new wine duty system

Peter Fawcett, Field & Fawcett, York

1. Chin Stain

2. Reuse Fag

3. Utopian Clips

Anthony Borges, The Wine Centre, Great Horkesley, Essex

4. Sober Eric

5. Armenians Devise Joint

Zoran Ristanovic, City Wine Collection, London

Daniel Grigg , Museum Wines, Dorset Riaz Syed, Stonewines, London

45. Jimmy Clifton-Richards

If the sommelier makes a wine recommendation, just go with it.

long run.

ISSUED BY THE WINE MARKETING BOARD

MCLEAN Northabout

Istudied philosophy at Edinburgh University, which practically-minded friends and family told me was a waste of time and would never lead to gainful employment. How wrong they were! What else would have equipped me, decades later, to fill the existential void between putting bottles of cheap Merlot and Pinot Grigio through the till? (Sartre: “Hell is other people’s wine choices.”)

Philosophy also gave me a teacher who became a dear friend until his death a few years ago at the age of 97. Richard Hamilton was born just after World War I, his father a miner, his mother a domestic servant. He grew up in Musselburgh in what we’d now consider grinding poverty, but rose, through support from a Miners’ Welfare fund, to study, and eventually teach, at several leading universities.

At first glance he might have seemed to conform to donnish stereotypes: the tweed jacket, the Shakespeare quotation for every occasion, the study lined with a library of ancient volumes. But a moment or two of conversation and his thoroughgoing radicalism became apparent. A

lifelong socialist and pacifist, he was a conscientious objector during World War II. Career-minded students sometimes complained that he wasn’t providing them with the answers required to pass their exams. “Education isn’t about passing exams,” he’d reply. “It’s about learning to think.”

Richard introduced me to many writers he thought I should read and think about. Some were typical of his age and vocation – Matthew Arnold, AE Houseman. Others revealed his radical streak – Mikhail Bulgakov, Arthur Koestler. He also introduced me to an appreciation of whisky. He believed in moderate consumption of all the fine things in life and especially in a good dram between friends. His favourite was peaty Islay, and it was a bottle of this that taught me a lasting

philosophical lesson.

I met Richard in Chambers Street one day, looking ashen. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I’ve just overcome a serious dilemma,” he replied. “As I stepped out of Oddbins, I dropped my bottle of Laphroaig 16 Year Old. What to do? Only one thing: go back in without hesitation and buy another. Future pleasures should not be sacrificed on the altar of past losses.”

It was Richard who gave me that classic old-buffer wine tome, Notes on a Cellar Book by George Saintsbury. It’s distinctly fusty and verbose; even when it was published, in 1920, it must have read like something from another age. Yet it’s full of fascinating recollection and rumination on wines none of us will ever experience (unless we are friends of Rudy Kurniawan): “The bouquet was rather like that of the less sweet wallflower. And as to the flavour one might easily go into dithyrambs. Wineslang talks of the ‘finish’ in such cases, but this was so full and so complicated that it never seemed to finish. You could meditate on it; and it kept up with your meditations. This was a red Hermitage of 1846.”

Last month I attended a wedding in Glasgow. (Piper-Heidsieck Cuvée Brut, since you ask, followed by Yealands Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir.) The happy couple were of a literary bent, so each table was named after a favourite writer, and decorated with artfully strewn antique books. At the end of the evening we were invited to take a volume or two, as they were otherwise being returned to the charity shop from whence they came.

I picked up and put down several cheap reprints of Dickens and Walter Scott, then lingered over an entirely forgotten book by an almost forgotten author: On Translating Homer, by Matthew Arnold. I leafed to the title page and found an owner’s signature in familiar neat handwriting: Richard Hamilton, 12-xi-40.

Later that night I raised a glass of Laphroaig in honour of a good friend, and the other fine things of life.

The pacifist teacher who taught me to think – and to appreciate good whisky

Duncan McLean is proprietor of Kirkness & Gorie, Kirkwall

It was Richard who gave me that classic old-buffer wine tome, Notes on a Cellar Book by George Saintsbury

Rising Stars

The story behind Ed Taylor’s successful career at Oak N4 starts off sounding like a joke: “A man walks into a bar …” The story could have progressed in any number of ways, but the punchline in Ed’s case is “and he never left”.

“It’s true,” laughs owner Cameron Mckeown. “Ed just came in one day and sat at the bar and was talking to Giuseppe, our manager. He just seemed like such a nice guy and Giuseppe asked him if he wanted to do a shift that night. He did a great job, so we hired him on the spot.”

This chance encounter has worked out well for everyone, especially the customers, who Cameron explains will often ask for Ed. “The regulars know him and just love him,” he says. “They warm to him. I cannot say enough about what a great guy he is and how he fits perfectly into a hospitality role. He’s so welcoming. In this industry you have to be able to like to listen, as well as talk, and he is gifted at both.

“He already knew quite a bit about wine when he started. He had been working in a winery in Australia for a while. But he’s not arrogant; he’s a real student when it comes to wine and wants to learn more. Right from the start he just fitted in with the rest of the team and he’s happy to take on responsibility.”

Ed moved to Australia for a time and, as respite from a City career, took a job in a vineyard. He says: “I’d be out hand-pruning, mists rolling across the hills in the middle of Victoria, the sun was out but it was still freezing cold. It was idyllic, but hard work. It instilled in me the understanding of how much hard work goes into producing one bottle of wine.”

Although his experience has left him with an immutable love of Australian wine, Ed has an enquiring palate and he particularly enjoys seeking out new wines for the business.

“It’s quite a time-consuming part of the job,” he says, “because to find maybe five or six lines that we want to take on often means tasting three or four times that many. Each wine has to work on a margin basis as well as making sure we’re filling gaps on the shelves, whether that’s varieties or regions. It’s not just finding some wine at a price. It’s finding the right wine. We have 30+ wines

Ed Taylor

Oak N4, Finsbury Park, London

usually by the glass and we rotate those frequently. We also need a bit of longevity in the bottle.”

Already equipped with plenty of hands-on experience, Ed says he still found WSET Level 2 valuable and he’s hoping to continue his formal wine education. “It took me into a bit more depth and detail, which I think is interesting on a personal level, but useful for talking to customers,” he says.

“I frequently have conversations with customers, whether they’re sitting in having a drink or buying a bottle to take away. It’s all about imparting our enthusiasm and knowledge to help customers enjoy wine, drink better wine and expand their enjoyment.”

Ed wins a bottle of M. Chapoutier Haut Chamblard 2019

If you’d like to nominate a Rising Star, email claire@winemerchantmag.com

MICHEL CHAPOUTIER’S LOVE OF THE LAND

The Rhône Valley legend is proud to call himself a farmer first and foremost, and now owns estates in Roussillon, Provence, Alsace and Germany, among other locations

Founded in 1808, Maison M. Chapoutier has been passed down through the family for over seven generations. Today, the company is headed by Michel Chapoutier who, along with his dedication to biodynamic winemaking and his irrepressible joie de vivre, has ensured the Chapoutier name remains synonymous with iconic wines from the Rhône Valley.

Taking the reins in 1990 aged 26, Michel was quick to innovate and expand beyond the company’s roots in the Rhône.

Chapoutier describes himself as a farmer rather than a winegrower, and the challenge of these vastly different terroirs appeal to his pioneering spirit.

He seeks to discover and reflect the full potential of his terroirs and let the soils express their true character to give the wines their signature style.

“Terroir is a combination of soil, climate

1

An exceptional Syrah with an ageing potential of up to 75 years, depending on the vintage. Described as complex, velvety and balanced with notes of raspberry and liquorice, this wine is from the Fac & Spera range. Translated as “Do and Hope,” Fac et Spera is the motto of Maison Chapoutier as well as the philosophy behind this selection of single vineyard biodynamic wines, created from the oldest vines.

2 Chante-Alouette

The Excellence range encompasses the wines made from several outstanding parcels. The grapes for this Marsanne were harvested from three different vineyards: Le Méal, Les Murets and Chante-Alouette. A brilliant green gold wine with aromas of quince, honey and ginger.

and man’s know-how,” he says. “Trying to get the best possible snapshot of a terroir is the art of the vintner. It’s not about making

technical wines but serving the terroir. Allowing it to express itself truthfully. Man can make or destroy a terroir.”

From the Prestige range of appellation classics which showcase some of the family’s best vineyards and winemaking skills. These complex and nuanced wines are full of character. This organic Syrah is vinified and aged in concrete tanks, which enhances its subtlety and balance and sets it apart from other Crozes-Hermitage wines. It has an ample and rounded palate full of stewed fruits and vanilla.

An organic and biodynamic Viognier from the Alchemy range, this is a fresh and delicate wine. The notes of bergamot and flint stone, followed by more typical peach and honey aromas, are rounded off with a savoury finish.

A Côtes-du-Rhône made primarily with Grenache and Syrah, Belleruche is part of the Tradition range. These smooth, rich wines offer a wide palate of flavours and aromas, all true reflections of their appellations. Belleruche is powerful and fruity with silky, delicate tannins.

The M. Chapoutier range is available from Hatch Mansfield

Le Pavillon Sélection Parcellaire

3 Les Meysonniers Rouge

4 Belleruche Rouge

5 La Combe Pilate

Preciso Primitivo Appassimento 2021

You can dry your grapes on straw mats or you can make it happen on the living vine, as is the case at this Puglian estate, where the stalks of mature berries are twisted to stop further nourishment. This creates a 30% reduction in liquid and a concentration of raspberry and cherry flavours, enhanced by a hint of blood and spice.

RRP: £11.99 ABV: 14%

Cachet Wine (01482 638877) cachetwine.co.uk

Finca Suarez Sémillon 2021

Four generations of the same family have tended the vineyards originally planted in what was effectively a desert in Paraje Altamira in the Uco valley. The Sémillon they make is as pure as the Andean air, with just 20% spending some time in French oak to smooth off some of the edges, harmonising beautifully with the citrus tang and stony minerality.

RRP: £24.50 ABV: 12%

Ucopia World Wines (01435 517080) ucopiawines.co.uk

M Chapoutier Monier de la Sizeranne Hermitage 2017

The Syrah grapes are sourced from a variety of sites across the region, making this an expression of winemaking artistry more than of a particular terroir. One sip and you feel yourself floating away, the elegance of the blackcurrant fruit and the gentleness of the tannins transporting you to your happy place.

RRP: £79.65 ABV: 14%

Hatch Mansfield (01344 871800) hatchmansfield.com

Pequeñas Fermentaciones Naranjo 2022

El Porvenir is experimenting with Salta’s possibilities with its Pequeñas Fermentaciones range. Here the blend is Torrontés and Moscatel, fermented in concrete eggs in contact with the skins. There’s a pretty, floral dimension to the wine but it’s the pithy grapefruit notes that really hit home.

RRP: £15.99 ABV: 12% Boutinot (0161 908 1300) boutinot.com

Pazo Barrantes Albariño 2019

Lots of Albariño producers are trying to replicate the Rías Baixas style, and perhaps they’re getting closer. So it’s interesting to see Pazo Barrantes moving the goalposts a little, with partial ageing in acacia and holding back the final wine for 16 months before release. It’s a rich, full-bodied and peachy iteration of the variety, but retaining the zip and vigour we love.

RRP: £50 ABV: 13%

Maisons Marques et Domaines (0208 812 3380) mmdltd.com

Château de Gardegan Côtes de Castillon 2020

This appellation, east of St Emilion, is attracting fans and wines like this help explain why. It’s authentically Bordeaux, with plummy, earthy Merlot flavours and some spice too. But what really strikes you is its easygoing freshness and drinkability – and, of course, the price. A lovely wine from a progressive producer.

RRP: £16 ABV: 12.5%

Walker & Wodehouse (020 7449 1665) walkerwodehousewines.com

Scheid Vineyards Ranch 32 Chardonnay 2019

From California’s Arroyo Seco AVA, this is a Chardonnay that most definitely isn’t aiming for the lean austerity that has become a little tedious in some outposts of the winemaking world. Instead it’s a crème caramel-tinged celebration of what made a lot of wine drinkers fall in love with the grape in the first place.

RRP: £19.99 ABV: 13.5%

North South Wines (020 3871 9210 ) northsouthwines.co.uk

Domaine de Castelnau

Garenne Syrah 2020

Sea breezes cool the vines on this former melon farm near Pézenas, where South African winemaker Francois Prinsloo puts the emphasis on freshness and not phenolics. He achieves his goal here deftly with a pleasing hint of plasticine sweetness, some enjoyable darker liquorice notes and a clean, red-berry tartness.

RRP: £11.99 ABV: 14%

Liberty Wines (020 7720 5350) libertywines.co.uk

Haysley MacDonald, te Pā

The Marlborough producer is proud of its Māori heritage and believes its Pā Road range will strike a chord with independents looking for authenticity and provenance

Not many new world winemakers can say that the land they farm has been associated with their family for 800 years. But it’s a claim that Haysley MacDonald can make with some justification.

At school, he wasn’t taught his Māori history. He’s since made up for lost time and it’s something that underpins his te Pā wine business in Marlborough.

Haysley grew up on a long-established mixed-use farm but his wanderlust as a young man took him far from home. His father asked him to return to the family business, but Haysley didn’t want a career as a potato grower. So he persuaded his dad to let him plant 150 acres of vineyards.

Friends and neighbours were on hand to advise and encourage. “I found, coming from traditional farming to the wine industry, everyone was there to help,” he says. “Everyone really likes to pass on their knowledge: what they’ve done, the mistakes that they’ve made.”

The family’s Sauvignon Blanc vineyards, based on the Wairau Bar in Cloudy Bay, expanded by another 250 acres over the next two years. Other vignerons had avoided this eastern outpost of Marlborough at the time, believing the

Pā

Road Sauvignon Blanc

soil to be too fertile for viticulture. But the MacDonalds proved them wrong. “You’ve got a lot of beautiful rich, silty loamy soils,” explains Haysley, “and the further down you go, you start getting into the gravel. Vines send a massive tap root straight down and into the gravel, so you get a bit of the best of everything.”

At first, Haysley was happy to sell the harvests. “As time went on, we looked to make our own wines,” he says. “We found that our fruit and our flavour profile was every bit as good as everyone else’s that I was involved with. And so we launched te Pā in 2011.”

In addition to what became known as the Home Estate vineyard, te Pā expanded its plantings into other parts of Marlborough, to give the winemaking team access to a broader range of grape varieties and flavour profiles. In the Awatere Valley, Sauvignon Blanc was joined by Chardonnay and Pinot Gris. There are pockets of vineyards across the region, all managed with the same respect for nature that has been fundamental to Māori culture for so many centuries.

The team is tight. Vineyard manager Gareth Exton has been a friend for years

Attractive floral aromatics with notes of citrus, lemongrass, passion fruit and guava. The lemon zest and passion fruit theme carries through the palate, supported by delicate blackcurrant and aniseed notes. The finish is crisp and clean with hints of lingering spice and a touch of chalky minerality.

Pā

Road Pinot Noir

An appealing primary-fruited assortment of cherries, blackberries, and dark plum. Brambly aromas of allspice, cassis and violet elevate the fruits bringing a complexity to the nose. The rich fruit is balanced by silky tannins, carefully curated oak, and a long lingering spicy finish.

Pā Road Chardonnay

and the pair can express robust opinions to each other. (“I give as good as I get,” Haysley chuckles.) The head winemaker is Sam Bennett, who will eventually have a purpose-built winery to work in, but currently achieves the results everyone is looking for in rented space.

The reaction to te Pā’s wines, at home and overseas, inspired the creation of the range that Haysley wants to channel in the specialist independent trade, Pā Road. “It’s an everyday drinker,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it your typical Marlborough Sauvignon. I think there’s a lot more love and creativity going on. Cropping levels are much lower, there’s a more concentrated flavour and we’re really looking after the fruit.”

Gently oaked, with an abundance of citrus zest and stone fruit aromas, married with the delicate scent of jasmine, smoky musk and toffeed hazelnut. The palate has a lively lime character, tempered by smooth vanilla oak and a hint of nougat. The texture is an exciting juxtaposition of rich and creamy, with a playful acidity and lingering finish of nuts and spice.

Pā

Road Pinot Gris

The aromatics are brimming with nashi pear, quince, apple and complementary notes of spice and mace. Notes of honeysuckle and orange blossom also make an appearance, with a hint of apricot adding further decadence to the nose.

Haysley (right) with winemaker Sam Bennett

Favourite Things

Dollar deal will boost Mendoza

Argentine wine producers are to be granted a preferential “Malbec dollar” exchange rate.

The plan follows a similar policy to boost exports of soy, allowing farmers to sell at a premium rate of 200 pesos to the dollar compared with an official rate of about 150 pesos at the time.

Magpie

In a deal between the Uffizi and Italy’s culture and agriculture ministries, the painting, which shows a boy reclining with vines in his hair, will be displayed in an as-yet unspecified location at the show alongside Guido Reni’s Boy Bacchus, which is also owned by the museum.

Leanne Olivier

Favourite wine on my list

I am in love with Lavi Nerello

Mascalese from Colombia Bianca in Sicily at the moment. It seems to be a great red for pretty much any occasion. It isn’t overly complicated, has a real burst of vibrant fruit and is oh-so-smooth.

