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Mauricio Lorca Angel’s Reserve Torrontes review

… is perfect for a reception or a party or a sly few mouthfuls before dinner with interesting company. Or even with boring company.

So, from those spunky folk at Naked Wines, here’s a pleasant young wine. You’ll get on nicely, I reckon. Very gentle and soft, you know? Peachy, scented, a smidge of sweetness. Ever had Gewurtztraminer? This is a bit Gewurtzty.

Very fruited but not sickly, it’s not mind-blowingly spice laden in the way that Gewurtztraminer can be — and doesn’t have the mesmerising frictionlessness of the likes of Spy Valley Gewurtz. No, it’s lighter, easier. Perhaps a little less remarkable.

Which isn’t the same as saying bad. Not at all.

This is an incredibly easygoing wine. Perfect for a reception or a party or a sly few mouthfuls before dinner with interesting company.

Or even with boring company. You’ll need cheering up, I guess.

Rating ★★★ 3 stars (good)
Region La Rioja
Grape Torrontes
ABV 13%
Price £8.99 from Naked Wines (£5.99 to members)

Three Choirs Winchcombe Downs 2009 review (Sunday quickie)

… will awaked your tastebuds with a zap like a shot from Commander Keen’s raygun

By way of this week’s Sunday quickie, I lugged my laptop down to the Summertown Wine Cafe (one of the places I’ll especially miss, when I haul my skinny white ass out of Oxford, next month) — and snaffled me a glass of Three Choirs ‘Winchcombe Downs’.

And I liked it. A good acidic gobful, zesty and fresh as you like. Bish! It’s bracing, fresh, summery. Really awakens ye tastebuds with a zap. Like a shot from Commander Keen’s raygun.

It also gets kudos for being made from a mixture of grapes that includes both Phoenix and Madeleine Angevine. A few points in your grape varietals spotters’ guide for them, surely?

Getting through more than a glass of this without some form of snack/food would be a challenge — because of all that acid. So consider yourself warned.

Rating ★★★ 3 stars (good)
Region Gloucestershire
Grapes Phoenix, Madeleine Angevine & Huxelrebe
ABV 11%
Price £9.45 from Jascots; £10.95 from Summertown Wine Cafe (no online ordering)

The Society’s Exhibition Sauvignon Blanc, Elim, 2008

… is a breathtakingly, audaciously barefaced, joyously ebullient, in-your-face cliche of a sauvignon blanc

Man alive. Here’s a wine that almost seems like it ought to crunch in your mouth. See, it’s like biting into a crisp, raw, juice-spurting green pepper.

This is a wine that’s so incredibly Sauvignon-Blancish that it’s almost a caricature. Almost like a bunch of satirical wine-makers got together and decided to make something that was so goddamn Sauvignon Blanc that it’d prompt shouts of incredulous laughter.

New World Sauvignon Blanc is generally pretty damn accessible — and this wine exaggerates all those accessible characteristics to such a degree that it’s almost (paradoxically, dude) inaccessible, it’s so full-on accessible. It’s a breathtakingly, audaciously barefaced, joyously upfront, in-your-face cliche.

And I rather like it.

It’s fruited, dry, and slips down leaving nary a cloy or a clog. It’s not sugary and simplistic (those are all-too-common SB characteristics it doesn’t exaggerate). As well as the green pepper, there’s fresh chilli, herbs. Hell, it’s like a blinkin’ stir-fry.

So if you’re in the mood for a bit of sauvignon satire — a wine that’ll throw your friends’ efforts into the sauvignon shade — this is for you. The one New World Sauvignon Blanc to rule them all, the one New World Sauvignon Blanc to bind them. &c &c.

If you don’t much like Sauvignon Blanc, though — um — actually, you probably don’t need me to finish this sentence.

Rating ★★★ 3 stars (good)
Region Western Cape
Grape Sauvignon Blanc
ABV 13%
Price £9.99 from The Wine Society (no longer available, I’m afraid)

English Bacchus Reserve, Chapel Down

… will give you a subtly blossomed English caress — but perhaps leave you dreaming of ecstatic frenzy and phallic symbolism

Trust the Romans, eh?

