Buying In Bulk: Shiraz, and plenty of it

As a rule, whenever I buy wine, I march robotically over to the booze section of the supermarket, stand in front of hundreds of unknowable bottles and special offers and bargain disasters for about thirty seconds, then reach out as if in a trance and grab the first bottle that costs about £5. That's it. Everything after that is a matter of destiny.

There is, I know, a grown-up way of acquiring drink, which is to ascertain your preferences beforehand then buy in bulk, a couple of cases at a time, and work your way complacently through the contents. Well, I have two problems with this. First, I can never remember what I like, or if, indeed, I actually like anything. Second (and more pressing) is that even if I can think of something that might be worth drinking, whenever this household orders even the most pitiable caseful of wine, something goes wrong with the delivery.

Tesco are a case in point, with their four deliveries and three monumental cock-ups. But it's not just them. The wife rather daringly went to popular winesellers Laithwaites to order a case of my pa-in-law's favourite wine and have it sent direct to his address as a Christmas present. Fine, the stuff turned up. But the pa-in-law already had an account with Laithwaites, so they billed him for his own present, instead of billing my wife. She called them up, explained, they said of course, we'll sort it out. What happened? Next time my pa-in-law put in for an order of his own, my wife got billed for it and he didn't. This makes no sense. They don't have the same names, they don't live in the same part of the country, they don't share credit cards. How can this happen?

Buying in bulk in person doesn't work much better. The doomed Oddbins (now relaunched, may God save their souls) would sell you plenty of stuff in one go, but it tasted terrible. My most recent visit to a cave in the south of France was so frosty that I ended up buying nothing at all. And I can't be arsed to get down to the nearest Majestic (all of half a mile away) because the parking's rubbish.

Nevertheless, in a last throw of the dice, I have been tormenting myself with the thought of going to France on a day trip, buying a load of cheap grog and bringing it back in the car. Ever since the Pound collapsed against the Euro a few years ago, the idea of the booze cruise has rather tanked, but then my brother-in-law, who has an almost obsessional interest in doutbful bargains, started explaining about some outfit that covers the cost of your ferry ticket provided you buy £200 or more of booze, or at least they give you a voucher for the next time you cross.

Actually, just looking at it, now, in black and white, I can see what a terrible idea this is, involving the purchase of a huge amount of wine I can't afford, plus fuel expenditure, plus the certainty that when I get my £200 of drink back home, it will turn out to be every bit as awful as the stuff I habitually buy from the supermarket. And my car's falling to pieces, so I probably won't even make it as far as Dover.

There must be some way round this. Perhaps I should try and get PK in on the scheme, not least because he has a newish executive-style saloon which won't break down on the M20. 


The drawback with that is that he'll insist on high-end purchases such as cellophane-wrapped ham rolls on the ferry. When we get to the outlet in Calais, he'll want bottles of wine that have dates on them. Plus one of those terrible, terrible bourgeois restaurant meals you get all over France where the food tastes of mud and the service is mediaevally bad and it costs a fortune: 'Thus losing a significant percentage of what you have just saved' as my bro-in-law (who used to be a finance director) observes.

Look: I just want enough everyday Shiraz, from almost any country, to be able to bathe in. Is that so unreasonable?

CJ

Getting aerated: Vidigal Dão D.O.C. 2008

An evening at home alone; no better way of alleviating that than a nice bottle of red. Cheap, obviously – this was for me alone. But this is where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

One of the most enjoyable wines I have ever come across is the deliciously supple, bright and beautifully balanced Quinta do Correio, a Dão red available from the Marylebone wine merchants and bar Vinoteca. I managed to get CJ to drink it there just before Christmas, by the ruse of buying a bottle before he arrived, and hence before he could complain about the price to drink it at a table (£21.75) – and even he was very happy with it. (Even happier when they offered it at the excellent takeaway price of £9.30 if we vacated our table, to somebody eating, and finished our drinking at the bar.) So I thought I knew something about Dão. 

So when I saw this Dão, with its elegant, minimal label, reduced in a City wine merchant’s sale from £7.95 to £4.95. I fooled myself into thinking that it was not one of CJ’s sub-£5 gut-rot specials. Oh no, this was a bargain, spotted by my knowledgeable eye. Spotted, admittedly, in a bin of wines with a big sign saying “Under £5”, but nevertheless.

The assistant went on for a bit, saying that she’d tasted it, how it needed to rest for a bit before drinking, etc etc. The back label endearingly described it as “A Soft medium bodied Dão wine to your delight” (sic). And I uttered the fatal words, “Well, how far wrong can you go for £4.95?” 

To which a suitable response might have been, “Have you got your passport?”

Because this was a wiry, thin wine, unpleasant bordering on undrinkable. It had to be forced down, with my cheeks contracting like salted slugs. Its bouquet – no, correction, its fumes – reminded me of bathroom cleanser; it was bitter on the palate, and even sat in my stomach like a large, cold stone.