Favourite wine and food match Mushroom and garlic bread tapas with a delicious CVNE Monopole Blanco was an unforgettable moment.

Favourite wine trip Bordeaux in the summer of 2012. I went to as many off-the-beatentrack vineyards as I could. At each vineyard, in very broken French, I asked the winemaker which vineyard I should visit next. The result was a fabulously sunny day, great tasting wines, an exquisite lunch, a whole boot full of tasty wines, and years of happiness enjoying them ever since.

Favourite wine trade person

The most interesting person in wine I have met has to be Pieter Walser of Blank Bottle Winery. Pieter doesn’t just have the chat; his wines are exceptional and he owns his brand by living by example.

Favourite wine shop

I’ll have to give a shout out to my local friends at Wolf Wine in Bath. I always take away a bottle of something pretty awesome.

Finance minister Sergio Massa said the more generous exchange rate for wine, the exact level of which has not yet been unveiled, aimed “to help recover export competitiveness and consolidate Argentina’s reserves”.

Enrique Vaquie, minister for energy and economy in Mendoza, said that trying to export Argentine wine had been like “rowing through a river of dulce de leche”. Financial Times, March 10

Go for the wine, stay for the art

Caravaggio’s Bacchus will be shown at the Vinitaly trade fair in Verona this spring as part of government efforts to promote the country’s wine industry. But art and heritage campaign group Mi Riconosci has described the plans as “absurd” and “unacceptable”, arguing that government rules prohibit the painting from leaving the museum.

The Art Newspaper, March 29

Co-op invests in own-label revamp

The Co-op has relaunched its premium Irresistible wine range.

The range has new branding to give better stand-out on shelf. It has added a selection of “esoteric” wines including the retailer’s first Swiss wine, a Chilean País from 130 year-old-bush vines and a Sauvignon Blanc Blush.

The retailer said customers are “moving back to own-label”, adding: “Our premium Co-op own-label offer, as a total, is up 9% so far this year. It does feel like a good time to relaunch the Irresistible range.”

The Drinks Business, March 30

Wineries hit by Silicon Valley crisis

Following the closure of Silicon Valley Bank, it is estimated that thousands of wineries are locked out of their accounts and they don’t know if, or when, they’ll get access to their money.

According to an internal report, wineries represented 2% of the bank’s total loan business and, since 1994, Silicon Valley Bank has extended more than $4bn in loans to wineries and vineyards.

San Francisco Chronicle, March 10

Cru Wines, Bradford on Avon

Matthew Jukes, by Caravaggio

Youngest grand vin from Latour

Château Latour 2015 has become the youngest grand vin on the market from this prestigious Bordeaux first growth estate.

Released for the first time on March 14, Latour 2015 was priced at £6,300 per 12-bottle case in bond at Farr Vintners. The château also released Les Forts de Latour 2017 and Pauillac de Latour 2018. Decanter, March 15

Digby joins the mile high club

British Airways is offering English sparkling wine as well as Champagne on business class flights for the first time.

As part of a one-year trial, BA has selected four English wines for its drinks roster, with the wine on offer changing every three months. The first to fly will be Digby Fine English Brut NV. From July the airline will serve the Balfour Rosé de Noirs, followed by Simpsons Chalklands Cuvée Brut NV. For the last three months of the trial, Wiston Estate Brut NV will be on the menu.

The Drinks Business, March 28

This month’s token celeb wine story

NBA superstar James Harden has added a Prosecco to his signature wine collection J-Harden.

The label, which launched in August 2022 as a collaboration with Accolade Wines, also includes California Cabernet Sauvignon and California Red Blend.

PR Newswire, March 15

Do you ever taste any of the most popular wines from supermarkets?

�I am often told that a customer likes Jam Shed or 19 Crimes and asked if I have anything similar. Understanding that these wines are high in sugar pushes me towards a juicy Aussie Shiraz or even an Appassimento. Although these styles are seen by indies like me as less desirable, they do open the gate into the wine world to a lot of mass-market drinkers and should be appreciated for what they are. But it’s important to promote the smaller growers, rather than a mass-produced product with very little complexity.”

Ian Howard H Champagne winner H That Wine Cellar, Delph, Oldham

�I tend to steer well clear of these branded wines – but Blossom Hill and Echo Falls were very popular with me when I first started drinking. On the odd occasion I have had some of the Casillero del Diablo range, which is just about drinkable with friends. I am currently five months pregnant so I have been on the hunt for good quality non-alcoholic wines, which are very few and far between, but the McGuigan noalcohol range isn’t too bad compared to others.”

Emily Wilson

La Dulce Vendimia, Macclesfield

�I have so many other wines to try: samples from new suppliers or new vintages of existing wines. However, we tried a few during the WSET Diploma, not only to understand mass-market wines, but to be able to distinguish quality in a blind tasting. While many of these wines are drinkable, they also highlight the difference between wine conglomerates and artisan wines and how spending a few pounds more gives you substantially more exciting wine.”

Duncan Gammie

The Wee Vinoteca, Hitchin & Cambridge

�No I don’t but, thinking about it, we really should. It’s so easy for independents to dismiss those wines as irrelevant, but with eight out of 10 bottles sold still going via the supermarkets we really should know what style the majority of wine drinkers are favouring. One of my best customers brought out a 10-year vertical of Casillero del Diablo at his 50th birthday and I must say they were actually very, very good.”

Tom Jones

The Whalley Wine Shop, Clitheroe

Champagne Gosset

The oldest wine house in Champagne: Äy 1584

43: Artisan Markets

Michael Boniface

No 2 Pound Street, Wendover, Bucks

In a nutshell …

From being a stallholder at regular markets to creating whole new events, Mike and his team reap the rewards from stepping out beyond their shop.

Tell us more.

We’re a wine merchant and a cheesemonger. For the last 10 years we’ve been stallholders at normal town markets at weekends and during the week. They call them Charter markets. We’ve always done food festivals, things like Blenheim Palace and Waddesdon Manor as well as our own food and drink festivals. We do one in Wendover called Summer on the Manor and we do a Christmas artisan market as well, but we’ve started to create more of our own events in addition to the summer and winter ones.

What prompted that decision?

Over the last year, we’ve seen consumer behaviour really change. There’s more of a desire for people to go somewhere for a day out where they know everything’s going to be good rather than just the town market on Wednesday. We have our network of traders we’ve built up over the last 13 years. That includes local wineries, local distilleries, crafts … all sorts of things.

Where do you start?

We have to talk to the local council. We find that some are more progressive than others. Really it’s good for everyone

involved. These are events that bring people to the town. They are an experience for people; they can come and spend a day. For food lovers there are lots of stalls and street food vendors, and there are companies selling toiletries and candles … we have artists coming along to sell their paintings. It’s a good diverse mix and we try not to cross over as we want to keep all the traders happy. We want to make it easy for them so we have introductory pitch rates and we can lend out some equipment if it’s their first time.

Do you sell much wine?

It’s difficult to get people to buy wines at markets and it tends to work better if you have a focus or a theme. We’ve gone to food festivals and taken a selection of

organic wines, which we can talk about very precisely and push as a theme, but generally we invite other traders or suppliers to sell their wines. We have a good friend who specialises in small organic Italian vineyards, so he will talk passionately about those particular wines. Another friend of ours is a local sparkling wine producer, Harrow & Hope. They do a stand and that’s really popular.

Tell us about staffing and resources. We have event staff and I try and keep the shop staff separate but we all muck in. We’ve got all sorts of different types of gazebos and things, including a big double gazebo but we don’t always use it – that depends on how big the site is. We’ve got quite a bit of equipment and three Bedfordsized vans. One is electric and we’re looking to change the other two, but the radius with the electric vans is a tricky one.

Can events get you long-term custom?

It’s great PR. If we can attract 1,000 people who are interested in food and wine to an event, they might not already know about us, they might be just coming to the market. So then we get a chance to talk to them about how passionate we are about cheeses and wines and they might just come along to our shop and visit our website. It’s a great way of getting new customers. People who visit the markets often come to the store and say, “finally, I made it to your shop”. It’s amazing.

Michael wins a WBC gift box containing some premium drinks and a box of chocolates.

Tell us about a bright idea that’s worked for you and you too could win a prize.

Email claire@winemerchantmag.com

The stalls focus on cheese rather than wine

DISCOVER THE PGI WINES OF CENTRAL GREECE

A diverse and unique wine region

Set a short distance from Athens, Central Greece lies along the southern part of the Greek mainland, encompassing the island of Evia to the East. The diverse landscape is framed by a picturesque coastline along the Aegean to the east and the Ionian to the west. For more than a century, extensive vine cultivation has been concentrated on the fertile plains of Central Greece. The region is in the midst of a quality-driven renaissance which sees modern winemarkers exploring the region’s terroirs and new varieties of grapes - from forgotten ancient local varieties to international and grapes from other Greek regions including Assyrtiko, Sauvignon Blanc, Agiorgitiko and Syrah.

Central Greece is home to over a fourth of Greek vineyards, which employ a combination of traditional and modern methods across 9 separate Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) wine zones which benefit from unique mesoclimates, unique varieties and skilled winemakers. The breadth of varieties grown in the region creates complex notes; 40 indigenous and international varieties are grown locally, resulting in the PGI wines zones of PGI Atalanti Valley, PGI Slopes of Knimida, PGI Opountia Locris, PGI Phthiotis, PGI Parnassos, PGI Thiva, PGI Lilantio Pedio, PGI Evia and PGI Ritsona.

A plethora of old growth vines offer winemakers the benefit of good quality grapes resulting in better quality wines. Winemakers strive to express the aromas, structure and unique character of these grapes. The range of style of wines is the most diverse in Greece: whites can range from light, easy-to-drink wines to savoury and complex; reds from fruity and mellow to sophisticated, pure expressions of terroir; while refreshing and aromatic rosè wines are ideal for Mediterranean summers.

Greece: the sturdy 'Savatiano' – one of the most ancient Greek grapes which produces light and refreshing whites with herbal aromas and fascinating ageing potential (PGI Evia, PGI Thiva, PGI Atalanti Valley)–and the aromatic 'Malagousia', a zesty, expressive and intensely aromatic wine (PGI Atalanti Valley, PGI Evia, PGI Thiva, PGI Ritsona). The star indigenous red grape varieties of the region are 'Mouctharo’ (PGI Thiva), 'Mavrokountoura’ (PGI Evia) , and 'Vradiano’ (PGI Lilantio Pedio, PGI Evia). Mouchtaro, grown exclusively in Askri, produces refreshing rose wines and deep coloured, fruity and mineral reds. Mavrokountoura yields zesty roses ideal for easy drinking alongside mellow but sturdy reds. Vradiano produces fruity roses and rich, spicy reds. All these indigenous grape varieties have been revived in recent years by the local vine growers and winemakers in their quest to preserve Greece’s viticulture heritage.

Whether sipping amongst the emerald mountains and coastal hilltops of Greece or enjoying a taste of the sun soaked Mediterranean from the comfort of your home, the wines of Central Greece offer something for every palate.

Central Greece is the homeland of two of the most important white grape varieties of

Indies bristle at Brexit aggravation

We begin the second, and final, instalment of our reader survey coverage with a look at indies’ buying activities, including the thorny issue of direct sourcing from producers

“Brexit continues to make it disproportionately difficult for smaller operators and importers like ourselves to buy wine directly. We have had to fundamentally change the way we do business, and sadly, unless Keir Starmer grows a pair and says Labour will apply to re-enter the single market in their first term in power, I can’t see the situation changing for the better any time soon.”

Marc Hough, Cork of the North, Manchester

“Brexit has made it much more difficult and cash-demanding to ship direct. The time from collection to arrival is now significant and often burns the credit terms you had. Things are improving, but only very slightly, so we will be more cautious this year.”

Mark Wrigglesworth, The Good Wine Shop, west London

“Lots of smaller-scale producers, even those who have become friends, are less keen to export direct because of Brexit paperwork. I’m looking at local groupage to see if that might help. I would like to direct buy more than I do; customers love it.”

Euan McNicoll, McNicoll & Cairnie, Broughty Ferry

2% Say Brexit will ultimately create net benefits for the UK wine trade

60% Say Brexit will ultimately diminish the success of the UK wine trade

“Brexit has made importing a hassle I don’t need. The proposed duty reform laws will make it even less likely that I will think about shipping again.”

Bruce Evans, Grape & Grain, Crediton

“We stopped buying directly after the Brexit vote and the crash in the value of sterling. Now, with the incredibly complex paperwork, customs declarations and other elements there is almost no incentive for a business our size to navigate the challenge of buying directly. If the currency drastically improved then perhaps the rewards would outweigh the risk and hassle, but right now they don’t.”

Tom Jones, Whalley Wine Shop, Lancashire

“The only wines that I buy direct are those made locally to my shop. I would love to buy some European wines direct but Brexit has put me off.”

Sarah

Truman, Sarah’s Cellar, Battle

70% Say the UK should rejoin the EU at the earliest opportunity

82% Say proposed duty reforms will damage the UK wine trade

“We import wine from one small Austrian winery and that has become very hard work because of Brexit and the paperwork involved. So we will be mostly buying from UK agents unless the system becomes more workable.”

Barry Howarth, Lancaster Wine Company

“Brexit and the NI Protocol Bill has made bringing wine from GB importers much more difficult and lengthy. It is now much easier for me to source directly from Europe, in particular, which is paying dividends in terms of exclusivity and profitability.”

Northern Ireland merchant

“We’ll be buying less from overseas. Brexit has not made it easy for importing from the EU. Also I consider that transporters are making money with the new cost for transferring details from the EAD to the new EX1, and increasing freight charges. Deepsea freight costs have increased as well, but not by such an amount.”

London merchant

“Since Brexit we are purchasing less directly from suppliers and especially those in Europe. This is mainly due to cost and lead times. It is very sad as these are friends as well as suppliers.”

Paul Tate-Smith, Derventio Wines, North Yorkshire

85% Disagree that the government is doing its best to help the UK wine trade thrive

Based on 186 responses. Figures combine votes that agree strongly and those that agree to some degree

You can still get the wines you want –if you plan ahead, argue some merchants

How will your direct buying of wine from producers change this year?

How much of your range is bought direct from producers?

We prefer to use the phrase “direct buying” rather than “importing”, as of course some wine producers are based in the UK.

Although the proportion of wine sourced this way is down on 2022 levels, to just over 16%, this is the sort of annual fluctuation that we tend to expect – as the graph illustrates.

But the figures in the table above do suggest slightly less eagerness for direct buying among many indies than a year ago.

Will independents be joining forces with their buying?

2023 average: 16.2% (-5.5%)

Based on 180 responses

It’s perhaps surprising to see twice as much enthusiasm among independents for formal buying groups than there is for informal groups. But that’s the reality of this year’s survey.

When asked to repond to the statement “I will source some of my wines this year as part of a formal buying group”, 20% agreed strongly – the most emphatic response we’ve seen in the survey over the years.

But overall, 58% do not expect to buy as part of a formal group, and 63% have effectively ruled out informal alliances.

Overall, 14% of respondents expect to buy jointly with other merchants more than they did in the preceding year, one way or another.

Based

Why we import ... and why we don’t

As usual, there’s a huge difference of opinion among indies on the subject of direct sourcing

“As we get busier the ‘critical mass’ threshold for direct purchase is being passed by an increasing number of lines. This allows us to buy better and be more competitive.”

Rupert Pritchett, Taurus Wines, Surrey Hills

“We’re happy with the wines we import. Brexit has made no difference either positively or negatively to importing wine from Europe. In the last six months the importing process has been at its quickest that I can remember.”

Jonathan Sutton, Michael Sutton’s Cellar, Dartmouth

“In terms of shipping, the rules are now in place and we know the costs. Of course, it would be nice to rejoin the EU, drop these additional costs and be able to access the larger share of wines we used to be able to. But it is just not going to happen, at least in the next decade.”

East Sussex merchant

“While there is no question Brexit has made buying from Europe a more difficult and lengthy process, it still represents an opportunity to create more margin on the more popular wines. Collaborating with like-minded merchants has also proved successful in mitigating the risk of holding stock for longer periods.”

Greg Andrews, DVine Cellars, south London

“We have been sourcing a large part of our range directly from producers over the past 40-plus years and don’t see the need to change this in any way.”

“I am happy with the balance between UK and shipment purchases. Brexit has made it harder, but the demand and delays appear to have eased off compared to last year. We will see.”

Matthew Hennings, Hennings, West Sussex

“We continue to be able to offer the best value with the wines we directly import, so have gradually been working with all our producers over the last two years to increase the number of wines we buy from them. We expect this to continue over the coming year. We have also always imported full pallets, so apart from a few wines, where we used groupage, we have been able to carry on doing this, and it’s still been financially viable to do it.”

Alexandra Edwards, York Wines, Sheriff Hutton

“There are core wines in our range that prop up ex-cellars ordering and allow us to make extra margin or offer better pricing. We’ve struck a good balance with cash flow and there’s no need to increase or decrease volume unless sales go up.”