Those unimaginative Romans, who came along and — without a by-your-leave — pinched the Greeks’ pantheon of gods, slapped a bunch of considerably less poetic names on them, carried out a few changes to make them altogether that bit more shit, and touted them as their own.

The Romans were a bit like Microsoft.

Anyhow. Bacchus was the Romans’ rebranded version of the Greeks’ Dionysus, god of wine — a tantalisingly androgynous kind of chap, holding (according to the oracular Wikipedia) ‘a fennel staff, tipped with a pine-cone and known as a thyrsus’.

For my next profile picture, incidentally, I intend to brandish a thyrsus, sure in the knowledge that I’ll thereby attract a large following of ecstatically raving bacchantes — female devotees who, via dancing and intoxication, ‘lose all self-control, begin shouting excitedly [and] engage in uncontrolled sexual behaviour’.

(Not to imply that I don’t already enjoy such a following, natch.)

Anyhow. Bacchus is also — and I hope this doesn’t come as too much of a crashing shock to you, after all that deity stuff — a grape variety. Grown in England, of all places.

So from Olympian heights, we find ourselves in the wine aisle of Marks & Spencer.

Mundane enough for you?

But let’s stave off thoughts of our own desperate mortality and get some of the stuff down our gullet, shall we? (Reminder: if you actually are in the wine aisle of M&S, you should probably buy the bottle and get it home before you do this.)

So — what’ve we got? First off, bacchus bears more than a passing likeness to sauvignon blanc. It has that springy zing to it. But here, there’s an appley softness, too. A subtly blossomed caress, if you want to get all wanky about it.

Yeah, it’s rounder, more welcoming, less showy-off than your everyday sauvignon blanc. Not quite as ‘June is bustin’ out all over’, y’know? But still with that crispness, that green taste to it — if you’ll forgive me coming over all synesthaesiac on you.

Nice and long and dry, with rather a lovely balance.

Yeah, it’s on the pricey side (which keeps it from earning that oh-so-coveted fourth star) — but perhaps that’s what you have to stump up for a subtly blossomed English caress, these days.

Alternatively, blossomed caresses be damned: just get yourself a thyrsus and bring on the ecstatic frenzy of those bacchantes. Who’s with me?

Rating ★★★ 3 stars (good)
ABV 12.5%
Price £10.99 from Marks & Spencer

Sainsbury’s Gruner Veltliner 2010 (Taste the Difference)

… is exactly the kind of dry white wine with which you’d want to slake your dusty thirst after half an hour’s bypass-trudging

And so I made my aching, slow way — beetle-like, beneath a beating sun — cars and buses roaring beside me as I clung to the narrow verge with its grey, dusty grass. Along the bypass.

Bypassing nothing.

There are whole stretches of this world that we are never expected to see from certain angles. The denuded backsides of highstreet shops, for instance, glimpsed voyeuristically through rarely-opened delivery gates. Laced with dark varicose veins of piping that give the lie to their gilded plastic frontages.

Just so with this bypass. This place of transit, designed (like piracy warnings on a VHS) to be absorbed at fast-forward — but now viewed through the slow, unexpected eyes of a pedestrian.

The insistent thrum and shudder of passing cars, beating out You should not be here. This is a place of vehicles. What right have you? Why are you here?

And what sinister explanations might have troubled the minds of those motorists as they passed this figure, shambling, alone? What did they imagine might lurk within the bag he hoisted from shoulder to shoulder?

What was this Bypass Wanderer’s heavy burden?

***

Three bottles of wine and a ludicrously, masochistically large number of tins of assorted beans, it turns out.

Because, yeah, I went to Big Sainsbury’s. On foot. Like a fucking idiot.

The question on your lips (that is a question I can see there, isn’t it? Not some kind of cold sore?) is, I suppose: was the odyssey worthwhile?

On the strength of the selection of wines on offer — emphatically not. My mission, y’see, was to hunt down examples of out-of-the-ordinary supermarket wines. Of these there were scandalously few. Bad show, Mr Sainsbury, bad show. And yet — on the strength of Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Gruner Veltliner — it turns out my travails were not in vain.

(Also, I now have many different types of tinned bean.)

