I am excited about this offer, from the admirable Hertfordshire firm
Hedley Wright. All the wines are packed with flavour and character and that special heady, perfumed quality you normally find in bottles at much higher prices. It may have something to do with the fact that they are nearly all from the New World, made by some of the most enterprising wine-makers you will find in many a month of glugging.
Take Ernst Loosen’s Villa Wolf Pinot Gris 20041. Dr Loosen was named Man of the Year by Decanter magazine in 2005, and when you drink this you will understand why. As different from a normal German wine as you could possibly imagine, it has all the punchy freshness of Pinot Gris, but layers of richer, fuller flavours. I saw this on a London restaurant wine list the other day priced at £29, but you can have it for £6.49.
New Zealand growers have pretty much mastered Sauvignon Blanc and made astonishing progress with Pinot Noir over the past few years. Now they are beginning to produce Chardonnays of a remarkable and unique quality. This Wild Rock Wild Ferment 20042 from Hawkes Bay is unoaked, yet it is crammed with flavour, spicy and with a special fragrant edge. At £8.49 it costs quite a bit less than almost any wine of similar quality.
Wither Hills is one of the finest New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs, and is usually hard to get hold of. The UK has an allocation, which gets snapped up pretty quickly, so I suggest you do the same with this 20053 if you like that grassy, gooseberry, herby quality, combined with a roundness that balances it out. At an informal tasting people thought it was ‘delectable’ and ‘gorgeous’, and they were right. Just £7.49.
Now the reds. A New York merchant famously once said that if Robert Parker, the omnipotent American judge of wines, gave a bottle less than 90, he couldn’t sell it, but if Parker gave it more than 90, he couldn’t buy it. So this Juan Gil Monastrell 20044 is pretty amazing value at £5.49, since Parker scored it at 91+. Parker is a controversial figure, especially in the British wine trade, but he and I share a taste for wines with real oomph, which this certainly has in spades. As one of our tasters, moved by the sheer weight of flavour, declared, ‘I would like to eat this.’ Evans & Tate is one of the finest wineries in Western Australia, in the famed Margaret River area, and its Shiraz is firstrate. The best Shirazes are more than dark, soupy wines, but have a fragrance, often derived from the eucalyptus trees nearby, which provides an extra zest and excitement. This 20015 has had much longer bottle-age than the great majority of Oz Shirazes, and — this is the amazing part — it is reduced from £10 to £7. A very considerable bargain.
I would also recommend very highly indeed the Kaiken Malbec 20036 made by Aurelio Montes, who is probably the leading wine-maker in Chile, but who has crossed the Andes to make wines under his own label, a kaiken being a wild Patagonian goose (not that that affects the wine). Our tasting notes included ‘perfumed, powerful, creamy, very classy indeed’, and it is all that. Why, I found myself asking, can the growers in the Lot valley of France, using the same grape, not put this quality into their Cahors wines? A decanter full of this will go wonderfully with a casserole or roast. A snip at 7.49.
All wines are sold by the case, though there is a sampler case containing two bottles of each. I recommend this since I suspect that you’ll like all the wines so much that you will want immediately to reorder some of them. The case is reduced to £79.95. All deliveries are free, and there is a further discount of £10 on each order of 24 bottles, and £20 for a 36-bottle order.
Previous page