Hertfordshire merchant

“We work quite heavily through Vindependents. They provide a decent range with the opportunity to improve upon the margins provided by many UK suppliers. This has allowed us to explore wholesale opportunities more than we were able to previously, and creates a slightly more sustainable business model. It also allows for community and conversation within the independent trade, which has to be a good thing.”

Stefan Botfield, The Wine Cellar, Woburn

“It brings kudos to have some wines that no one else has got. But it’s difficult when you don’t have premises that are big enough to store large quantities of wine in.”

Scottish merchant

“With fuel surcharges, and general issues with transportation it is becoming less favourable to bring wines in ourselves. We will continue to bring some lines in, however the maths is starting to make less sense nowadays.”

Phil Innes, Loki Wines, Birmingham

“Brexit. Transport costs. Delays. Paperwork. I’d much prefer someone else to deal with it.”

Mark Stephenson, Grape & Grain, Morpeth

“We prefer to buy from UK agency companies, provided they support our events and promotional activity. The more they help us, the bigger the slice of the pie we give them.”

Anthony Borges, The Wine Centre, Great Horkesley

“We ship almost all the wine we sell. It’s not getting any easier. I may introduce a surcharge for Brexit voters.”

Ben Robson, The Bat & Bottle, Rutland

Chris Piper, Christopher Piper Wines, Ottery St Mary, Devon

“We used to import but the hassle – and strong availability from UK suppliers – means there is less of a need to do so. It is not Brexit-related but more to do with storage and moving wine around, holding stock and the cash tied up therein.”

Cheshire merchant

“The cost of importing direct from the EU has increased again, and fuel prices are rising. We are better suited to carry on dealing with UK shippers.”

John Hattersley, Hattersley Wines, Bakewell

“We will pick regions where the processes are manageable and, where difficulties arise, will review whether or not to continue. We’re happy to move to using UK suppliers as an alternative if cost effective. Yes, Brexit is the primary factor, although transport costs with new world regions is also an issue.”

North London merchant

“We imported a bit too much last year and we have some frozen stock so we will be more cautious this year. Nothing related to Brexit.”

Alexandre Bal, Authentique, north London

“Buying direct has been of little interest over the last 15 years. A poor exchange rate at times, increased duty and additional paperwork has meant that it has been financially better to buy from UK agents. It also saves a lot of time and means we don’t have to worry about red tape and the new duty levels anywhere near as much as some would. We have a relationship with one producer which is historic and worth the extra effort. We have seen very little impact from Brexit other than a couple of additional paperwork costs.”

West Yorkshire merchant

You can still get the wines you want –if you plan ahead, argue some merchants

How important are these categories to you?

65%

Speciality spirits

Still the leading category outside wine, though down from 74% last year. (25% say very important; 40% say fairly important.)

British craft beer

Slightly down on the 60% recorded in 2022 and 2021 but another solid result. (19% say very important; 37% say fairly important.)

22%

56% 25%

Imported beer

After 33% in 2021 and 30% in 2022: are imports losing out to UK brews? (4% say very important; 21% say fairly important.)

17%

Cigars and tobacco

Another dip this year: indeed for 69%, tobacco is a non-event. (3% say very important; 14% say fairly important.)

13%

Glassware

Delicatessen items

Deli remains a core item for many, with a repeat of last year’s 22% score. (6% say very important; 16% say fairly important.)

Confectionery

Not far off the results recorded in 2022 and 2021: a useful add-on for some. (1% say very important; 14% say fairly important.)

Based on 186

Another category whose niche status seems entrenched. (3% say very important; 10% say fairly important.)

15% 9%

Wine accessories

Slipping from 13% last time; a category that is marginal for most indies. (0% say very important; 9% say fairly important.)

Based on 187 responses

Our selection of organic wines is growing

Organic, natural and biodynamic wines in growth

The majority of independent merchants say that their ranges of organic, biodynamic and natural wines are growing.

Our selection of biodynamic wines is growing

The figures are slightly down on the 2022 survey, which doesn’t necessarily mean that enthusiasm is waning. It may simply be that there’s no longer as much scope for category growth within the business as there was a year ago.

Overall, 86% of indies say that their organic line-up is expanding, down from 90% last time.

Our selection of “natural” wines is growing

When it comes to biodynamic wines, 78% of respondents say their range is growing, compared with 84% in the 2022 survey.

We also asked about natural wines –putting inverted commas around the word in an attempt to keep matters suitably vague and uncontentious. We found that 54% of merchants are growing their range of such wines, very similar to the 53% we recorded last time.

Eight out of 10 indies want suppliers to act sustainably

It’s often said that, ultimately, only consumer pressure can persuade producers and retailers to make decisions that will benefit the planet.

That may well be true. But this year there’s no sign that such pressure is necessarily building among the people who frequent independent wine shops.

We asked respondents if more of their customers are now demanding products with sound environmental credentials

Last year, the proportion agreeing with this stood at 56%; this year it’s 55%. (In both surveys, the proportion agreeing strongly,

rather than “to some degree”, was 11%, and the proportion disagreeing was 15%).

So what about the merchants themselves? This year, 64% say they are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint, not far off the 65% we recorded in the 2022 survey.

For the first time, we asked respondents how much it matters to them that suppliers and producers act in a sustainable way The vast majority, it seems, do care about these things, with 27% saying they agree strongly with the statement and 54% agreeing to some degree.

The essential guide to selling wine digitally

Open Imagination helps indies who are looking to claim their share of the online boom. To find out more, contact Howard Lee-Smith on 01865 922 112 or visit openimagination.co.uk

There’s no doubt that people love the experience of buying wines from bricksand-mortar shops. Wine merchants offer atmosphere, expertise and emotive experiences that might seem impossible to replicate online. But the web, and the inboxes of your audience, are important sales and marketing channels. They are there to be capitalised on, with the right approach.

Open Imagination has been providing e-commerce web development solutions to the drinks trade for 10 years. It has some insights into easy wins for independent wine merchants who want to improve their digital presence and make online retailing more prosperous.

The Personal Touch

You want your website to deliver a network of positive brand and customer experiences that funnel happy browsers through the front door to the checkout. So, it’s important to appreciate the virtual journey of your customers. Does the website, through its design and visual appearance, represent brand personality? Are customers welcomed and guided to the products they want?

While it is harder to offer a truly personal experience without face-to-face customer interaction, tools can be used to target customers with products they are more likely to buy based upon their journey, and the selections made. “We think you might like ...” provides recommendations that encourage a customer to browse further. Additionally, a virtual sommelier can offer useful pairing advice and tasting-note guidance for customers.

Optimise websites for mobiles

Today a mobile phone or a tablet is the device of choice for accessing the web. Some older websites are not adaptable to different screen sizes, and this will invariably deliver a mediocre online shopping experience that will turn visitors away. You definitely don’t want this.

The best “mobile-first” websites offer slick navigation with large buttons, concise readable

text and simplified menus, with an intuitive search feature.

Shopping cart

Online customers love convenience, and 50% of shopping carts are cast aside due to overcomplicated checkout procedures or surprise charges. A friction-free checkout experience is the answer to this. Make the process easy: avoid unnecessary form filling and be up-front about shipping costs, with eye-catching incentives e.g. “free shipping for orders over £…”

Customers also have a habit of ‘wandering off’. In fact, 70% of carts in the UK are generally abandoned. Servicing your customer with a gentle on-screen reminder can prompt a sale.

Make use of data

There are some reports within Google Analytics that offer low-hanging fruit to give you insights on your customers. For instance, webpage traffic reports show attributes of your website that have helped your customers make a purchase. You can also inspect what aspects have turned prospective customers away. This strategy is great when planning online features and offers.

Use data to target specific customers in a mailing list based upon products previously purchased or browsed. Learn from the results of

your campaigns for future marketing so you can be confident customers will continue to welcome receiving it.

Processing orders

So, your website is providing a virtual experience as close as is possible to a visit to your shop. Now you will be keen to find a solution to order processing, so that the task doesn’t distract you from your walk-in customers.

Order fulfilment processes can help to ease the load on the administrative tasks involved in online retail. You and your team can share the tasks while knowing who’s doing what. Bulk processing and printing of labels enables fast and efficient internal processes. Integrations can coordinate with delivery companies to provide competitive logistics and provide cost savings too.

the finish

Take advantage of today’s technology. Run digital marketing campaigns with buying incentives tailored to your customers’ preferences. Look to provide online the great service and quality that you deliver in store. Celebrate virtually the personality and character of your brand and your online customers will demonstrate their loyalty too.

• Published in association with Open Imagination

The Setúbal we love

The Portuguese region has been winning admirers throughout the UK wine trade in recent years. Joe Wadsack and Sussex independent merchant Henry Butler explain what Setúbal means to them

Produced in association with Setúbal Peninsula Wines

Portugal is not short of vinous jewels and Setúbal is a precious, regional gem, worthy of a closer look. Producing on average 10% of all the red wine in Portugal, Setúbal is also the source of tasty dry whites and world-beating sweet wines.

Half an hour on the train from Lisbon, the Setúbal Peninsula is home to 8,000 hectares of vineyards and two DOs: Palmela and Moscatel de Setúbal. This simple denomination structure is refreshing, but perhaps belies the varied landscape and heterogeneous soil types, which range from the limestone and clay/ calcareous of the Serra da Arrábida slopes to the finer, sandy plains below.

Palmela is primarily a DO for dry white and red wines, though you’ll also find small production of sparkling, rosé, and even liqueur wines too. The Setúbal denomination is exclusively for Moscatel de Setúbal and Moscatel Roxo de Setúbal, both of which are fortified wines. The wider – and more flexible – GI is Setúbal Peninsula.

Across the region, producers are permitted “to grow a huge diversity of different cultivars, due to a university research station within the region which contributes to the diverse and often complex blends in their wines,” says

Joe Wadsack (below), who acts as an ambassador for the region in the UK. However, DO Palmela reds must contain at least 67% of Castelão, known in the old days as Periquita, and a star in waiting.

The loupe should be firmly focused on Castelão as, while it is planted widely throughout southern Portugal, it shines brightest in Setúbal. Here, in the warm sandy soils, the grape gives wines that are aromatic, structured with both great natural acidity and ageing potential.

Wadsack concurs. “It is a variety indigenous to the area, capable of producing beautiful entry-level wines, juicy, raspberryish quaffers, and greatness: oakfinished marvels from 70-year-old vines,” he says. “A great many producers make 100% Castelão … they should promote it as their own and put all their might behind it.”

Henry Butler of The Butlers Wine

Cellar in Brighton (right) is also encouraged by what he’s seen from the region. “I am a big fan of the wines from Setúbal,” he says. “It does feel that there is a bit of a positive movement going on in the region, with younger producers making modern wines.

“The wines have character, and a freshness and salinity, which I enjoy. I

really like Castelão as a variety.”

Speaking about the region’s wines more broadly, Butler continues: “We like both reds and whites as they have an elegance about them; they tend not to be too high in alcohol. They are fresh and you can often lightly chill the reds. The wines we have in stock start at around £15, and all need to be hand-sold, which is OK as the staff are enthusiastic.”

Arinto and Fernão Pires are the region’s two most significant white grape varieties, with blends a common feature of the wines. Widely available, their fruity appeal is matched with competitive pricing.

Wadsack says: “The region’s secret weapon is its clear identity. Even at UK retail prices comfortably around £10, or perhaps even less, it is possible to find

real wine. These are wines of authenticity. At this price, few regions in the world offer the restaurant diner or budget wine enthusiast as much complexity and interest.”

If the red Castelão wines are nudging their way steadily into the spotlight, the sweet wines of Setúbal have been winning wine enthusiasts’ hearts for hundreds of years.

“Fortified wine lovers fall in love at first sight, when given the chance to try even more moderate examples of Moscatel de Setúbal,” says Wadsack. “With port and, more importantly, Madeira prices going into space, I am wholly confident that these incredible fortified wines are about to have their day on the red carpet.”

Bringing the wines from this beautiful

Portuguese peninsula to a wider British audience shouldn’t be too tricky. The range of styles and competitive prices make them a dream for most indies. Butler adds: “I think the proximity to Lisbon can only be beneficial. We have sent two or three customers on vineyard visits if they have been on holiday in Lisbon. This helps put Setúbal wines on people’s radar.”

Wadsack sums up: “I have rarely met kinder and more complimentary total strangers than in Setúbal and in Portugal at large. They will promote and talk warmly about anyone other than themselves. They would rather let their actions, wines and food do the talking for them. The wines, even the serious ones, delight at a price that almost everyone can afford.”

Life is sweet in Setúbal

For wines to be labelled Moscatel de Setúbal, they must contain at least 85% of Moscatel de Setúbal, known historically as Muscat of Alexandria. Fortified with grape brandy, the wine is left on skins before being aged for a minimum of 18 months in cask. Moscatel Roxo is made from a purpleskinned grape, which has exactly the same name, resulting in a beautiful amber-coloured wine. Both wines can have up to 15% of other varieties such as Arinto or Fernão Pires, but many producers follow the 100% model.

There are four additional classifications, which refer to length of ageing, outstanding quality, a particular vintage or a blended wine from several vintages: Superior; Reserva; Moscatel de Setúbal Datado and Moscatel de Setúbal Não Datado.

But where are you really from?

It’s a fair question to ask of our most familiar grape varieties, following new research that overturns preconceptions about the way Vitis vinifera evolved. David Williams reports

The past month has seen a massive shake-up of our understanding of the earliest origins of wine. The cause of this academic kerfuffle was presented at length in a research paper, published in the journal Science at the beginning of March, which has challenged the most recent consensus on the evolution of Vitis vinifera.

For the past couple of decades, scientists in the field had believed that Vitis vinifera had evolved in a single geographical centre in the Caucasus in modern-day Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, around 8,000 years ago. But the Science paper sets out the case for an earlier and more geographically dispersed development, stating that Vitis vinifera was domesticated from two distinct populations of wild vines, in two distinct geographical centres: one in the South Caucasus and one in the “Near East” (modern day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan), 11,000 years ago.

The paper goes on to state that the Vitis vinifera varieties grown today in Western Europe are descendants of the Levantine branch, the product of cross-pollinations with wild grape species as the early Vitis vinifera varieties migrated westwards. The grape varieties of the modern-day Caucasus, meanwhile, are the products of their own, distinct development.

Reading about the dual-development theory has brought a whole new dimension

to my relationship with Georgian grape varieties: knowing that Saperavi has an entirely different lineage to, say, Syrah, brings an extra layer of meaning to wines that, even when they’re sipped blind and stripped entirely of context, have such a strong, instantly recognisable, inimitable personality.

The paper’s findings have also enriched and extended that wonderful, if slightly dizzying sense of connecting to deep history you can get with wine sometimes. Take a sip of even the most mediocre wine and you’re participating in a culture that has endured for millennia – there’s something both humbling and uplifting about that.

Above, all I like the way the new understanding of vinous evolution reinforces the idea of wine as an essentially cosmopolitan and dynamic thing, its character fundamentally shaped by migration and interbreeding and crosscultural connections.

This last idea is something that is often under-played in the modern wine world, which tends to privilege notions of permanence and tradition over dynamism and change, whether it’s the sometimesunthinking devotion to the not always clearly defined idea of terroir, or the preference for “local” or “indigenous” over “international” interloper grape varieties.

Not that the pull of tradition isn’t perfectly understandable and even, at times, commendable. The Ark of Taste – the Slow Food organisation’s online catalogue of small-scale food and drink products threatened with imminent extinction thanks to “industrial agriculture, environmental degradation and homogenisation” – lists 122 wine products and grape varieties. So when a Loire producer chooses to use the Ark-listed Romorantin rather than Chardonnay, or a Bulgarian grower goes for Zarchin over Cabernet, it’s hard not to see it as a blow struck for conservation and biodiversity, and against the sometimes-overbearing presence of the handful of French varieties that have spread everywhere wine is made.

The paper’s findings have enriched and extended that wonderful, if slightly dizzying sense of connecting to deep history you can get with wine sometimes

For all that wines made from rescued local grape varieties

– such as Greece’s Malagousia (all but extinct before the 1990s revival led by Vangelis Gerovassiliou) or Portugal’s Jampal (the passion project of Brazilian ex-footballer André Manz) – are vitally important contributors to the sum of vinous happiness, there is a danger, sometimes, that an essentially benign traditionalist impulse can tip over into a narrowly conservative mindset. In its own way, ultratraditionalism is as threatening to vinous diversity as the shorttermist grubbing up of precious old vines. It can lead to rigidity about what grape varieties can work where – and discounts the potentially

galvanising effects of outside influences and materials.

Let me give you an example. Last month I was on the panel for a tasting of Mencía put on by Decanter magazine. Mencía is a poster child for the 21stcentury focus on local varieties, a red that has been successfully reinvented as a quality (rather than bulk) variety over the past 20 years in its north western Spanish heartland. The tasting was inevitably dominated by samples from Bierzo in León and a handful of Galician DOs, and it was wines from one of the Galicians, Ribeira Sacra, that provided most of our highest-scoring wines. But for me and at least one other member of the panel, one of the strongest contenders

for wine of the tasting was Baldovar 923 Cerro Negro, a 100% Mencía, from, of all places, Valencia.