What’s more, it turns out that Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Gruner Veltliner is exactly the kind of wine with which you’d want to slake your dusty thirst after half an hour’s bypass-trudging.

It’s got the qualities I want in a summer wine: bracing, lightish, dry — but rounded (none of that mean-spirited, thin-in-the-mouth stinginess). There’s an appley sort of bite to it: fruits and spice and pepper. An appetising edge of bitterness and a very pleasant silkiness in the gob.

What’s more, it’s relatively keenly priced.

So — whilst Big Sainsbury’s wine selection was, overall, pretty much as unremarkably barren, unimaginative and bereft of variety as my journey there and back — it turns out that if you walk slowly enough, even the most uninspiring of places may reveal a hidden delight.

Rating ??? (3 stars: good)
ABV 12%
Price £7.99 from Sainsbury’s

Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi (Follonica) at Branca Restaurant, Oxford

… scores a little bit lower than a waiter with a funny-shaped head

The scene: Branca, a good Italian restaurant in Jericho, Oxford. Two chums — Old Parn (OP) and Faith Amurao (FA) — sit toying with the remains of ham-ensconsed halibut. They are drinking wine from a curiously-shaped bottle, which their waiter has confidently declared (unprompted) to be ‘really drinkable.’

OP: So. The wine. How many stars (out of five)?

FA: Two and a half.

OP: Okay. I think two. Anyway, you’re not allowed half stars. You can’t have a half star.

FA: But you could do it. You could do it with shading…

OP: Check your telescope, Faith. If you can find me a half star up in the night sky, you can use a half star in your rating for this wine. Until then, no half stars for you.

FA: Anyway, now that you said it, I think it actually is a two as well. I wish I’d said two at first. But I think I wanted to give it an average mark. So as not to be too disparaging. Two means slightly worse than average, right?

OP: 0 means terrible; 1 means some flaws; 2 means okay; 3 means good; 4 means very good; 5 means outstanding.

FA: Okay. If three means good, it’s definitely a two.

OP: I’m actually impressed that you even answered the question. You’re good at giving ratings, obviously. How about our waiter, then? How many marks would you give him (out of ten) for hotness?

FA: Four.

OP: Haha.

FA: His head is a bit squashed. He’s slightly below average. Maybe 4.4?

OP: And what about the man who slipped you his number in Wagamama the other day?

FA: He’s actually quite similar to our waiter. His head is quite small too. I’d give him 4.6.

So, there you have it. One below-average wine in a weirdly-shaped bottle; two below-average men with weirdly-shaped heads. And not one of them exciting enough to win Faith’s affections (or, I might add, Old Parn’s).

If you’re drinking in Branca in Oxford, then (food: very good, by the by), I’d choose something other than their Verdicchio.

They probably won’t, however, let you choose your waiter.

Rating ??
ABV 12%
Price £8.99 from The Co-op (currently reduced — would you believe it? — to £4.49. At which price, fair doos, try it for yourself). Needless to say, it costs a fair crack more than that at Branca.

Benjamin Darnault Picpoul de Pinet 2010 review

… is Pinot Grigio’s tearaway little cousin — who’s just come out of the sweet shop with a crafty grin on his face

Actually, enough of that shit. Here’s a wine review.

So — how do you feel about pear drops? C’mon. Don’t tell me you’re indifferent. That’d be like saying you’re indifferent to Bruce Forsyth. Or Al Qaeda.

Pear drops are just something you have an opinion on, right?

Okay. Thanks.

So. If you like pear drops, you’ll like this nifty, zippy young Picpoul de Pinet from Naked Wines. Because it’s stuffed with the things. Like the pockets of a light-fingered schoolboy in a blind old woman’s sweetshop.

Just as well I like pear drops, eh?

What else? It’s dry, pale and light of body. Kind of like me, really.

Verdict

I reckon a lot of people would love this wine. It’s accessible, lithe, unusual enough to start a conversation (about pear drops, obviously) but not outlandish.

It’s not entirely dissimilar to Pinot Grigio; it has that same light clarity. Like Pinot Grigio’s tearaway little cousin, maybe.

Pinot Grigio’s tearaway little cousin who’s just come out of the sweet shop with a crafty grin on his face.

