find this wine – from £19.99 (26.10 euros in France and Can$49 in Canada) but see others below from £3.74 a bottle
I do my best to nominate wines of the week that can be found internationally. And I’m very aware of the fact that there are four times more American visitors to this site than there are Brits, despite the fact that such a high proportion of active users of the new members’ forum are from the UK. (Perhaps some newer visitors haven’t discovered that to post a new thread they have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list of recent topics on the forum?
However, I think it appropriate, on the day they announce they have made £1.1 billion in the last six months, to devote today’s wines of the week to a British phenomenon, the dominant and growing leading supermarket chain Tesco. The glamorously named Tesco, not so long ago very much an also-ran in the cut-throat world of multiple retailing, may not be as widely known internationally as Carrefour of France but it is expanding fast outside Britain. Tesco has just bought a massive site in the US, is already increasingly important in mainland Europe, as well as in China. Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand.
I wouldn’t be dedicating this slot to Tesco were it not for the fact that a) I tasted a wide range of their wines last week and b) their Wine Festival with some quite dramatic reductions has exactly one more week to run, ending on Tues Oct 10.
The wine I’ve chosen to highlight as wine of the week Condrieu 2004 Vins de Vienne is not part of their Wine Festival reductions but at £19.99 a bottle in their top 90 stores, and online per case of six at the equivalent of £18.99 a bottle, it is a very fine wine by any measure, at a decent price. The 2004 vintage was especially good for Condrieu. Vins de Vienne is the negociant company formed a few years ago by three of the most talented younger producers of the northern Rhône, Yves Cuilleron, François Villard and Pierre Gaillard, the first two my top two Condrieu heroes. It’s hardly surprising therefore that they should be able to find some seriously interesting Viognier grapes within the extremely limited Condrieu appellation and turn them into decent wine. This one is really exciting. It starts very rich and heady with that classic blossomy, dried apricot nose of fully ripe Viognier, is very full-bodied and vibrato but then finishes dry and very firm. Much more exciting than the average Condrieu, and a much better price. Berry Bros ask £22.75 a bottle for it and suggest it has sufficient backbone and acidity to last another year or two but I’d drink it over the next few months as I don’t see that much acidity, and anyway, I really can’t see it improving.
It's quite widely available in France and Canada and Vins de Vienne's superior special bottlings of Condrieu are well distributed in the US according to winesearcher.com, at $50-60 a bottle.
But I’d also like to draw your attention to the bargains below from the special offers in the tesco Wine Festival, although I fear few of them are available, or at least identifiable, outside Tesco stores and www.tesco.com/winestore. The word Finest should be taken with a large pinch of salt. These (regular prices in brackets) are far from the finest wines in the world. Indeed they don’t even qualify as ‘fine’ by many defnitions, but they are very competent and representative and have been reduced considerably in price so that if you are counting pennies, you can use them as an excuse to buy a better quality wine than you would normally. But, if and when you go into a store to take advantage of these special offers, don’t play into their hands and buy other stuff that you might have bought at your favourite neighbourhood store. A world with nothing but Tescos and WalMarts would be a thoroughly horrible place.
Tesco Finest Côtes du Rhône Villages 2005 £3.74 (£4.99) 15.5 Drink 2006-07
Good vintage and plenty of juice in this Syrah-dominated blend with Grenache that is still also quite chewy. From Vignobles Peloux. Unoaked. Obviously.
Réserve St-Clair 2004 Lussac-St Emilon £4.99 (£9.99) 15.5 Drink 2007-08
Classic straightforward right bank red bordeaux. “Too expensive to be thrilling” I wrote when tasting it at regular price. But at this nominal “half" price it is a good buy as bargains with the words Emilion on the label are few and far between.
Tesco Finest Barolo 2002 £8.99 (£12.99) 16.5 Drink 2006-08
Of course 2002 was far from a great vintage in Piemonte, and no-one is pretending this is Barolo at its finest, as described so charmingly by Neville Blech from Genoa yesterday in Barolo and Paganini, but for anyone who wonders what mature Barolo tastes like, this is incredible value. In fact I thought it good value at full price, because it has evolved so fast that you can already enjoy that tar and roses perfume. Ascheri of Bra is a thoroughly respectable producer, but big enough to play with many UK supermarkets and, presumably, put together blends of lesser wines that will mature much earlier than the top bottlings.
Chanoine Blanc de Blancs 2002 Grand Cru Champagne £18.99 (£34.99) 17.5 Drink 2006-08
As already recommended to a purple pagers as a prudent housewarming celebration bottle here.
But do remember that these reduced prices hold only until Oct 10.