Before tasting the wine, I would almost certainly have said that this was a western Iberian fish out of fresh Atlantic water over in the Mediterranean east. When ambitious growers can work magic with local Bobal, Mando and Merseguera, why do we need this Valencian-Galician fusion?

The 20-year-old Mencía vines used for Cerro Negro provided their own gorgeously compelling answer, with a wine that has much of the same alluring slinky texture as its Galician peers but with a distinctive, herbal Mediterranean lilt all of its own.

A true original, in other words, and a tribute to wine’s enduring, 11,000-year-old cosmopolitan streak.

Mount Ararat forms a dramatic backdrop for a vineyard in Armenia

Cider Is Wine tasting No need to concentrate

Indies spot the opportunity for a fresh sales opportunity

Alistair Morrell, founder and chief cider officer of Cider Is Wine, delivers something of a bombshell as he leads his second online masterclass for Wine Merchant readers.

“We don’t talk about cider,” he declares. “If you go to somebody and say, ‘try this cider’, the likely response is going to be ‘no thanks, I used to drink it when I was 16’ or ‘I got drunk on it at a festival once and I’ve never gone back to it’.

“So we don’t talk about cider. We talk about wine: wine from apples, pears and other fruits. ‘Try this wine’ is a credible, genuine and justifiable position to take because the English dictionary definition of wine is an alcoholic drink fermented from any fruit or flower. So that’s how we tend to approach it.”

Cider Is Wine is on a mission to promote ciders, perries and fruit wines that are made from 100% fresh-pressed juice, never from concentrate. Its range comes from various countries across the globe, in addition to the UK. Each carries a hologram logo.

“In a typical 75cl bottle of cider made from concentrate – and most are, in the UK – you have the juice of less than one apple,” Morrell says. “In our bottles, it will take at least seven apples.” In fact, the number is more like 10 or 13 in some examples we try. “One of the ice ciders I know takes four kilos of apples, so probably nearly 40 apples per bottle,” Morrell reports.

Cider Is Wine now distributes its products to nearly 100 independents in the UK, through Awin Barratt Siegel. How difficult has it been to persuade people to pay a premium for a product usually associated with £3 to £8 price points?

“Not very difficult, is the answer,” says Morrell.

“As I go to independents around the UK I find that, increasingly, people want to talk about something new. People want to find something new. And the ciders offer that horizon; they offer the opportunity to open up a very different conversation with your customer.

“One of the pleasing parts about this is that it appeals to Gen Z and Millennial customers. If you see any food and drink research today, it says that younger consumers want the real deal. They will want products to be artisan. They want things to be authentic and provenance-led.

“Younger customers also don’t see defined boundaries in the way that perhaps people of my generation and older did: beer, cider, wine and spirits. They see them meshing, and, as a result, they’re repertoire drinkers. They’ll drink certain things in certain places, or with certain foods or with certain friends or in certain social situations.

“So there is a fantastic opportunity to open up a new conversation with younger consumers. And when we weigh in the fact that these are half the alcohol of a bottle of wine, on average, then it’s a different proposition, and it fits with their idea of less but better.”

Tinston Gateway 2019

“This is made by Liam Tinston, who’s both a cidermaker and a winemaker. Liam makes small-batch ciders from dessert apples, typically Bramley, Cox, Worcester and Russet.

“This was IWSC gold medal winner in 2022. It’s methode traditionelle, so it’s aged for at least 18 months in bottle. It’s very light and sophisticated and that’s because it’s made from dessert apples.

“It’s an excellent alternative to Champagne. The mousse is really quite lively, as you would expect with Champagne, as there is the same pressure. A nice light golden colour. Absolutely brut dry.”

Gospel Green Rosé 2017

This Sussex estate took its inspiration from Champagne when it was created in 1990.

“We very much regard this as the mainstay of our methode traditionelle range,” says Morrell.

“It has about 8g per litre of residual sugar. This rosé has a dosage of Pinot Noir, just to give it that sort of pink tinge. It’s fermented with yeasts that are sourced from the Institut Oenologique de Champagne.

“It’s a great alternative to Champagne, Prosecco and Cava. It’s dry and delicate and something really completely different with an added benefit, of course: the ABV. This is just 8.4% alcohol.”

English Wine Project Queen of the Orchard

Made in Derbyshire from Spartan and Dabinett apples, this cider spends time in Burgundian oak and bourbon barrels, where it undergoes malolactic fermentation. Secondary fermentation in the bottle creates a gentle col fondo fizz with natural cloudiness.

“These are cidermaking apples which by their very nature are more acidic, more tannic,” says Morrell.

“This has got an assertive nose. You get riper fruit, and a raisiny effect.

“On the palate, again, much

Roddy Kane (left) and Alistair Morrell, partners in Cider Is Wine

ciders that set the scene

stronger, much richer, much firmer. You can imagine this paired with strong south east Asian flavours immediately.”

Templar’s Choice Naturally Sparkling Dry

Keeving is a process that creates a natural layer of pectin at the start of fermentation, starving the juice of nutrients and promoting a rich style of cider. It’s popular in Normandy, where Templar’s Choice is run by British couple Adam and Anne Bland.

“So it’s a very natural approach that they take: wild yeast fermentation, unpasteurised, unfiltered and then finished off with fermentation in the bottle,” says Morrell.

“It’s a very French style: savoury, with just a hint of sweetness but a lovely rasp of tannin on the finish. It’s tremendous with food.”

Ramborn Quince 2021

Morrell predicts that this one will “blow our socks off” and he’s right. It’s made entirely with quince juice from Luxembourg, on the Moselle. As with many of the producers associated with Cider Is Wine, the trees are full-height, often very old, and grow in natural

orchards rather than in ordered lines.

“It has a light sparkle, and a wonderful smell of dill,” says Morrell. “If you can just imagine a plate of smoked salmon in front of you, are you not in absolute heaven? It really just goes to show the heights that ciders can climb. Quite, quite delicious.”

Once Upon a Tree Blenheim Superb Ice Cider 2019

There are a few ways of making ice ciders. In the UK, the most practical is to freeze and then gently thaw apples, and tap off the first third of the juice that emerges. It’s a long, laborious process but worth the effort. This one, made with Spartan, Falstaff, Russet and Blenheim

Orange apples from Herefordshire, ferments for up to four months.

“You’ve got this lovely colour and about 150g per litre of residual sweetness, and every bit of that sweetness comes from the apples,” says Morrell.

“There is this wonderful acidity that makes you go back and say, ‘I’d like another drink – that that was delicious’.”

Kat Stead Brigitte Bordeaux, Nottingham

We liked quite a few of the ciders: in particular the Tinston, for its freshness, and the Ramborn for its really unique flavour profile.

We were surprised at the similarities between the ciders and a range of wine types, from traditional-method sparkling wine to a more natural wine style.

We really think our customers would be interested in these ciders. A Cider Is Wine tasting in our garden this summer would be really popular.

Deiniol ap Dafydd Blas ar Fwyd, north Wales

All the ciders tasted were unique and very enjoyable in their own way. The Tinston Gateway was really elegant and dry, with good acidity, and could replace a dry Cava or young crémant without a problem.

I think that the ABV ranging from 5.5% to 10% makes the ciders a great option for certain opportunities. I can see most of the ciders we tasted having great potential for incorporating in wine flights for restaurants.

Fabien and Christine Voisin Tell Me Wine, Chepstow

We found some similarities between the winemaking and cidermaking process in terms of the methods used: co-fermentation and the ageing process, among others.

In addition we were impressed by the food matching possibilities. We’re thinking of expanding our cider range.

Six

Planeta’s passion for olive oil

Planeta, one of the great wine companies of Sicily, is also the producer of an exceptional range of Sicilian olive oils.

Sustainability and the preservation of local culture are central to Planeta’s values. All its estates’ agricultural processes are fully organic, and while wine is the core business, it is part of a much broader, holistic approach to agriculture.

The company’s vineyards cover 386 hectares, with plantings in some of Sicily’s most prestigious DOs. Growing alongside Planeta’s diverse portfolio of international and local grape varieties you will find a variety of other organically grown crops, including almonds, durum wheat and the all-important olive groves.

Planeta has 50,000 olive trees, covering 151 hectares, planted in the Capparrina Oasis, close to the beach at Menfi and between Capo San Marco and Selinunte. The family have farmed the land here for over 200 years.

Today this area is home to protected flora and fauna, with the aim of preserving the precious scrubland of the

Mediterranean and providing a haven for endangered animal species. Visit and you will find dwarf palms and sea lilies and keep company with porcupines and hoopoes. Time it right and you might see the migration of loggerhead sea turtles.

It is in this magic spot that the family grow three different olive varieties: Nocellara del Belice, Biancolilla and Cerasuola, which in turn make three distinctive organic IGP olive oils.

Hand-harvested, the olives are taken promptly to the olive press house, at the centre of the estate. The process is rigorously controlled, in line with IGP requirements and Planeta’s commitment to making the finest possible olive oils.

Gently pressed in a new, two-phase centrifuge, the oil is gently extracted with the maximum amount of character and flavour, drawn from the fruit. Each resulting oil has its own distinctive personality.

Olio Extra Vergine di Oliva Tradizionale

(Traditional extra virgin olive oil.) Aa blend of all three olive varieties. Richly pistachiocoloured, this is an oil that vividly expresses the terroir of the Capparrina Oasis on the nose: fresh-cut grass, tomato leaf, artichoke and seaweed, alongside fruity notes of cedar and fresh-picked basil. This is a clean, richly fruity oil that is both spicy and intense. It’s also very adaptable, accompanying meat, fish and vegetables equally well.

Olio Extra Vergine di Oliva Denocciolato

Nocellara (Pitted Nocellara extra virgin olive oil.) This mono-variety olive oil is intense green in appearance with lime-yellow highlights. The broad bouquet encompasses fragrant basil, green citrus and bergamot. The de-pitting of the olives makes this oil more delicate, almost sweet, and wonderfully fragrant. The palate is given terrific lift by a tang of sea brine. The perfect olive oil for lighter dishes –maybe raw vegetables, salads or soups.

Olio Extra Vergine di Olivia Denocciolato Biancolilla (Pitted Biancolilla extra virgin olive oil). Pale green with light yellow hues. Scents of fresh thyme, carob, almonds and white pepper are all there to greet you on the nose. Delicate and velvety smooth, there is a distinctive sea-air quality to this oil. A standout with fish, shellfish and seared chicken, it would also work well with goat’s cheese, lettuce and tomatoes.

THE DRAYMAN

Budget 2023

Wine will feel the draught as the duty differential with beer increases

Comparisons are odious, as we’ve been told by many writers over the years, the earliest of whom appears to be the poet John Lydgate in 1440, who said that “engendyrd is haterede”. He was actually advising against comparing horses, geese and sheep, which is all very well and good until you come to bet on the racing and cook Christmas dinner while knitting a woolly jumper.

I wouldn’t normally bang on about the Budget as it bores me – and possibly everyone else – to tears, but last month’s felt like a big moment. It brought forth many more pertinent comparisons between different drinks duty rates than Lydgate’s animal conundrum, with one singled out for a freeze, while others got clobbered by an inflation-linked rise.

The unusual aspect wasn’t that a particular drink was singled out at all, but the means of dispensing it. In a bid to help pubs level up after the pandemic, draught beer got off, while packaged beer, along with almost everything else, got an increase.

It all happens in August, when a realignment of drinks duty around ABV rather than drinks category comes in to blur the picture more, but the government says the move will see the duty on a pint in a pub go up by 11p less than on the equivalent quantity “in supermarkets”.

Note the quote marks there: a subtle nod to the (Camra-assisted) British brewing community’s historical, Animal Farm-like “on-trade good, off-trade bad” mantra, without any acknowledgement that the latter also includes thousands of decent independent shops who’ll also see the beer that they sell become relatively more expensive than that on-tap in pubs. It also overlooks the fact that pubs sell packaged beer too and that, in the hybrid era, many shops (including a branch of Asda!) offer draught beer.

Packaged beer won’t come out of the whole duty realignment-plus-inflation

equation too badly either, with the tax burden per bottle or can only likely to go up by just a few pence.

But perhaps of more long-term significance will be the rather useful comparison between beer and wine, which the Wine & Spirit Trade Association said will go up by 44p a bottle at 12.5% abv, and by more at strengths above that. The duty on port, sherry and spirits will go up by considerably more.

Historically, Budget duty hikes are often over-hyped, rarely having any significant impact on drinking habits. But the scale of the autumn increases on wine are not an insignificant few pence – and they aren’t going away. The duty differential between beer and all its competitor drinks categories except cider is growing wider, in beer’s favour, for good.

In the past, duty hikes have usually (though not always) been felt by all categories at the same time and to a similar degree. But August will be a once-only event that may lead to a more thorough assessment than normal of the relative merits to a retail business of different drinks categories.

Many wine merchants already have skin in the beer game, and it’s not much of a stretch to see that customers who buy both beer and wine, and who aren’t perturbed by comparisons, might shift more of their basket spend into the former when they see shelf prices of the latter soar.

Thousands of decent independent shops will see the beer that they sell become relatively more expensive that that on-tap in pubs

In the hybrid era, many shops also sell draught beer

Oranges are not the only wines

East London is widely regarded as the achingly cool epicentre of the UK wine trade. A land of cycling, orange-wine obsessed hipsters plying funky Slovenian pet nat to waxedmoustached web developers.

Philippe Polleux doesn’t quite match the stereotype, though he does sell a lot of orange wine, and he does come to work by bike. (He got knocked off it once, by a bus, but he seems to regard this as unremarkable.)

He grew up in Creil, a small town north of Paris a long way from the nearest vineyards. He began to discover wine during his “lazy student” years and landed a job in the wine trade almost at random when he arrived in London about 20 years ago.

“I took my CV and walked along the high street and asked for work,” he recalls. “Oddbins gave me a job and I realised I enjoyed it.”

Two years at Oddbins were followed by spells as a sommelier, directorship of the regrettablynamed importer Dago Wines and then five years at Vinarius, an enoteca in Bow.

Having sold his Vinarius shares in 2019, Polleux joined Vagabond in early 2020, only to find himself furloughed the following month. “I stayed with them during the Covid time,” he says. “I was helping them to do the online sales and to send out the little tasting bottles.”

London has its fair share of French-born independent wine merchants, but not many of them are based in its eastern boroughs.

Philippe Polleux is a rare example of the breed, opening his People’s Wine shop and bar in Dalston soon after lockdown was over.

Inevitably, many of the wines he sells are what you would expect in this trendy enclave. But Philippe prides himself on a wide selection of (mainly French) wines that suit a broader demographic.

Plans began to ferment in his mind for a wine bar and shop of his own. The unit he settled on was a former vegan brownie shop – mais bien sûr! – a short walk from Dalston Junction, in a part of Hackney where a Champagne cork popped in the street would stand a very good chance of landing on the doorstep of an independent wine merchant. (Not that Champagne is a big seller in these parts. But more on that later.)

It’s a tall, modern space where guests can spend a languid afternoon observing minor traffic collisions on the adjacent mini roundabout, while enjoying wines by the glass, perhaps in the company of some oysters, saucisson or Comté.

By Graham Holter

Polleux relishes the surroundings, which are light and airy, and enhanced by subtle variations in décor which subliminally delineate the retail and bar areas. At some point he might look at ways of muting the acoustics a little for the times when 20 or so customers are noisily appreciating his hospitality.

It’s not the only drawback of a high ceiling. “It’s very complicated to remove the spider webs,” he points out.

When you lived in France, had you already started to explore wines from other countries?

Not really. I remember trying wine from Chile once or twice. But I tried it when I was doing work experience in Germany. And most of the time, I was drinking wine with my parents at home, so it wasn’t me choosing the wine. After that, when I was a student in Paris, I was buying quite cheap wine and not really choosing with a lot of discernment.

How did you arrive in this location in Dalston?

Basically, I wanted to open somewhere in east London, and during the Covid time I visited quite a lot of venues. I thought this one was the right size, and a good space. And I thought the crowd in east London would be interesting to work with.

My concept was to specialise in French wine. First, because I wanted to go back to my roots. Whenever I can travel, it’s nice to be able to go to the countryside in France. Also, I wanted to work with artisanal producers, which could be organic,

“I wanted to be in a place where I wasn’t isolated. There are other wine bars, wine shops and restaurants, which is nice to create a sort of network”

biodynamic and natural, but not only those things. Mainly the idea was to work with artisanal and small producers who actually care about what they do, and can express terroir and something interesting.

I could see what sort of things worked around this area, and I wanted to be in a place where I wasn’t isolated. There are other wine bars, wine shops and restaurants, which is nice to create a sort of network.

Is it a friendly kind of network or do people get a bit worried when someone new opens?

Well, with the people I know, it’s a very friendly relationship. It’s not uncommon for me, when I’m fully booked, I’m having an event or something like that, to tell people to go to another wine bar. If someone is asking for Spanish wine, or sherry, and I don’t have it, I tell them to go to Furanxo next door because it’s his speciality. And I think he also sends people to me. I think on the whole it’s positive.

Philippe Polleux, Dalston, February 2023

Why did you choose the name People’s Wine?