Rating *** (3 stars)
ABV 12.5%
Price £9.99 full price — £6.66 (el numero del diablo!) for members — from Naked Wines

Leon Beyer Pinot Gris 2008, Alsace review

… is a mightily exotic gobful — an olfactory rollercoaster

Turkish delight. Bubblegum. Nectarine. Rhubarb. Pepper. Cream. Lavender. Honey. More cream.

Well, hot darn. Ain’t that an olfactory rollercoaster, and no mistakin’?

So, yup, this is another virtuosically aromatic Alsatian.

Compared to others of its ilk, this one’s on the acidic side of things, meaning it’s less smooth, less limpid, less pacific than some. It’s got quite a crisp old bite to it. Also (which is less welcome) it’s just a touch over-the-top — that ol’ belch of alcohol hits you if you keep it in the gob too long.

And I’m no fan of that alchbelch.

Verdict

But, mmm, yeah, it’s pretty nice otherwise. And as my initial salvo of flavours might imply, it’s a fairly exotic gobful. So exotic, in fact, that I decided to photograph it in front of some delightfully out-of-focus springtime flowers.

With a bit more refinement, it’d be a four-star. Anyhow, serve it up to people who complain that Alsace wines are ‘too sweet’.

Rating ★★★ (3 stars)
ABV 13.5%
Price £13.50 from The Wine Society (no longer available, link is to the 2005 vintage)

Smoked trout and Saumur: wine pairing

In which a drool-inducingly acidic Saumur Chenin Blanc proves the perfect foil for a smokey old trout

A quick blast from the Parn. Less of a review; more of a passing observation I thought I’d share with y’all.

We just had a bottle of Saumur alongside some smoked trout from Inverawe Smokehouses. A damn fine lunch, mark ye. But also a reminder that the right wine/food match can be fucking sublime.

On its own, Les Andides Saumur is certainly on the bracing side — like a dip in ice-cold riverwater for your tastebuds. It’s pretty dashed acidic stuff, and you’d be salivating like a rabid dog if you drank more than a glass of it without food.

Sharp, fresh, clean stuff.

With the smoked trout, it was perfect. That acidity was taken into hand by the salt’n’smoke, allowing the wine to sing in its modest, mineral-laced kind of way.

There was no awkward drooling.

A more peaceable, smooth’n’fruity number would’ve been left dead on the side of the road in the wake of that trout. Hoofing, strong, salty flavours don’t take no prisoners.

Les Andides Saumur costs £7.11 from Waitrose Wines. You might’ve expected it to be made from Sauvignon Blanc, given its Loirey home, but it’s actually 100% Chenin Blanc, that other (undersung) white hero of the Loire. 12% ABV.

Approbatory side-note, meanwhile, to Inverawe Smokehouses, who supplied my parents with extra smoked trout for easter (free) in recompense for delayed delivery back amidst those Christmas snows we had. Good chaps.

Wine Society half bottles roundup

In which three French half-bottles from The Wine Society are put through the rigorous Parn tasting process

I’ve written before about my lonely love of half bottles. Below are my brief impressions of three French wines, all available in half bottles from The Wine Society.

The Society’s White Burgundy

Planted resolutely at the dry, pure, stony end of the (vibrant) chardonnay spectrum, this is delicious, appetising. Aromatically discrete, yes, with a bracing dose of lemon-rind bitterness. Finding small fault, it’s just a touch thin, a touch watery. But at the price, I feel almost churlish saying so.

Rating *** (3 stars)
Price £4.50 from The Wine Society

The Society’s Crozes Hermitages

Roughish, somewhat stalky and austere. There’s a fair bit of bitterness and tannin — and a certain coaly quality, like that stuffy-headed smell I remember from my grannie’s coal scuttle.

In the gob it’s a little lighter than I’d expected, with some red fruit to counteract all the gruffness. There’s also a bit of orange in there — orange oil/essence, not juicy, fresh orange.

Fine for a midweek slurp, though a little rough and unbalanced.

Rating ** (2 stars)
Price £5.25 from The Wine Society (but no longer on the site)

The Society’s Chablis

Slate and peach and cream. It fills your nose like the smell of summer rain. In the gob, it’s appealingly plump — though with a fair old dose of acidity. A good bit of citrus there.

