Special offer
Wine Club
Auberon Waugh
Astrange and rather mixed list for August. I swore to find a Hermitage offer after reading that it was the favourite wine of Conor Cruise O'Brien (a journalist I rather admire, but whom I had previously suspected of being something of a leftie on the strength of some silly novel reviews he used to write under the name of Donald O'Donnell 25 years ago). It was very hard to find any good, mature Hermitage at a reasonable price. The one I eventually found — the Hermitage Vogelgesang '1974 — was still pretty expensive and in such short supply that I decided to cut it with six bottles of Bristol-bottled Crozes Hermitage 1970 which were lying around unlabelled in Avery's cellars. This reduces the price and enables us to offer a grand total of 50 cases. If anybody, having tasted it, goes mad for the Crozes, there should be 16 cases of that left over at £4.50 the bottle (£54.00 the case) if you can get it past Avery's dragon of a computer.
The year 1974 was not particularly remarkable on the Rhone (Hugh Johnson gives it 4-6) or indeed anywhere else. Nor, to be honest, have I ever heard of Vogel- gesang before which sounds like a sort of John Pilger horror projection, being a cross between Volkswagen and doppelganger. When I opened a bottle an hour before lunch it tasted powerful, manly, robust all the clichés which are usually applied to Hermitage — just the sort of thing for any O'Brien to drink at lunchtime. But I was tasting several others at the same time./ and
did not finish it. When I tried it again at dinner, six and half hours later, I found it was exploding all over the place in a great fireworks display of complicated and ex- pensive tastes. A most exceptional wine.
The Crozes Hermitage 1970 is a very soft and gentle wine which one might never guess to have come from the Rhone at all. It has a good, upper-class taste and will shock no one — ideal for buttering up elderly relatives without any suspicion of the Bodkin Adams approach.
The beaujolais comes in an irritatingly shaped bottle. Its pretentious title disguises the fact that it does not come from any of the famous Beaujolais villages or grands crus. But it has a good Gamay taste and struck me as a bargain at the reduced price of £3.18. The same is true of the Lirac at £2.78 — a straightforward good wine with no firework displays, no lace petticoats or frills of any sort. Perhaps one should really compare it with the excellent Spanish wines coming up from a firm in Bath next month, but for really good everyday drinking wine ,delivered to your door in a respectable bot- tle I don't think you can do much better.
I throw in the sherry to see how it will go — the Exhibition Port, of blended vintage and ruby wine, was a spectacular failure, attracting only seven orders. My point with this offer is that when you buy the big branded sherries — Tio Pepe, La Ina, San Patricio etc — you are paying vastly over the odds for all the advertising, promotion and drunken journalists being flown around from bodega to bodega, making silly noises into their glasses. This is a good sherry for the price of a bad one. Sherry is also quite a cheap form of alcohol-intake nowadays — very necessary for those of us who have given up gin. It has a pretty label and looks distinctly superior, as if one has really studied one's sherries before deciding on this one.
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