Presumably to take the emphasis away from the idea of big corporations?

Wine is a medium. It’s the reason why people will be sitting together and chatting. So I think “people” is quite important.

I want to work with artisanal producers, and connect them with people in London. I thought this was the most important thing. Afterwards I saw that there was a socialist connotation, and I’m like: yeah, why not? There’s nothing wrong with that.

I want to be a French specialist, so should I take a French name or a name in English? English is probably just simpler. Maybe French could have been seen as a bit too elitist, and I don’t want that. I want it to be approachable. Around here, a lot of shops sell wine and it’s hard to find anything below 20 quid. But that’s something I really want to have. Maybe because I drink a lot. I can’t spend too much money on a wine when it’s a Tuesday evening.

What’s the demographic in this part of London?

Are people constantly moving in and out?

You’ve got people coming here from other parts of London and other parts of England, because it’s a dynamic place with lots of things to do. And it’s still connected to the city. But then you’ve got also residential areas, like nearby London Fields, where you’ve got communities with families who are settled here.

Do you mainly attract a young crowd?

I get older people here too, and I think it’s because I also try to have some classical appellations. I am not sure where else you will find Champagne in Dalston. You will see lots of pet nat but not actually Champagne.

Is that mainly grower Champagne?

Yeah, of course. I try not to work with big brands and I think right now all of the Champagnes I’ve got are organic. Not that I’ve got a lot.

Lots of indies find that with Champagne, they need the big names, because those are what people want to buy as gifts.

Maybe it’s because the crowd I’ve got knows that I’m not doing big brands and the big names that I don’t have any requests for those wines.

Maybe I’m cutting myself off from another crowd who could be interested. But overall I think people are quite keen to taste mine. It’s selling, so it’s working.

The main Champagne I’m working with is Lasseaux. They’ve got only four hectares. I put it on by the glass so people can try it. I think it makes them feel more confident with the product.

I think the fact that I’ve got the bar helps; I can play with this sort of thing. On Bastille Day, I did all the Champagne for 10 quid, and you could try some premium artisanal Champagne at a decent price. And you could see it was good.

How does your business split between retail sales and drinking in?

It really depends on the time of the week and the season of the year. Friday would be mainly bar; Sundays are fully retail. In December, the bar is really quiet but in January and February it’s mainly the bar that we’re pushing.

I can see it’s a £10 corkage fee to drink in. Is there a by-the-glass list too?

Yes, we have about 15 wines available by the glass. We try to rotate it and update the menu. So we always add something and remove something.

Where do you source your wines from?

I do a little bit of importing, which should be growing. I’m looking also to develop the wholesale business. I’m working with something like 15 wine importers. Again, I try to work mainly with smaller-

“ Whenever we mention orange wine, people from outside of London don’t really know it very well, or they haven’t really tried it. People from west London have tried it, but they’re not very familiar with it. With people from east London, it seems to be completely normal”

sized importers and try to be supportive of small businesses.

I’m working with Swig, Les Caves, Portuguese Story … Sager & Wilde as well: they’ve started to import a bit. Iberian Drinks for some Spanish wines. Gergovie Wines for natural wine from Auvergne, which I think is an exciting region.

There are plenty of orange wines on your shelves.

Orange wine is a big chunk of the market. On Saturday we are part of the East London Wine Walk, so we get people from other bits of London and from outside of London. Whenever we mention orange wine, people from outside of London don’t really know it very well, or they haven’t really tried it. People from west London have tried it, but they’re not very familiar with it. With people from east London, it seems to be completely normal. We sell a lot.

Do you start people on more approachable orange wines and then guide them into the funkier ones?

It’s hard to say about the funkiness. Right now when I’m looking at my orange wine selection, all of them will be biodynamic as a minimum, and natural in a way. I don’t know if I like to use the word “natural”, because I don’t really know where to start and where to finish. But I still try to choose orange wine that will be of good quality, well-structured, well made, even if there are more sulphites and more filtration. They also need to be tasty and fun.

As everybody’s asking for it, I sample a lot of orange wines which are not really that good in terms of quality. You need to really skim a bit to find the good ones.

Do you find that some French producers don’t bother with official organic certification simply because they find the bureaucracy involved too onerous?

That’s why I like to work with smaller-sized producers, because it’s easier to have the trust relationship, to actually get the information and to see what they do.

Sometimes I prefer a guy who doesn’t have any certification, but I know is going to work in a good way, rather than someone who is organic but was only working for certification, and doesn’t really care much about what he does.

Which parts of France excite you most right now?

It’s hard to say. The Loire Valley, because there is a lot of varieties and quite a lot to discover. Languedoc is always dynamic, and I think the quality is really increasing, even with the problem of temperature increase.

I’m excited by Auvergne even though there isn’t much quantity. Its red wines would be Pinot Noir and Gamay, and white would be Chardonnay, mainly. You’ve got very mineral and fresh red wine, which can be really exciting. Recently I’ve got more and more into white from Alsace as well. Again, there’s a lot of variety.

And what about the classics: Bordeaux and Burgundy?

I’m doing a Burgundy wine tasting next week, so it’s on my radar. I struggle with the prices, obviously. But when something is exciting, it’s extremely exciting. With Bordeaux I don’t have a lot of stock, and it seems to be more of a gift wine. It’s not something people really choose to drink at the bar. Or if they choose it, they choose the Bordeaux at

around 50 quid. I’ve got Bordeaux at £20, which I think is very good value, but it doesn’t move as fast.

We are quite lucky that here people are interested in the lesser-known appellations and like to discover new things and to experiment. With Bordeaux there’s not much to experiment with.

Every two or three years, Bordeaux says that white Bordeaux is back on trend and it’s going to sell. I never managed to sell any. It never sells. They are good. But they don’t move.

Food is obviously important. How do you prepare it?

We do the food prep here at the bar. When I created this place, to start with I was working on my own, and I tried to build it in a way that I could prepare the food, serve the guests and organise the takeaways without having to run into the back room. The menu is simple, but substantial.

There are quite a lot of restaurants around here. We’ve got people who come here before their dinner, or they come after their dinner, to have a last glass. So I don’t need to become a restaurant and to serve more food.

Philippe now has a small team of full and part-time staff, meaning he can take two days off a week to spend with his family

With food, have you got one supplier that you use for everything or do you have to use lots of different people?

I mainly work with a guy called Geoffrey and his company’s called Tasting with Nivard. He’s mainly a cheese importer but he also does charcuterie. We use Belazu for nuts and olives and the bread I get from a new baker called Breadery on Roman Road.

How many staff have you got now?

I’ve got two full-time employees. It allows me to take two days off. And I’ve got a lady who almost works half=time.

Are you happy with how the business is going?

We’ve started to make money and now I’ll start to look at developing further. That’s why I’m looking to import more wine. Have a bigger portfolio and see where we can go.

Is importing a painful process these days?

Basically you need to be a bit more organised, or you need to forecast a bit better what you need to have, because it takes time. If you work with a winemaker who is proactive, the pallet could be ready in, like, 24 hours – or in a few days. But some winemakers are a bit slower, because they have a lot of things to do and can be really unresponsive on email. Then the transporter takes maybe something like a month to bring the wine to England, and the cost is much more compared to before.

Did you find anything good at Wine Paris?

Maybe from Alsace and Beaujolais. I looked for some Burgundy, but it seems so hard to find because prices are too high and a lot of the wines are already imported anyway.

I saw I guy who’s making natural Muscadet as well, which can be quite fun. Lots of lees; a bit more texture. Everybody says Muscadet was bad in the 70s. But I wasn’t born, so I don’t know. Actually nice Muscadet at a good price sells quite well.

Tell us about the ticketed events you run in the shop.

We have a cheese and wine afternoon on Saturday, run by my cheesemonger. It’s mainly him presenting the cheese and then pairing it with the wine. Usually people like it. It is quite fun. It’s a good way to start a weekend. It should last an hour and a half, but sometimes people stay longer. Last time we did it, I think some of the guests stayed for the evening.

What social media do you use?

For me it’s Instagram – it’s a big, big help. And whenever I do wine tastings, I send a newsletter. I try to do this more and more and to be less connected to a social network. Because when they change algorithm or something, it could affect my business.

How is Deliveroo working for you?

My feeling is that Deliveroo has been getting a bit quieter recently. I can see the sales figures are a bit lower. I don’t know if it’s just because of the time of the year or if actually people are using it less, or if there’s competition from other delivery companies that people prefer to use.

You’re hinting at expansion. What plans are in your mind? Will it depend on the economy?

Gradually the economy will recover sooner or later, so I’m not too worried about that. Maybe in Dalston we’re in a bubble, and we don’t really see [the downturn] as much.

I launched the shop just after Covid, and it was the European Championships as well. It was really hard because basically nobody really wanted to go to a wine shop, or wine bar. Pubs were busy with the football. So when I started it was really empty. I wasn’t doing any marketing whatsoever.

Now, I can see that it’s improving, and I’m getting busier. But I can still see that I can do better. I need to work on the selection. And I really want to work a bit more on the import side of the business. I think that’s this year’s project.

Do you think you’ll ever return home to France?

I don’t know. My daughter is in high school here. I’ve got a business. I feel that I’m pretty established. My wife is from Thailand. So who knows? Maybe I will open People’s Wine in flip flops on an island. I would like that. One branch in Dalston, one branch in Koh Samui.

“I’m getting busier. But I can still see that I can do better. I need to work on the selection. And I really want to work a bit more on the import side of the business. I think that’s this year’s project”

Northern exposure

In early March a group of wine merchants from Scotland and northern England took part in a round-table discussion, which covered a range of issues facing independents.

Our coverage begins here and continues in our May edition.

Organised in partnership with Hatch Mansfield

How has trade been in recent months?

Ray Nicholls, Ripponden Wine Company, West Yorkshire: Very positive. January and February are both above 4% growth on the previous year, which I was not expecting at all. Granted, I’m only in my second year of trading, so we’re still relatively young and I’d expect some natural growth. I’ve added a couple of elements but I was I was pretty nervous about January. In 2022, Christmas kind of rolled on through January as people did their best to get together.

Archie McDiarmid, Luvians, St Andrews: We’re in a very good place. 2022 was a record-breaking year for us. The Covid lockdown meant we had to invest quite heavily in the online side of our business. The challenge for 2022 was keeping that and developing it, and we’ve actually been able to retain a lot of that business.

We had the 150th Open Championship at St Andrews, and that’s 350,000 people visiting a town of 25,000 over the course of 10 days. That meant we posted our best single-week and single-month figure as a company that we’ve ever had.

The challenge for 2023 is to measure up to 2022 because there’s going to be stuff that isn’t happening this year.

One of the challenges we have had, post-Covid, was getting staffing back. I got it back to full staffing levels and therefore back to full opening hours in January of this year. One member of staff that we had pre-Covid is still with us. It was a baptism of fire last year. It all came out really well and we have a great team.

Andrew Lundy, Vino, Edinburgh: Probably one of the biggest things is staffing. I think sales may take care of themselves. But the biggest challenge has been actually finding people who are of the standard that we expect. A lot of the plans that we have from last year have been taken up with us covering shifts. We were really lucky not to have anyone with Covid for most of the way through the pandemic until we came out of it. And then everybody caught it and was off sick.

Graham Holter, The Wine Merchant: Do like-forlike comparisons mean anything at the moment given that we’ve had three really weird years?

Andrew Lundy: I went back to 2018-19. We’ve gone from four shops to three shops. And we’re doing the same as we did with four shops with three shops. So I suppose that is close to likefor-like but it’s not really the same. We’ve got a completely different range than we had then. We’ve increased the average bottle spend.

Mark Stephenson, Grape & Grain, Morpeth: We probably had our record Christmas this year. I think a lot of that was fuelled by the fact that we’ve moved location within the town. It was only a couple of hundred yards but I think we were up about 20% on turnover because of that move.

This year, and this may sound a bit of an oxymoron, has been steady but unpredictable. Prepandemic you could hang your hat on which days you’d see an increase, but at the moment it’s just all over the place. You’ll have a weekend in February that’s just as good as a weekend in November, which we’ve had recently. But then we’ll have a week where you were literally looking down the street and thinking, what more can I do?

I’d say things are relatively comfortable and going well. But, managing a business, it is difficult to make a decision on where you want to take the next steps because of the unpredictable nature of the market.

We’re in a market town which has seen a huge boom in tourism in the last few years, so we’re getting to the time of the year now where we’re really thinking, let’s push the accelerator down and gear up for what would hopefully be a good summer.

But you just kind of wonder how far to go with it because of how unpredictable it is at the moment. I mean, I was expecting it to fall off a cliff in January and February, and it’s actually been OK.

Richard Meadows, Great Grog, Edinburgh: I totally agree with that. It’s been quite busy. January was less shit than normal. February was pretty good.

Douglas Wood, WoodWinters: Over the last year we’ve put in two new shops so we would have expected an uptick. We didn’t lose money this January, for the first time in a long time, which was really positive.

February was down a little from January, which is a bit weird. But because we have such a diverse product mix, it can depend on the timings of certain campaigns for private clients as well ... that can make a big difference to sales, depending on allocations, etc.

Champagnes, which would come in and go straight out, can make quite a big difference too. Our retail figures are quite disparate, especially across the three different sites that we have. Inverness is picking up really nicely. It’s been going there for four or five years. Edinburgh has always been a fairly tough site for us and Bridge of Allan just keeps on getting better.

It’s important to note, if we’ve been running inflation at 10% for the last year, inflation on wine is only 4%. You do have to consider all our costs are going up. So if you’ve not increased year on year, then there’s a problem, because people expect to spend more anyway. Our average bottle price has moved up probably about 6% to 7%. For pure retail, customers’ average bottle price is about £12.

Ben Knollys, Hatch Mansfield: We get the broadbrush picture, dealing with a lot of indies across the country. In terms of like-for-likes we’re mostly comparing back to 2019. For reasons of Covid it’s less relevant looking at 2020 and 2021.

We’ve seen some indies trading really, really well and some others maybe not being quite as good as they were. There not being typical days of the week anymore seems to come from the working-from-home trend. People aren’t commuting, they’re working from home, so they can take their lunch hour and shop at their local indie on a Tuesday but that means they don’t come in on Saturday.

We’re seeing a bit of a trend that happened during lockdown when people couldn’t dine out,

“At the moment it’s just all over the place. You’ll have a weekend in February that’s just as good as a weekend in November”

Mark StephenSon

but instead were actually investing maybe half that money on an even better bottle of wine from an indie to drink at home. Now with the cost-of-living crisis, there’s a bit of that trend still going on, with some people possibly not dining out as much but drinking better at home.

Andrew Lundy: For us in Edinburgh, one of the things is the quality of food that you can get delivered, and little kitchens that are providing amazing food. So you can sit at home and have amazing food. And if you’ve got an amazing bottle of wine, you’re still not paying £100 a head.

Graham Holter: Some merchants in our reader survey have observed that a lot of people are moving out of the middle ground and buying £15 or sub-£10 wines, while other people are still very happy buying at the top end of the market. Is that something that rings true across your businesses?

Ray Nicholls: I’m not seeing the squeezed middle at all. If anything, I’ve taken out some of the lower end of my range that doesn’t do anything for me. £15 to £25 is the sweet spot, that’s where most of my trade comes from. I do the odd bit at the lower end; most of that I reserve for my wholesale customers. If lockdown taught us one thing, it was we know how to have a good time at home now. So if you are a little bit more resilient to recession, but you want to save a few quid, you won’t eat out twice a week, you’ll eat out once and you’ll get a takeaway and a decent bottle of wine from an indie instead. I’m definitely seeing that.

Mark Stephenson: I decided to react to the cost-ofliving crisis by putting out the £10-and-under range again, which is something we abandoned years ago. And we’ve hardly done anything on it.

Ray Nicholls: Yeah, I do have some bottles like that and I want people to know that it’s still going to be a decent bottle of wine. But I think if you’re comfortable spending £9 on a bottle of wine, you’re just going to stick it on your grocery shopping. You’re not going to make a separate trip to your indie to do that.

Archie McDiarmid: We have a dedicated sub-£10 range and it’s a big driver for us. While we still have a couple of beloved students who come in and treat Haut-Brion as a table wine, the vast majority of them are buying more inexpensive wines. What I would say is there is still wine at the sub-£10 level out there that is good, and which we’re happy putting our names behind. Our job is to be like, ‘right, we have got two rosés that are sub£10. And that’s because we’ve tried every rosé at this price from every producer that we’ve got. And these are the two that we’d actually put in our bodies’.

Andrew Lundy: We’ve got big student population that comes to us, so we have to have wine under £10. It has to be there. The next student could come in with a Louis Vuitton bag and drop £100 on a bottle of whisky. But if you don’t have that in there ...

Archie McDiarmid: … you lose them as customers. When they leave for the summer, and they want to buy a bottle of whisky as a present, they’ll come to us. If you’ve given up on them and just said ‘go and buy your sub-£10 in Tesco’, then they’re not going to come to you when they’ve got more money to spend.