Proper dry stuff. Nice. With simple, unadorned seafood, this would be delightful. My mouth’s watering already.

Rating *** (3 stars)
Price £5.95 from The Wine Society

Reserve de la Saurine 2010 Review

… is an honest (if brusque) young peasant of a wine

Well, here’s a wine that’s not nearly as bad as I’d feared — and a good deal better than our last disastrous encounter with an M&S ‘dine in for £10’ bottle.

It’s a Rhoney kind of red (not from the Rhone region itself, which doubtless helps keep the price down, but from a satellite region and made from Rhoney grapes Grenache, Carignan and Syrah.)

It’s quite nicely rounded (though that does give way to harshness on the finish), with a tannic weight to it. There’s a bit of a metallic tang to it too, perhaps (surely I can’t be the only one who once sucked on a mouthful of coins as a child? What’s that? I am? Oh shut up.) In other words, it’s the kind of wine you’d describe as rustic. Unpretentious.

An honest, rather brusque, young peasant of a wine.

There’s some fruit, yeah (lucky peasant nabbed himself a punnet of cherries), and a herby, stalky bite. No oak, so it’s fresh and supple.

Verdict

Be warned: the tannic roughness does build up, so it’s probably more of a food-partner than a solo quaffer. All considered, though — the price in particular — it’s not at all bad.

(Still, I wasn’t too heartbroken to consign half of it to my bolognese sauce. These peasants mustn’t be allowed to rise above their station, after all.)

Rating ★★ (2 stars)
ABV 13%
Price £5.99 from Marks & Spencer

Picco del Sole Falanghina 2009 review

… will give you jelly babies, aniseed and bolognese sauce — but only if you manage to decork the blighter

So — bottle 4 of my six-bottle taster case from Naked Wines (previous Naked reviews: Mistral Sauvignon Blanc, Tor del Colle Montepulciano and Burgo Viejo Rioja). How will this little Falanghina fare?

Crack the blighter open (may I mention, en passant, that this is the third Naked bottle I’ve had that’s been an absolute rotter to uncork? A proper strenuous veins-standing-out-from-your-temples rotter) and you’re greeted by a delicious aroma. Cut grass, lemon sherbets, exotic fruits.

Yum McYum.

At a waft of this (if you’re anything like me), you’ll be slopping wine on the table in your eagerness to slosh it into your glass.

And, yes, in the gob it’s lively, too. I have to say, it doesn’t quite live up to the fizzing promise of its smell, but it’s still good. That lemon sherbert carries through, along with smidgins of other confectionery (green jelly babies, mayhap, and a good dose of aniseed). There’s a plump helping of mango there, too.

It’s tempered with a hint of bitterness (a pleasant quality in a white like this, I always think) — and, most interestingly, it has a pronounced savoury quality that puts me in the mind of a bolognese sauce. Sounds a bit quirky, eh? Well, don’t get me wrong: it’s not powerfully meaty. But I’d say the flavour is quite noticeably there.

It’s certainly not your usual mass-market Italian white.

There is, though, a little bit of mouthshrivel at the end, so (if you’re not drinking with supper) have it with some crisps, salted nuts or what have you. If this quality were eliminated (as in the delicious Contesa Pecorino I reviewed the other day), I’d like it even more.

Verdict

In my Mistral review, I raised a small doubt about the Naked Wines price model, and, yeah, my words broadly hold true for this wine, too: at Naked member price (£6), it’s a friggin’ steal; at full price (£9), it’s certainly not a rip-off, but I reckon I could find better.

But if you’re Naked? Get in there with Falanghina, I say. Just be prepared for a bit of wrestling and heaving beforehand.

Rating ★★ (2 stars)
ABV
Price £8.99 from Naked Wines (members receive 33% off). Link is to the new 2010 vintage.

Pecorino Colline Pescaresi, 2009, Contesa

… will make your stomach purr with delicious minerality, lissom-lingering fruits and distant cream

Here’s a wine from made from pecorino.

No, not the cheese. You wag.

For it seems that Pecorino is also a white grape variety. A white grape variety that (on the evidence of this example by Contesa) makes dry, deliciously mineral-laced wine.

Yeah, mineral. As opposed, I guess, to animal or vegetable. Contesa’s Pecorino has a stony, chalky dryness. But not — let me reassure you, if that all sounds a bit gullet-rasping — in a harsh way. Because it’s also poised, rounded, cultivated. So more of a meticulously-kept gravel bed than a heap of shale. There’s some cream, some distant fruit in there as the flavours linger (and linger they do, most lissomely) in your mouth.

Verdict

I love mineral-dry whites. They achieve a mouthwatering, stomach-purring appetiser effect — yet need not be excessively acidic. This is a very nice wine to drink before dinner.

And during dinner. And after dinner.

I’m a suggestible old fart, what’s more, so I can’t help but taste — after all — a certain pecorino cheese thing. Yeah, deride me, sure. But there is something about that intensely flavoured, appetising dryness than reminds me of snaffling wafer slices of pecorino, cut from a freshly opened block, when you’re meant to be grating it.

Not that I ever do that.

Rating ★★★★ (4 stars)
ABV 13%
Price £9.95 from The Wine Society

Mistral Sauvignon Blanc, Naked Wines

… will underwhelm you. But the people selling it to you? They’ll whelm yo’ ass right off.

Naked Wines underwhelmed me with this one.

But then (hot damn!) they went right in and fucking whelmed me something proper.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s talk about the underwhelm, first.

So. Mistral Sauvignon Blanc. A disappointing wine. I mean, it’s not bad. It’s just, well, rather uninspiring.

A bit empty, a bit nothingy.

Rather like Old Parn running the 400m, it starts off energetically enough (though already people are whispering that it’s worryingly thin and pale) — but then it has a really poor finish.

You’ll be snuffling and flaring your nostrils like something out of The Witches in an attempt to get much out of this wine: aromatically, it’s very closed down for so zingy a grape variety. And what aromas you do get out of it are typical, a tad uninteresting. Except (alas) for a faint waft of nappy. I’m sorry. Really, I am. But there it is.

Verdict

Increasingly, I’m coming to think that there’s a small problem with Naked Wines’ model: the ‘full price’ figure seems rather inflated. You see, I’d be chagrined if I’d spent £7.50 on this wine. In fact, I had it for a reduced rate (part of a taster case). But because I have £7.50 as an RRP in my head, I’m psychologically primed for a £7.50-quality wine. Even if I’ve actually paid a good deal less than that (hell, this is a £5 wine if you’re a member — in which light it suddenly seems a heck of a lot less disappointing).

Alas, £7.50 is still the yardstick I’m measuring it up against. And it falls short.

Don’t take this as an attack on those fine Naked fellows. I remain intrigued and impressed by their business model — and I enjoyed the first two bottles of theirs I reviewed (whilst still harbouring the slight impression of over-optimistic ‘full’ prices, I might add). While this specimen is definitely less good than those other two, it’s still by no means terrible; just unexciting, middle-of-the-road.

So I suppose I’m just saying that, psychologically, their pricing model isn’t quite hitting the right note for me.

Then again, I’ll tell you what is hitting the right note: the fact that, a few hours after I’d casually tweeted a message about my disappointment with this wine, one of the Naked guys was contacting me to offer me my money back on it*.

That, in case you are wondering, is fucking uberwhelming.

Rating * (1 star) — but ***** for customer service
ABV 12.5%
Price £7.50 from Naked Wines (£5 if you’re a member)

* Fo’ yo’ info, I didn’t take him up on his offer. It may’ve been disappointing, but it wasn’t bad.

The Wine Society’s Vin de Pays des Cotes de Gascogne

… is worth knocking over a couple of old ladies for, should you happen to see it at a party

Wine served at post-concert receptions. Not necessarily the most pre-possessing of notions.

I found myself in the Cathedral of Christ Church College on Saturday — for an evening of sacred English choral polyphony from the 16th century, courtesy of I Dedicati, an all-male vocal ensemble directed by Greg Skidmore.

(Now, you may think that sounds niche. However, according to the programme, it offered an opportunity to combine undiscovered gems with ‘very well known’ items of repertoire. There are few places in the world besides Oxford, I humbly submit, in which any piece of sacred English choral polyphony from the 16th century could conceivably be described as ‘well known’.)