One of the biggest challenges with under-21s is getting them to drink at all. As a market, the under-21s, loads of them are teetotal or are super health conscious. And then a whole bunch of them do drugs and vape. And that’s where the disposable cash goes. Drinking is not a key part of their recreational matrix.

Andrew Lundy: I don’t think [sub-£10 wine] is something that we all need to talk about. You know, it happens, it’s there; we all try so much nonsense to get to a wine that we’re comfortable selling. You either have it because you can sell it, or you don’t.

Anybody who’s got the family spreadsheet in front of them and is looking at spending and wines to cross off … if that’s where they’re

“There is still wine at the sub£10 level out there that is good, and which we’re happy putting our names behind” archie McDiarMiD

at then the next step is not to come to us. They’re going to go to Lidl and they’ll find something for £5.50.

Richard Meadows: My bottle price average is probably about £8.50 to £9 because students and people drink cheap wine during the week and they’ll go for good stuff and a decent bottle of wine of the weekend.

Douglas Wood: I think there’s still a place for [wines below £10] in an independent merchant. People come in, they want to have a chat, and you will not get that service in a supermarket. If somebody comes in and they want something that’s not too heavy, and they say ‘I like Beaujolais, but I want to spend £8’ then I say, ‘try a Grenache’. You can give them that direction. And they enjoy that and enjoy that interaction. And as Richard says, they’ll then spend a little bit more, perhaps, on the weekend bottle, and so on. Going in thinking that they’re getting something a little bit better, or at least having something that suits their tastes: that’s worth two or three quid extra a bottle sometimes, rather than having something random that they don’t know. You can come to us and get something that’s actually directed towards your palate.

Andrew Lundy: For the first time in a long time, those cost increases we’re seeing are actually relatively fairly distributed across the industry. Supermarkets are having to pay the same kind of costs that we are because you can’t make glass cheaper, that’s just the price glass is; that’s just the price energy is; that’s just the price fuel is. So their economies of scale that allowed them to put wines out at £5 have gone.

If you buy an £8 or £9 bottle from a supermarket that’s been made with no love or care, you might have forgiven it when it had only been a fiver.

If you get people coming in and saying, ‘the bottle I used to buy now costs £9, have you got anything that’s better than that?’ and if I can’t outperform a supermarket on ‘is it better than that?’, I shouldn’t be here.

Richard

filters. That’s what we are.

Meadows: We’re dross

Above: St Andrews supplies a useful student clientele for Luvians Below: Consumers seem to be happy to spend big as they cut down on meals out

London calling

The Wine Merchant has secured bursaries for 30 independent wine merchants, covering travel and ticket expenses for this year’s show at Olympia. There are plenty of reasons why it promises to be worth the journey

Why would an independent wine merchant go to the London Wine Fair? That’s a question many indiess have asked themselves in recent years, as they think through the most valuable ways to make use of their most precious resource: time.

Any answer in these pages will inevitably begin with a reminder of The Wine Merchant’s activity at Olympia in May, which includes an exclusive deal with the London Wine Fair to offer 30 bursaries for independent merchants.

Wine Merchant readers can apply for a bursary that includes a free three-day entry ticket worth £49 for the applicant and free entry tickets for two further guests, plus up to £100 in travel expenses. To get one of the first-come, first-served awards you just need to apply the code TWMBURSARY at the checkout on londonwinefair.com.

The Wine Merchant team will be out in force on Tuesday, May 16, with our stand located on the main, ground floor of the event right next to the popular collection of specialist importers that is the Esoterica zone.

The stand will be the home for the big reveal of this year’s Wine Merchant Top 100 winners, including the competition’s crème de la crème, the trophy winners,

samples of which will be available for visitors to taste.

Tuesday was the logical day for The Wine Merchant to make the most of Olympia, since the fair organisers have given it the unofficial designation of “Independents’ Day”. Editor Graham Holter will be giving a presentation about the UK’s independent wine market in the Industry Briefing Theatre at 10.30am.

The Wine Merchant is also one of the media partners at the annual Wine Buyers’ Awards, sponsoring both the Large Independent Merchant Wine Buyer (for businesses above £750,000 turnover) and Small Independent Merchant Wine Buyer (businesses below £750,000 turnover) awards.

The shortlist this year features Chris Goldman (Hennings Wine), Phil Innes (Loki Wine), Kasia Konys-Pieszko (Dunell’s) and Nicolas Rezzouk (Reserve Wines) battling for the Large Independent prize and Liz Coombes (The Artisan Wine & Spirit Co) and Peter Wood (St Andrews Wine Company) competing for the Small Independent category.

The winners, alongside those from the on-trade and multiple retail categories, will be announced at a ceremony on the Centre Stage starting at 1pm on Tuesday, May 16.

Other Independents’ Day attractions picked out by London Wine Fair director Hannah Tovey include masterclass tastings by Wines of Roussillon and Wines of Greece. But Tovey is keen to remind visitors that, while the Tuesday will be of particular interest to independents, there are plenty of attractions throughout the fair’s three-day duration.

Tovey’s highlights include new exhibitors such as a Catalonia pavilion and IGP Mediterranée, plus AC Languedoc’s largest presence in years. She also picks out Entoria&Coe’s premium producer masterclasses, with 12 sessions featuring some “genuinely high-end” producers; a new pavilion, Distill, dedicated to non-wine products, with “a really broad mix of exhibitors from the UK, Japan, and Ukraine” among others; and “a real explosion in mindful drinking” with 30 no and low-alcohol brands exhibiting as part of a collaboration with Club Soda.

According to Tovey the key pillar of the show is, as ever, “trading: helping customers find suppliers and vice versa”. But the event has two other main themes.

The first is sustainability, with sessions “covering everything from bottle weight to alternative packaging to viticultural

practices and logistics, to enable people to collaborate and achieve a better outcome for the industry,” Tovey says.

The fair has teamed up with sustainability audit firm DNV, which is “bringing some of its services onsite to help show people how they are to achieve these audits – and how to move to carbon zero or zero plus”. There will also be sustainability talks and seminars from the Sustainable Wine Roundtable

Tasting remains at the heart of the fair, but the show also prides itself on the many educational opportunities it offers

and The Porto Protocol. “We’re asking all these partners to collaborate, to work together to support the industry and move forward collectively,” Tovey says, adding that the fair itself has become much more sustainable. It is now reusing materials for stand and feature builds, she reports, and implementing cork collection and sending all the bottles opened at the fair to re-use rather than recycle.

Beyond these worthy initiatives, Tovey

is also keen to stress the LWF’s credentials as a tasting opportunity, with thousamds of wines to explore, including those picked out by 10 leading wine writers and influencers as part of the Wine Writers’ Edit.

It’s all part of another reason Tovey believes the event remains relevant to independents, and which she describes as the third of the London Wine Fair’s main pillars: education.

David Williams takes stock of the perhaps shocking state of play with pink wines

Talking to retailers, you sometimes get the sense they’re not 100% happy about the pre-eminence of Provence rosé. For those who are down on the style, it seems to fall, alongside fellow 21st-century success stories Pinot Grigio and Prosecco, into that special category of wines that they sell without ever really drinking themselves.

As with those two styles, the reasons given for the absence of enthusiasm are generally along the lines of “bland”, “unchallenging” or “it all tastes the same”.

Of course, you’d hear a lot less complaining about Provence rosé (and Prosecco and, to a lesser extent these days, Pinot Grigio) if it wasn’t such a commercial success. No matter what their personal feelings may be about the style (and there are plenty in the trade who love it), almost all merchants feel the need to stock Provence rosé because it’s what their customers want.

Take away that consumer demand and rosé sceptics would soon move on to grousing about the next big apparently bland thing they felt obliged to stock.

I do wonder, however, if the reason Provence gets up some merchants’ noses has more to do with what has happened in rosé production elsewhere – that Provence is being blamed for the rash of inferior imitations of the pale, pastel-shaded style of dry pink it has patented and perfected. Pale is now by far the leading strain of rosé, wherever the style is made.

Indeed, it’s quite astonishing how pervasive it has become in recent years. It dominates to the point where many retail buyers have pretty much stopped listing anything darker than “mandarin”,

the darkest (but hardly dark in a wider context) hue on Vins de Provence’s official swatch of six Provence rosé colours.

All the same, I’m not convinced that anywhere has got close to matching Provence’s mastery of the medium just yet. Having participated in several comparative tastings of rosés over the past few years – some featuring Provence alone, some a mix of Provence and wannabe rivals from neighbouring Languedoc-Roussillon, Bordeaux and the Rhône, and others fullon international rosé compilations – what’s become clear to me is just how consistently better Provence is at this way of making the style.

Yet Provence doesn’t have a complete monopoly on quality at the lightest end of the rosé colour spectrum. You can find an increasing number of good quality pale pinks

emerging along the French Mediterranean coast in the Languedoc-Roussillon; and many Spanish producers, notably in Navarra and Rioja, have also mastered the pastel arts. There are good wines being made in the style in almost every corner of the world, from California to Campania. Only a select handful, however, manage to approximate the best of Provence, with its combination of freshness, delicate fruit expression and creamy leesiness.

There are numerous reasons why that might be the case. First, Provence has simply been doing this kind of thing for longer than its rivals: the region has had a head start in figuring out what works.

Then there is the situation of its redgrape vineyards: relatively high-altitude sites cooled by the Med’s sea breezes that are, for the most part, actually better suited to rosé than red, meaning rosé has always been first on the agenda rather than a by-

Provence and its pastel-shaded

pastel-shaded rivals

product. Most important of all, perhaps, the region has been the site of unprecedented investment and specialisation in the style in recent years, leading to the kind of fine-detail tweaks to sorting, pressing and maceration that might seem pedantic, fussy and microscopic, but which are essential in a style in which subtlety of expression is the defining feature.

To me the situation with pale rosé resembles the world of traditional-method sparkling wine at the beginning of this

century. At that point, Champagne was unchallenged as the market leader, and operating in a completely different league at the top end. The years since, however, have seen a wave of genuine competitors emerge in regions that have made sparkling wine a speciality, from southern England to Tasmania. All of which means that, while it’s still hard to look past top Champagne when assessing the world’s best sparkling wines, the gap between the rest of Champagne and the best of the rest of sparkling wine has narrowed to the point of invisibility. At the same time, enhanced competition has improved the basic level of Champagne.

At current rates of improvement, a similar narrowing will happen in pale rosé over the next five years – a situation which won’t do anything to please the sceptics, but will be good news for the style’s evergrowing number of fans.

Broadening the pink palate

Wherever you stand on Provence and the spread of pale pink, there is always an alternative. While pale takes an evergreater share of the total rosé market (a study by market research firm Agrex Consultancy for the Provence generic body the CIVP suggested that it has swapped places with darker styles, going from around 30% of rosé production to around 70% in the past decade) that market has itself grown enormously. Global consumption of rosé is up by around a quarter since 2002, according to the CIVP. That leaves plenty of room in the market for different and often innovative approaches.

At just shy of 30% of the total, France is comfortably the world’s biggest roséproducing country, and many French pink producers have profited as

Provence has simply been doing this kind of thing for longer than its rivals: the region has had a head start on figuring out what works

FOCUS ON ROSÉ

From page 49

drinkers brought into the rosé category by Provence look for something a little different. One beneficiary is Sancerre, where rosé production now outstrips red, accounting for 7.4% of the total (red has 6%). The Sancerre style, slightly racier than its southern counterpart but a logical next step for those weaned in the Provence way, has proved hugely influential wherever Pinot Noir is grown, with increasingly worthwhile examples from New Zealand, Germany and Switzerland.

Bordeaux, which was rather slow to embrace the rosé boom, has also been increasingly focused on its pink wines: a necessary adjustment in a country where more rosé is consumed than white. Rosé has grown to account for some 4,310ha, or 5.8%, of the Bordeaux vineyard (up from 4% in 2016). And while much of the growth has been in lighter styles, the region’s original darker rosé style, clairet, has also been enjoying a revival, fitting, like the Rhône’s Tavel, into that currently fashionable grey area where rosé meets lighter “infused” reds, orange wines and skin-contact whites.

For the most part, however, region remains a less useful guide to rosé style than producer – and that’s true all over the world. While rosé is capable of being a terroir wine (it can have a sense of place), it’s the decisions made in the winery that have the most significant effect on style. The general drift towards paleness notwithstanding, the past five years have seen a range of serious rosé winemakers experiment with what’s possible in rosé in sometimes fascinatingly delicious ways. And whether they’re playing with skin or lees contact, with oak, steel or amphora, or even holding back releases to give their wines time to age, the rosé scene has never been more diverse.

A spectrum-spanning selection of indie-friendly rosés

Château La Mascaronne, Côtes de Provence, France 2020 (FMV)

The epitome of stylish pale Provence rosé, on the eye this is as light as they come; on the palate it glides with soft nutty creaminess and bright berry-cherry.

Pasquiers Grenache-Cinsault Rosé, Corbières, France 2022 (Boutinot)

A wine that takes the Provence pale method and applies it further west along the coast in a brilliantly crisp, refreshing and, crucially, good value rosé.

Ramón Bilbao Lalomba Rosado Finca Lalinde, Rioja, Spain 2021 (Enotria&Coe)

Ramón Bilbao has been at the vanguard of fine rosé production in Rioja, with this single-vineyard bottling a complex, seamless contemporary pale pink.

Feudi di San Gregorio Visione Irpinia Rosato, Campania, Italy 2021 (Hallgarten & Novum Wines)

A southern Italian answer to Provence, this seamless salmon-pink rosé is filled with zingy cherry and raspberry – a pastel rendition of the darkness of Aglianico.

Birichino Vin Gris, Santa Cruz, California 2020 (Bancroft)

An explicit homage to the wines of Provence, this Californian blend of very old-vine Grenache, Cinsault, Mourvèdre and Rolle is wonderfully, evocatively herbal.

Domaine de Montmillon Oeil de Pedrix, Neuchâtel, Switzerland 2020 (Alpine Wines)

A 100% Pinot Noir from the shores of Lake Neuchâtel, this pillow-soft, salmon-coloured Swiss wine is filled with gently insistent acidity and a delightful subtle herb-and-strawberry character.

Celler del Roure Les Prunes Blanc de Mando, Valencia, Spain 2019 (Alliance Wine)

Made from the local red grape Mando, and aged in amphora, Pablo Calatayud’s individualistic blanc de noir is made like a white wine but retains a delicate pink hue and lovely crisp redcurrant fruit.

Thymiopoulos Rosé de Xinomavro, Macedonia, Greece 2013 (Eclectic Wines)

Apostolos Thymiopoulos makes some seriously characterful rosé form Xinomavro, with this example, aged for four years in oak, a marvel of complex, chewy berry and tomato maturity.

Domaine Maby La Forcadière Tavel, France 2021 (Yapp Bros)

A benchmark example of the dark, robust, spicy, textured but nonetheless refreshing foodfriendly delights of the Southern Rhône’s 100% pink appellation.

ong-term rosé advocate and enthusiast Charles Bieler is a winemaker full of joy for the 2022 Provence vintage “I’d go as far as saying this 2022 Rosé is the most exciting vintage in recent memory,” he says.

Bieler is talking about his Sabine AOP Coteaux d’Aix-enProvence. The wine is a blend of Grenache (32%), Syrah (23%) and Cinsault (17%), with smaller amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon, Rolle, Grenache Blanc and Counoise in the mix. The company has been making new plantings and grafting over extensively in the past 10 years. This has given it a rich selection of varieties, which is an important element in Bieler’s ambition to develop and enhance the flavour profile of the wines.

2022 was warm and dry, giving the wine impressive concentration of flavour, with no loss of natural freshness. This is thanks to the fruit being sourced from the cooler, higher altitude vineyards that surround Aix-en-Provence. Here, because of the brisker night-time temperatures, the ripening period is that bit longer, which gives the grapes time to develop a broader flavour profile, while retaining natural acidity. On average, the fruit for Bieler’s rosé wines is harvested two weeks after the vineyards on the flatter Provençal plains.

Bieler believes that Provence sets the gold standard in rosé wine. He says: “Our goal is to find the delicate balance between floral, herbal, wild red fruit (not overly ripe), stone fruit and acidity. We don’t want singular big flavours; we want more nuance, energy, soul and personality.”

The winemaking is expertly and tactfully managed. Plots are vinified separately with yeast selection and lees treatments chosen with individuality in mind – the objective being that each parcel brings unique qualities and characteristics to the wine. Pre-fermentation, juice solids are circulated, to create greater depth and concentration. Nitrogen coverage is used to ensure that there’s no damaging exposure to oxygen, resulting in a brilliantly vivid rosé.

Sabine 2022 has aromas of peach, white cherry and wild raspberry, balanced by summer flowers, white tea and Provençal herbs. Both delicate and creamy on the palate, this rosé has terrific length, the raspberry, cherry, herbal, citrus and mineral notes lingering long and generously.

Bieler Père et Fils buys fruit from growers with whom it has been working collaboratively since 2005. The Bieler family’s love affair with Provence was sparked by Charles’s father, Philippe, who bought a property – Château Routas – in the Coteaux Varois in 1992. The focus was on Grenache-based red wines and rosé too, though for the children, Mira and Charles,

'the most exciting vintage in living memory'

Why Charles Bieler is delighted with his 2022 Sabine Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence rosé

it was the rosé that stole their hearts. Routas was sold in 2005 but Bieler Père et Fils was founded, with rosé the shining star.

Charles’ lifelong passion for rosé is now decades deep. At a time when rosé was slightly unfashionable, he crossed the USA in a pink Cadillac promoting the Routas rosé, building a loyal fanbase.

Bieler Père et Fils has amassed an impressive collection of top scores and favourable critical reviews, with 90 points awarded between 2019 and 2021.

Sabine Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence Rosé 2022 is a delicious expression of this stunning vintage.

Meet the Aussie behind an Italian rosé

I am the founder and Chief Rosé Drinker of Cala Falcone, which I officially launched in 2020 in a misguided attempt to turn my life into a Slim Aarons catalogue. I have yet to achieve the Slim Aarons lifestyle, but I did manage to create a rather good rosé.

For me, Puglia is the most beautiful place in Italy. Every time I go down and I see the red earth, the olive trees, the stone walls … I feel genuinely at peace. It’s not polished, it’s raw. It’s true Italy for me.

I’ve been summering in Puglia every year since I was 18. My best friend’s parents bought a rugged piece of land with several trulli on the hills near Monopoli and turned it into their retirement project. They turned this run down piece of land into the most incredible masseria, making their own wine, olive oil, honey and vegetables. I truly fell in love with Puglia and the Italian way of life.

I always knew Cala Falcone was going to be a rosé. I love rosé. I love what it represents. It’s summer in a bottle, it’s good times with people you love, it’s the sea, it’s blue skies, it’s carefree. Its qualities match perfectly with my experience of Puglia, which happens to have a long history with making rosé too.

It was clear from the beginning that it should be made in Puglia, but I wanted to give it a modern interpretation. Super light, not too acidic, easily consumed without food. Beverino, as they say in Italy.

We use a method of growing grapes called vite ad alberello, which dates back over 2,500 years to the early Romans and Greeks and has remained unchanged since. The vines are grown as nature intended,

as small bushes whose leaves protect the grapes from the harsh climate. It doesn’t get much more low-intervention than that! This method is naturally lower yielding and inherently more sustainable than modern viticulture processes, so we only make 5,000 bottles every year.

Negroamaro is a very light, gentle grape, contrasting with the intensity of Primitivo. We tried various blends starting with 100% Negroamaro, but as we directly press our grapes, it was too light, lacking in character. Once we added the 25% Primitivo, which gave structure and body without overpowering the Negroamaro, the whole thing came to life. It was the result of about three years of experimentation before we found the right balance.

If we could summarise the winemaking philosophy behind Cala Falcone, it’s il futuro ha un cuore antico – “the future has an ancient heart”.

On the back of our bottle we have a little quote for our would-be customers: “For those who question why, who chase the unknown, the curious and rebellious. Here’s to you.” It’s always scary going against the grain. Mass-market rosés are the safe bet because no one will complain, but they won’t necessarily be happy either.

Cala Falcone is a rosé that, if you have it in your fridge, if you pull it out at a dinner, people will ask you about it. The head sommelier of 10 Corso Como in Milan does most of his sales of Cala simply because guests will see another table with this beautiful bottle and want to try it. All it takes is a customer willing to try something different – to discover something amazing.

Cala Falcone Rosato (RRP £25.95)

On the nose, there’s white peach, watermelon and hibiscus. The classic fruitiness of the Negroamaro grapes comes through gracefully. You think it’s going to be sweet, but it’s so beautifully dry.

On the palate it is crisp and fresh. It has a balanced acidity that presents as grapefruit – my favourite part. There’s a long, clean finish.

Angus Walton

Cala Falcone Puglia

Angus is originally from Australia but has spent a large part of his life in Italy. “I like to pretend I’m Italian,” he says.

His Cala Falcone project in Puglia is producing limited-edition premium rosato with a distinctive golden hue.

What makes Cala Falcone different to any rosé is its iconic golden hue. It’s like you're drinking liquid gold in a glass. It really is something you have to experience for yourself.

Even now, after having consumed more Cala Falcone than I care to admit, when I pour myself a glass my reaction is always “holy shit, that’s good!” And then somehow the wine disappears rather quickly after that. One of life’s mysteries.

Imported by Propeller propeller.wine

Southern Wine Roads has a simple enough origin story. As Maria Moutsou, the company’s founder and driving force, puts it: “I founded SWR in 2014 because I couldn’t find enough Greek wine around, and I thought there was something missing.”

In the eight years since Moutsou began trading in earnest, much has changed, she says, with Greek wines now much closer to the mainstream in the UK. What hasn’t changed is Moutsou’s mission, which is all about working with “family wineries who see the process from the roots of the vine to the bottle, people who tend the vineyards, grow the fruit, and press and elaborate the wine.”

Moutsou, a Greek-British who has has strong personal connections to the producers in her portfolio, decided to show off the enormous variety in both Greece and her range through a focus on the country’s three best-known grape varieties: the white Assyrtiko, and the reds Xinomavro and Mavrodaphne. She picked out two very different wines to represent each variety, which led to a flight that spanned everything from a zingy dry white to an orange wine, a blanc de noir, and a trio of very different reds.

As Moutsou points out, Greece’s appellations were created in the early 1970s and based on local traditions, which means they don’t always reflect modern trends.

That means, for example, that Assyrtiko has only one appellation in which it is required to be the main grape (85%, in PDO Santorini).

Xinomavro has four, all in central and western Macedonia; Mavrodaphne has three, but only for sweet wine. Faced with changing habits, Mavrodaphne producers are turning to more approachable styles, suitable for everyday drinking.

TAKE THREE GREEK GRAPES

> ASSYRTIKO

The tasting kicked off with the great white Greek grape Assyrtiko, a grape variety that originated in ancient Assyria, and which has become strongly associated with the volcanic terroir of the island of Santorini. As Moutsou says, however, the variety, while still only accounting for around 10% of total Greek plantings, has been spreading throughout Greece, producing very different wines wherever it is planted.

Karadimos Neottia Assyrtiko 2022

From central mainland Greece, very close to the coast, on limestone soil, and at 330m altitude: a “beautiful terroir”, says Moutsou, and “a breezy vineyard”. The wine spends some time on lees.

“It’s very expressive of Assyrtiko,” she adds. “A citrus core, but then white fruit like nectarine, and even some floral qualities. Elegant and powerful at the same time.”

Markogianni Vorias and Helios

Assyrtiko Orange 2021

From the lands of ancient Olympia, in the Peloponnese, an example of how well Assyrtiko can work with extended skin contact, in this case 10 days. The fruit comes from a vineyard at 150m, but again with plenty of cooling breezes.

“The relatively low alcohol is counterbalanced with a lot of phenolic presence, a lot of taste, a lot of colour from the skins,” says Moutsou. “It’s a balanced wine, but more trendy – something to have in a wine bar or with tapas.”

> XINOMAVRO

The grape behind many of modern Greece’s best red wines hails from the north of the country, and is spread across four protected PDOs. Often compared to Pinot Noir and Nebbiolo, thanks to its “thin skins, powerful linear tannins and

high acidity”, it produces wines that are “very pale in colour but very rich in taste”, Moutsou says.

Domaine

Tatsis Xiropotamos Blanc de Noir 2018

Biodynamic, organic and with very little sulphur, this white Xinomavro is made by two brothers from grapes grown at 750m in “a proper mountainous” terrain and “proper continental climate”, says Moutsou.

“Here we do not have the skin effect to give us all that breadth of flavours, but still there is a lot of uniqueness of flavours and power,” she explains. “The low-intervention approach showcases even better the grape here as a blanc de noir.”

Karadimos Family Vissa Xinomavro 2016

From the same producers as the Neottia Assyrtiko, this red is Greece’s southernmost Xinomavro and, according

In our online tasting with Greece specialist Southern Wine Roads, we explore very different interpretations of Assyrtiko, Xinomavro and Mavrodaphne

to Moutsou, the location brings “more richness and higher alcohol than found in the more northerly examples”.

“For those who know Xinomavro already, it’s interesting because the fruit is red rather than black. It has the classic vegetal tones but they are not over-pronounced. The herbal notes are well absorbed, and there’s chocolate, too, but it’s warmer and rounder than northern examples.”

> MAVRODAPHNE

Mavrodaphne, which has its “motherland” in the Peloponnese, is still best known for the port-like sweet fortified red wines that were popular throughout much of Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, many producers are making high-quality dry wines from a grape that Moutsou compares to Touriga Nacional, although “outdated” local legislation means only the sweet wine producers are allowed to put Mavrodaphne on the label.

RETAILER FEEDBACK

Carl Reid

Saxtys Wines, Hereford

“As a long-time fan of Greece and its wines I really enjoyed the tasting. It was interesting to try some Assyrtiko that wasn’t from Santorini which showed how markedly different the styles can be. And I’ve never tried a Mavrodaphne that wasn’t sweet and from Patras, so that was a first. If I had to pick a star wine it would be the Vissa, which had perfume, complexity and was just an enjoyable wine to drink.”

Charlotte Dean

Wined Up Here, Norbiton

“The stand-out wine was the 2022 Assyrtiko – a very pungent open nose of pear fruit and some peachiness. Very inviting. Great weight on the palate, focused and pure, with lovely viscosity that filled the mouth and balanced acidity which left the mouth clean and fresh and looking forward to more. Although high alcohol, it was well integrated: complete and delicious. Our favourite red was the Vissa Xinomavro. Soft red fruit notes of cherry and raspberries. Lively and fresh on the palate inviting another sip. No harsh tannins. Fresh and pure fruited.”

Duncan Gammie

The Wee Vinoteca, Hitchin & Cambridge

“I very much enjoyed the first Assyrtiko and the white Xinomavro. Overall I thought the tasting introduced some very exciting wines that will be very well received by adventurous wine drinkers and in fine-dining restaurants.”

Chris Bain

Sant’Or Krãsis 2020

From the north western part of the Peloponnese, a vineyard at 750m, this is a natural wine, biodynamic, harvested early, and aged for six months in old barrels to mellow the tannins.

“It is a gentle expression” of a “thickskinned grape. It has a blue hue, the tannins are tamed, the wine is more about freshness and we pick up the flavour profile at the very end.”

Papargyriou The Black Daphne 2021

From one of the very few north-facing vineyards in Greece, at 800m, looking directly onto the Corinthian Bay in the northern Peloponnese, this is a much darker, more extracted, style, says Moutsou, in which you can see the sweet-wine tradition coming through.

“It’s round and ready, very pleasant and approachable. A popular wine, with a fullness and integration that suits the British palate,” she adds.

Harris & Co, Castle Douglas

“I thought Karadimos Neottia 2022 was excellent, with great fruit concentration and a lovely hint of the sea. The alcohol was hidden nicely in the layers of flavour. We’ll likely list it.

“I also really enjoyed the Karadimos Vissa 2016, which in the glass I suppose looked like a Nebbiolo and had a very attractive nose of cherries and herbs. It reminded me of both a Languedoc red and something from northern Italy at the same time, and for nearly seven years old I thought it was very nice indeed. Again, we will probably list.”

Kieran O’Brien

Three Pillars Wine, Stafford

“I was really impressed with the wines. This was the first time I tried a white Xinomavro and that was the stand-out wine for me. The orange Assyrtiko was another highlight. A deliciously savoury and textured skin contact wine.”

For more information contact maria@southernwineroads.com southernwineroads.com 07775 714595

Maria Moutsou enjoying Mavrodaphne straight from the vines at Papargyriou Estate

Focus on South of France

David Williams considers some of this year’s main talking points from a part of the world where there always seems to be something worth talking about

Learning to cope with the unexpected

No corner of the wine world has been spared the effects of the climate crisis. But growers in the south of France do seem to have been at the forefront of extreme weather patterns over the past two years.

While much of the coverage of France’s 2021 vintage focused on the disastrous, livelihood-threatening effects of the late spring frost in the north (Burgundy, the Loire, the Jura), nowhere – with the exception of Provence – had a good time of it, and the south certainly did not escape. As one of southern France’s leading large producers, LGI Wines, put it, 2021 was “one of the hardest vintages on record”, with first frost and then extreme heat and drought, followed by heavy rains at harvest time. Volumes were down, although certain parts – Limoux, Roussillon – fared better than others on all counts.

2022 was no less challenging throughout the region, featuring as it did record-breaking high temperatures that consistently broke the 40°C barrier, and led to widespread forest fires. And while most of the vineyards escaped fire damage (and all avoided smoke taint), the extreme heat led to an accelerated growing season and unprecedented early harvests: growers in Fitou began harvesting in late July, and many growers had finished picking by the end of the first week of August.

Expecting the unexpected is now one of the chief skills required of a vigneron working in southern France. Learning how to adapt to the new climatic normal and its confounding range of challenges is calling on all their ingenuity.

Old vines: A regional strength

Old vines have become hot property in the wine world in recent years, with the message that beauty in wine comes with vine age starting to get real traction among consumers. That’s good news for growers across the Occitanie area, which is home to a concentration of France’s most precious old-vine treasures.

Vines of over 50 years of age are commonplace, but a remarkable number of vignerons are working with centenarian vines – survivors, all, of successive waves of economically-driven grubbing-up campaigns – even if they are sometimes prevented from showing off that fact.

Certainly, many Languedoc AOC rules stipulating that wines must be blends containing a minimum percentage of each variety tend to lead to wines in which the fruit of old vines is mingled with the fruit of much younger ones.

That’s not the case in Roussillon, however, a region that has become justly known for intensely concentrated but balanced and finely detailed reds and no-less-fascinating whites made exclusively from old and very old vines.

As ever in this part of France, these can be absurd value, too. Domaine Gayda’s intensely expressive Altre Cami red and white would be at least twice their £26.99 price tag were they to hail from almost anywhere else in France (or Spain; they have a Priorat-like mineral quality), while Jean-Marc Lafage’s Centenaire Vieilles Vignes white, with its waves of salty-pithy acidity, is almost absurdly under-sold at the £11.50 price tag it has at some online retailers.

The harbour at Collioure

Pays d’Oc: A 35-year transformation

The Pays d’Oc designation celebrated its 35th birthday last year, and few would argue that the Languedoc-Roussillon-wide IGP, now produced in half of the region’s 240,000ha total vineyard area, has been anything less than transformative since it emerged in 1987.

Its mission – to embrace the varietal marketing and flexible winemaking approach of the new world – remains in place, and the designation has long since established itself as the biggestselling (in terms of volume) French GI both domestically and internationally, with the IGP Pays d’Oc generic body coming up with the fun statistic that a bottle of IGP Pays d’Oc wine is sold every 25 seconds.

That flexibility can be seen in the evolving stylistic and varietal make-up of the GI, which has, over the years, moved from its initial focus on red varieties to adjust to the fashion towards white wine, notably Chardonnay, in the 1990s. Then, in the 2000s, as rosé began to eclipse white wine in France, there was a mini-boom in plantings of the popular pink-wine variety, Cinsault.

Some 58 varieties are now permitted, with the likes of Albariño, Nielluccio and Tempranillo taking their place alongside the big hitters Merlot (the biggest red in terms of volume produced) and Chardonnay (comfortably the biggest white). In terms of style, the balance is now 45% red, 30% rosé and 25% white.

Picpoul de Pinet: Getting serious

For all that IGP Pays d’Oc remains the standard-bearer for southern French varietal wine, the single most successful white variety from the region in the past decade has been the one that most consumers would be hard pressed to recognise as a variety at all. That variety is Picpoul, of “de Pinet” fame, which is responsible for half of the Languedoc’s white wine production, and a remarkable 80% of Languedoc-Roussillon’s total white wine exports.

It’s a phenomenon largely shaped by British drinkers, with the UK responsible for more than 57% of Picpoul exports (65% of Picpoul is exported). There’s something about this “Muscadet of the south”, with its combination of freshness, easy lemon-and-apple fruitiness and, perhaps crucially, pricing that is particularly suited to UK palates.

It’s all a far cry from the late 1980s, when vignerons in the region were puzzling how to cope with the precipitous fall in the market for vermouth which had sustained them for so long.

The next step is to cement the appellation as capable of something a little more serious, which it is hoping to do via officially sanctioned “Selection” wines, which aim for something with a little more concentration, elegance and/or complexity.

Château

criteria.

de Pinet-Gaujal de St-Bon Cuvée Impériale (above) is an example that fits all those

Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, Gard

Occitanie v Burgundy

At a time when winemakers in Essex are ripening Chardonnay and Pinot Noir with ease, lovers of traditional Champagne and Burgundy could be forgiven for looking north rather than south for a fix of the sort of virtues they associate with these varieties.

Curiously, however, recent hot vintages in the south of France have not impeded the rise in quality of both varieties in and around Limoux Upper Aude Valley, an area that has long provided them with the cooler comforts they prefer – and, as ever in these parts, at significantly lower prices than their northern peers (including in Essex).

Recent Aude Valley favourites at The Wine Merchant include Domaine d’O and Domaine de Mouscaillo (Pinot Noir); Domaine J Laurens and Étienne Fort (sparkling Limoux) and Domaine Bégude (Chardonnay) – while the inexhaustible Jean-Claude Mas makes some of the best and best-value wines in his wide portfolio in the area.