Anyhow, yes. I digress. The concert (since you were wondering) was excellent.

… and the post-concert drinks were excellent, too. Not only because they gave me a chance to catch up with the fine old bass who’d invited me, but also because our hosts were serving The Wine Society’s Vin de Pays des Cotes de Gascogne.

As soon as I saw the label, I realised the aforementioned fine old bass wasn’t going to be the only dear friend with whom I’d be reunited that night. Indeed, in my enthusiasm to snaffle a glass I may have knocked over an old lady or two. Never mind. See, I’ve had this wine before. And it’s very, very good.

And the kicker? It’s £5.50. Let me spell that out. FIVE AND A HALF OF YOUR BRITISH POUNDS.

Being relatively low in alcohol (10.5%) it’s perfect for convivial quaffing. It’s clean and verdant. A snap of spring in your mouth. Like crunching raw fresh peas straight from the pod.

And it goes down a treat, let me tell you. Whilst not perhaps quite as swooningly polyphonic as the repertoire of I Dedicati, it is a delight to drink. And is, I daresay, destined to appeal to a rather broader audience.

So should you find yourself throwing a party — for Oxonian polyphonists or otherwise — look no further.

Rating ****
ABV 10.5%
Price £5.50 from The Wine Society

Prinz von Hessen Riesling Kabinett 2008

… has (alas) had much of it winning subtlety beaten out of it — leaving it cowed and wretched, cringing in the corner like a maltreated animal

Opening a bottle of wine is a time of almost intemperate joy for me. A time pregnant with possibility. My mind conjures the potential delights ensconced within those glassy walls. My focus sharpens. The world narrows to this: the loosing of the cork; the exquisite slow prise of the corkscrew (waiter’s style only, please); the first snatched whiff at the neck of the freshly denuded bottle.

(Before you ask, no, my palms are not sweating.)

What I mean is, there’s a hell of a lot of hope invested in those meagre 750 millilitres of liquid.

And that’s with any halfway respectable wine I open.

With a German Riesling, well, let’s just say that (in terms of relative expectation levels) Obama had it easy.

Because it was Riesling that started me off on all this. This wine business. Riesling that first fascinated me; Riesling that first beguiled me. Riesling that first made me realise how people got so damn into the whole malarkey.

Which is why I opened this bottle of Riesling Kabinett — snaffled in the Wine Society’s January sale — with even greater eagerness than usual.

ALACK, dear reader.

I was disappointed.

For a German Riesling, it’s fairly closed-down aromatically. Some fruit, some lavender and suchlike. But it’s hardly leaping out at you like a mad axe-murderer in a dark alley.

The lavender’s there in the mouth, too — but here’s where the axe-murderer does jump out. And hits you with a swingeing blow of winey bosh. It’s overwhelming. Not in a hedonistic pleasures kind of way; in a Blitzkrieg kind of way.

There’s a nice, unexpected hint of toffee to its finish, but unfortunately one that’s ultimately overridden by acid. So kind of like chewing a toffee that’s been soaked in vinegar, then. Which curtails the pleasure somewhat. Once that’s cleared, though, you’re left with some lovely delicate floral, peachy perfumes lingering. This is hands-down the nicest part of the whole experience. And the thing that keeps you going back to your glass, wondering if you got it all wrong.

But you didn’t.

Verdict

This actually reminds me of some of the New World attempts at Riesling that founder because of a climate or style of viticulture that’s unsuited to the strengths of the grape. If I was blind-tasting this, I’d say it was a Riesling from a too-hot part of Australia.

Because it tastes like much of the winning subtlety of the grape has been beaten out of it. Not completely removed, you understand; just cowed and wretched, cringing in the corner like a maltreated animal.

Which makes me sad.

The wine isn’t bad, I should add. But this is a not-inexpensive German Riesling, for Christ’s sake: it could be magical. It should be magical.

Which, given my lofty expectations is all bit of a shame.

You reading this, Obama?

Rating *
ABV 11.5%
Price £11.95 from The Wine Society (no longer available); £87.32 for six from Bibendum;