A developing sub-regional identity?

Winegrowers in Limoux/the Aude Valley are not the only ones who are having some success in carving out a distinctive identity within the overarching southern French/Languedoc-Roussillon/ Occitanie brands.

CRÉATEURS DE GRANDS VINS en Languedoc-Roussillon

Founded in 1995, Calmel & Joseph is a micro-négociant. We make Languedoc-Roussillon wines from carefully selected vineyards which are farmed with utmost respect for the environment, according to strict guidelines. We vinify, age and blend to create wines of character.

La Marquise is another one of our fine exclusive estate wines that highlights yet another classic indigenous variety that grows, like all our other estate wines, on organically farmed vineyards at 350 meters altitude.

www.calmel-joseph.com

PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY

There is a sense, too, certainly among more engaged wine lovers, that the region’s appellations and crus are starting to come into their own, each of them with a different take on the traditional Mediterranean red blend.

We are not quite at Rhône – let alone Bordeaux or Burgundy – levels of sub-regional recognition just yet. But bottlings from Corbières, Pic St-Loup, Faugères, Terrasses du Larzac, St-Chinian, Maury, Fitou and Minervois-La-Livinière have all been spotted by this correspondent in one or more supermarkets in recent months, and at prices often significantly higher than the multiples’ standard southern French limit.

Some 58 varieties are now permitted in Pays d’Oc, with the likes of Albariño, Nielluccio and Tempranillo taking their place alongside the big hitters Merlot and Chardonnay

Vines at Naramata Bench Winery, Okanagan Valley, British Columbia

Northern Lights Tasting

Delibo, Dreyfus Ashby, Gonzalez Byass, Hatch Mansfield, Marta Vine, New Generation Wines, Richmond Wine Agencies, Ucopia and Winetraders return for this indie-focused tasting.

Each importer has its own specialisms and will be using the event to unveil new ranges and new vintages, in several cases in the company of the winemakers themselves.

For more information and to register, email julia@richmondwineagencies.com.

Monday, April 24

The Tetley

Hunslet Road

Leeds LS10 1JQ

Walker & Wodehouse Spring Tasting

The event will showcase wines from across the W&W portfolio along with “a few surprises”.

For registration details, merchants should contact their account manager.

Wednesday, May 3

Tanner & Co

50 Bermondsey Street

London SE1 3UD

Deep Down Under Tasting

This is the third edition of the Deep Down Under tasting, organised by a group of leading importers.

They are Awin Barratt Siegel, Graft

Wine Company, Liberty Wines, Flint Wines, Indigo Wine and Nekter Wines.

Several Australian winemakers will be visiting for the first time including Vinteloper founder David Bowley, Tim Wildman, Melanie Chester of Giant Steps, Tom Grant of SC Pannell and Johann Henschke.

Registration information is available at Eventbrite.co.uk.

Monday, May 22

Wild By Tart

3-4 Ecceleston Yards

London SW1W 9AZ

Wines of Canada

Tasting

Twenty-four wineries from British Columba, Nova Scotia and Ontario will be represented at this event.

The day includes a Cool Reds masterclass and a Chardonnay feature table.

The tasting will feature wines from both vinifera and hybrid grapes.

Full details and registration can be found at canadatasting.co.uk or from daniel. brewer@westburycom.co.uk.

Tuesday, May 23 & Wednesday, May 24

Canadian Embassy

Canada House, Trafalgar Square

London SW1Y 5BJ

Wines of Georgia Tasting

Sarah Abbott MW introduces her musttry selection from over 100 Georgian wines.

The event will feature the collaboration with Georgia’s Women in Wine organisation with many female winemakers visiting.

Those seeking wines not yet represented can visit the Unsigned Talent table.

For more information and to register, email madeleine@swirlgroup.com.

Tuesday, May 23

The Vinyl Factory

18 Marshall Street

London W1F 7BE

Thorman Hunt Italian Tasting

This tasting features many family growers and is dedicated to premium, artisanal wines from across Italy.

Highlights include Argiano, Fratelli Berlucchi, Cortonesi, Azienda Agricola Michele Reverdito, Di Giuseppe and Mauro Pavia.

Thorman Hunt is also introducing some new arrivals including Fattoria La Rivolta from Campania, and Casa D’Ambra in Ischia.

For more information and to register, email vanessa@thormanhunt.co.uk.

Wednesday, May 24

67 Pall Mall

London SW1Y 5ES

Sarah Abbott MW

Annoying/endearing Aidan was in today. He was celebrating his 30th birthday by being a grumpy wee prick.

It’s a period of High Cosmic Activity, it’s everyone’s birthday, which doesn’t make sense. Are we just drawn to people born at a particular time? Is there a particular time that people are born in? Aidan was bemoaning his 30-year-oldness and I couldn’t give a fuck. Turning 30? Walk in the park. Why would you want to hang on to those miserable, vomity, wise/foolish, secure/insecure years of your 20s? What do those years even matter, now? “The only thing you have to lose is the comfort of your working body,” I told annoying/ endearing Aidan. “Things are only going to get worse. Enjoy those fleeting moments of fulfilment/pleasure because you certainly don’t get more of those in your 30s. And don’t fake the fulfilment/pleasure by excessive booze and food consumption.”

I have been eating a lot of food and occasionally feeling really quite sick with delicious excess. Last week I had a day out in Edinburgh, culminating in a dimly lit room with some well-dressed wine people, many cuts of cow and some killercarbs covered in strong tasting fats.

“Do you remember,” I said to my favourite sub-continentally inspired Fellow Merchant, “when we were in Sicily and you asked me if I had to only have one herb for the rest of my life what would it be and I said mint? I would like to change my answer, mint was foolish …” We never got to finish this conversation because we never do, we’re trapped in an everlasting almost. We would like to be taken away somewhere (#indiaandphoebetakeaway) and given interesting things to taste so that we could get to the bottom of things. Greece would be nice. Or Tenerife. We would be an absolute pleasure.

28. ESCAPE TO THE LOIRE

Phoebe Weller of Valhalla’s Goat in Glasgow is whisked away to France, where she has time to contemplate mint, the ageing process and the possibility that not all people are real

She wasn’t with me yesterday when I had a perfect lunch (terrine, baguette, bavette/bearnaise of dreams, no-fuss cheese, conversation surrounding essential condiments, quiet polished limestone streets, blue sky) in Montlouissur-Loire. A consistently classy supplier saw some fractals in my eye a month ago and followed up with an email saying, “we’re taking you to the Loire”. My fellow escapees were excellent and I didn’t soil myself. It was the first time

I’ve flown since 2019 and I was reminded that people actually exist, which is good because I did, last week, have a serious conversation with seemingly real people about the impossibility of 8 billion people existing; maybe there’s only, say, a hundred people or so and a lot of holograms or mirrors, like in The Man with the Golden Gun. Or: as all matter is between a wave and a particle, there’s all those people in existence but maybe we only exist for some of the time, which is why everyone I know’s birthday’s on the same day. All these people farming and typing and striking and waiting and lunching but not at the same time.

Maybe not, because Titi in the bar in Tours (who did a great advert for Pipers Crisps (Best Crisps! in Tours!) for me that I completely failed to film), and the serveuse in Montlouis-sur-Loire (with the perfect, working tiny golden Waitersfriend on her necklace who gave me a cutting of the restaurant spider plant) ... they existed. Moments of pleasure, just enough.

Sorry for the misery chat yesterday, I texted annoying/endearing Aidan. No bother, he later replied, I thought it was really insightful and beautiful advice.

Poor young fool.

Annoying/endearing Aidan cancels his birthday party

LOUIS LATOUR AGENCIES

12-14 Denman Street

London W1D 7HJ

0207 409 7276

enquiries@louislatour.co.uk

www.louislatour.co.uk

Hazel’s Vineyard is McHenry Hohnen’s southernmost and biodynamic vineyard, certified in 2020 and located in Margaret River, Western Australia. This site benefits from a cooling Southern Ocean influence, and a northerly aspect, with plenty of sunshine and free-draining, ironstone gravel loam soil.

Today, the vineyard is managed by Simon Keall, with the aim in encouraging biodiversity within their boundaries, and in minimising all external inputs.

How McHenry Hohnen maintain and encourage biodiversity

• Vineyard chickens manage pest insects

• Sheep provide organic fertiliser and graze on weeds

• Honeybee colonies assist pollination and act as environmental indicators

• Rainwater harvesting for all winery operations

• Significant solar power generation

• Extensive composting

Wines to seek out

Hazel’s Vineyard Chardonnay 2019: A layered wine with persistence, power and structure. A true representation of this southern Margaret River vineyard.

Hazel’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2015: A purist’s Cabernet; unfined and unfiltered, an elegant expression of Hazel’s Vineyard with harmony, balance and integrity.

hatch mansfield

info@gonzalezbyassuk.com www.gonzalezbyassuk.com

@gonzalezbyassuk

@WalkerWodehouse

vindependents

www.vindependents.co.uk

hallgarten wines

Mulberry

sales@hnwines.co.uk

www.hnwines.co.uk

Famille Helfrich Wines

1, rue Division Leclerc, 67290

Petersbach, France

chris.davies@lgcf.fr

07789 008540

@FamilleHelfrich

@gcf_exclusive_uk

ucopia wines

Unit 2 Wellbrook Farm Berkeley Road

Mayfield, East Sussex

TN20 6EH

01435 517 080

office@ucopiawines.co.uk

Phil Crozier joins Ucopia Wines

Specialist importer Ucopia Wines is delighted to announce that the latest member to join its team is Phil Crozier, formerly director of wines at Gaucho Restaurants and more recently head of Wines of Argentina, Europe.

Phil brings with him encyclopaedic knowledge of Argentina and its wines as well as vast commercial experience in the UK wine industry over the last two decades.

Ucopia MD Laurie Webster says: “This is a very exciting development for Ucopia as we as we embark on our third year of trading. Phil joins us to bolster our plans for growth and help us to realise our ambition to become a leading specialist supplier of top-quality wines from South America and beyond to the UK trade.”

For more information, please email office@ucopiawines.co.uk or call 01435 517 080.

They’re all smiles to your face …

BERKMANN wine cellars

104d St John Street

London EC1M 4EH

020 7609 4711

info@berkmann.co.uk

www.berkmann.co.uk

@berkmannwine

@berkmann_wine

buckingham schenk

Unit 5, The E Centre

Easthampstead Road

Bracknell RG12 1NF

01753 521336

info@buckingham-schenk.co.uk

www.buckingham-schenk.co.uk

@BuckSchenk

@buckinghamschenk

The perfect rosé from the Languedoc, this pale pink wine from French Bulldog is complete with floral notes, followed by a delicate and complex nose and strawberry flavours, making it as clasically refreshing as it is delicious.

~

Cheerful and playful with a touch of arrogance, the French Bulldog was the inspiration for this range of wines from the Languedoc area. Produced from vines planted on well-drained hillsides, surrounded by scrub land and limestone, the area is blessed with plenty of sunshine all year round and cooling sea breezes.

Available in red, white and rosé Pays d’Oc.

Fells

Fells House, Station Road

Kings Langley WD4 8LH

01442 870 900

For more details about these wines and other wines from our awardwinning portfolio from some of the world’s leading wine producing families contact:

info@fells.co.uk www.fells.co.uk

@FellsWine

je_fells

richmond wine agencies

The Links, Popham Close

Hanworth

Middlesex TW13 6JE

020 8744 5550

info@richmondwineagencies.com

@richmondwineag1

Attis Mar 2021 Albariño is now available via Richmond Wine Agencies

• Selection of 50-year-old vines

• Hand harvested

• Sorting table selection

• Ageing on lees in stainless steel tanks for 6 months with batonnage

• Ageing for 6 months under the sea, to a depth of 12m

Limited availability – please contact us for more details

Our 2021 Agency List is now available. Drop us an email for your copy.

A Sea Matured Albariño

020

info@mentzendorff.co.uk www.mentzendorff.co.uk

Cartuxa is known for some of the best wines in the world, and is truly legendary in Portugal with its icon Pêra-Manca. The winery dates back to the sixteenth century in the Évora region of the Alentejo and is owned by a non-profit making foundation, the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation. Here are two fantastic reds that represent great value for money.

Cartuxa Tinto 2018

“This has a floral, expressive nose that is bright and vivid with lovely red cherry and raspberry fruit. There’s a touch of redcurrant, too. The palate is ripe and textured with nice fleshiness and a grainy structure. Substantial but still very fresh, displaying ripe berry fruits.” 93 points

Geno Tinto 2019

“I still cannot quite believe the value offered by this stunningly rewarding wine from acclaimed producer Cartuxa Evora… the colourful label gives you an idea of the open, refreshing flavours in this engaging red.”

Jamie Goode, Wine Anorak

Matthew Jukes, Daily Mail

liberty wines

020 7720 5350

Château Miraval goes from strength to strength

Over the past decade, Miraval has garnered a reputation for top quality rosé wines, made under the expert guidance of the Perrin family of Château de Beaucastel fame. Thanks to their continued dedication to improving quality in both the vineyards and the cellar, Miraval is today considered one of the great names of Provence.

@liberty_wines

selection

Château Miraval is in Correns, the first 100% organic village in France, where all the crops, including grapes, are grown organically. Tucked away in its own private valley, the château is surrounded by ancient woodlands and olive groves. Their 50ha of terraced vineyards lie on clay and chalk soils at 350m altitude – the cool nights here moderating the warm days and allowing the grapes to retain their delicate aromas and crisp acidity. Hand-harvested in the coolness of the morning, the grapes are hand sorted twice ensuring that only the best go into the wine.

The Cinsault, Grenache and Rolle parcels for their Côtes de Provence Rosé are gently pressed to extract just the right amount of colour, while the Syrah is vinified using the saignée method. Each variety is fermented separately – 95% in temperature-controlled stainless-steel tanks and 5% in oak barrels with bâtonnage to add texture and complexity – before blending. The resulting wine is a beautiful pale petal-pink colour with enticing aromas of fresh raspberries, cherries and hints of garrigue, while the palate is dry with refreshing acidity and a lingering, perfumed finish.

Q&A

Tatiana Fokina Hedonism Wines

week. Even though I live in Chelsea now, I love going to see the games at the Emirates when I can. I’m really happy they seem to have finally found their game this season.

Who’s your favourite music artist?

The Rolling Stones, not only their music, but their vitality. I saw them live in Hyde Park last summer and they are still in such good form. Something to aspire to after the hedonistic lifestyle they have led.

Any superstitions?

I never reveal our projects to anyone, even close friends and family, before they are completely finished.

Who’s your favourite wine critic?

Jancis Robinson certainly did an incredible amount to break certain stigmas and misconceptions within this field. I don’t always agree with her reviews, but I always enjoy reading them.

What’s your most treasured possession?

I have a very small sketch by one of my favourite artists, Egon Schiele. It is hung on the wall in my bedroom and is one of the first things I see when I wake up.

What’s your proudest moment?

Hedonism Wines makes me proud every day. It has been over 12 years since we started the project and to see the company going from strength to strength makes me extremely happy.

Tatiana Fokina moved from Russia to London in 2009. She is CEO of Hedonism Group which includes the fine-wine emporium Hedonism Wines, the Michelin star restaurant Hide, and the White Horse wine pub in Mayfair. She is also an interior designer, creative director and founder of Studio Caché.

What’s the first wine you remember drinking?

It was Soviet “Champagne”, which is a sparkling wine from Crimea that used to be the drink the whole of the USSR celebrated the New Year with. I was 12 and my friend and I were allowed some. It was a demi-sec and probably would taste horrendous now, but was like ambrosia at the time.

How do you relax?

I don’t really; this is a skill I have not yet mastered. I love going to the cinema, preferably on my own. There is the original Curzon close to the office that shows a

lot of independent films and has a lovely atmosphere. The best way to spend time for myself and to truly switch off is surfing.

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell is a terrifying but incredible book I am sure will become a world classic alongside Slaughterhouse Five, The Tin Drum and other brilliant fiction on World War II.

Give us a Netflix recommendation.

I have recently watched Break Point, a documentary on the new generation of tennis stars that I really enjoyed. But my all-time favourite is Money Heist; I barely slept binge watching it. For a while, I have to admit, it completely took over my life.

Do you have any sporting loyalties?

Historically I support Arsenal as I lived on Gillespie Road near the stadium and the whole street turned red and white every

Who’s your hero?

Alexey Navalny. He is probably the most courageous person I know, a true fighter who is sacrificing his life and freedom for human rights and democracy.

Any hidden talents?

I make really good French crêpes.

What’s your favourite place in the UK? The white cliffs of Dover, by St Margaret’s Bay. It is a beautiful walk with a stunning view, with an occasional swim in the Channel and fish and chips on the beach.

If we could grant you one wish …

World peace is my only wish and I no doubt share it with millions of other people. The war in Ukraine is truly devastating. It is still incredibly hard to believe something like this can be happening in Europe in 2023. I really hope that this year will see the end of bloodshed and tyranny.

“Soviet ‘Champagne’ tasted like ambrosia when I was 12”