But one of our mottos is “I’ve bought it, so I’ll drink it”; I had planned a cosy evening alone with this bottle, and I was damned if it was going to beat me. 

So, remembering the suggestion that it needed to rest for a bit, I thought I would try putting it through my recently-acquired Soirée aerator (as seen in the neck of the bottle above).

I already possess an aerator called a Magic Decanter, a gift from my offspring, about which I will write at length some day. But I am particularly proud of my new Soirée, because I won it in a competition on the excellent Blogyourwine site, with the kind of display of my wine knowledge which exasperates CJ, and leaves him glowering at me like a disgruntled Fred Emney. 

I was determined not to be put off by the Soirée’s resemblance to an optic spirit measure, which suggested I might be intending to consume my wine by the shot. No, the wine swirls around in this little glass bowl as it leaves the bottle, and is thereby immediately aerated like a spell in a decanter.

And yes, the Soirée did soften the acridity of the wine quite considerably. Indeed, it could be said that the very name promises a softening of one’s drinking. Had I now embarked upon a soirée, with all its sophisticated undertones, and not just an evening of quite basic solo bottle-bashing?

Sadly not. Aeration cannot transform bad wine into good, and a softer bad wine is still…bad. I became steadily angrier at the stuff I was drinking, and the lengths to which I was going in order to try and render it drinkable. The effort/reward ratio was badly, badly skewed. Instead of returning to a relaxed and gently inebriated husband, Mrs K came home to find a fizzing ball of frustration, surrounded by half-finished glasses of wine; aerated, unaerated, poured, decanted and rested. And all, in their various ways, vile.

Mrs K will agree. There’s one thing that doesn’t benefit from getting aerated. Me.

PK

Time for a drink? Miwok Ridge Shiraz (Again)

The earliest I think I've started drinking wine was about eight in the morning. Not my suggestion, I should point out: we were staying with a friend of ours who lived in a converted pigshed near Barcelona, nicer than it sounds, the ground floor still indefinably murky but nevertheless good for somewhere that had recently housed animals. And for breakfast, on the penthouse floor, two stories up, our host cheerfully sliced up a beefsteak tomato, cut a round of bread, laid the the tomato on the bread, and poured a glass of rough red wine over the whole thing.

'Breakfast Catalan style,' he said. 'Do you want some?' I joined him for the sake of form, obviously, but the kids were a bit young at the time and the wife just stood there looking appalled.

When he next came over to our place to stay, he arrived from the airport with a vast wheelie suitcase which he hauled along our path and up our steps like a gun carriage. He was gasping for breath and fanning his armpits as it rumbled to a halt in the hallway.

'What's in it?' I said. 

He opened it up: it contained four five-litre plastic carboys, like the one I used for my precious petrol-pump Ventoux, full of incredibly cheap red wine; plus a tiny brick of fresh socks and pants, wedged into the bottom.

'They put anti-freeze into it,' he said, gesturing at the red stuff in the carboys, 'and sugar. To make it more drinkable.'

He had it for breakfast, with some fried eggs.

The earliest I started spontaneously drinking, as opposed to merely joining in, was also around eight in the morning, at Marco Polo airport, near Venice. We had all formed a queue at the cafe bar for a breakfast cup of coffee, and some deviltry made me ask, not for a flabby cappuccino, but for a heart-starting caffé corretto, that (typically) brilliant Italian confection of an espresso with a shot of grappa in it - the espresso buzzing you up, the grappa mellowing you out, till you reach a state of god-like acuity and inner balance, a state in which no situation - like getting a bargain flight back to London - is too depressing to deal with.

'It's a bit early, isn't it?' a man behind me said, so I leered back at him, 'It's never too early for this.' He looked appalled.

And then there was the Calvados I was offered in the middle of the morning, in Normandy, to keep the cold out. Various ouvriers were supping away in this bar at Un p'tit Calva, also to keep the cold out, before going back to operating heavy machinery, handling explosives etc., but seemed unconcerned. This time it was my turn to look appalled but I had one anyway, before going out and nearly being run down by a man full of Calvados, driving a backhoe loader. It was about eleven a.m.

How early is too early for a drink, then? I only ask because it's not yet six o'clock – pm, I hasten to add, but no-one in our house is allowed a drink before six o'clock, on account of it being The Road To Ruin. Obviously if I'm going out on the lash with PK, this condition is capable of being modified, but normally nothing happens until we've reached that existential moment, that six o'clock, that philosophical sundown, but today it seems as if the existential moment is never quite going to realise itself, and I am filled with a sense of unease made worse somehow by the fact that I know what I'm going to be drinking - more of that Miwok Ridge stuff from Tesco, the Creosote's Revenge - and therefore it has no terrors, only the promise of an affordable homecoming and a slightly tarry sensation between the ears, and yet time stands still, and if I was our friend who lives in Spain and packs twenty litres of sewage-treatment red wine just to come to England, I'd already have made a start, but that's as it may be, and it's only just five o'clock! but the Calvados workmen, they'll have made a start, and so will some other lucky swines who knocked off early or enjoyed the advantages of living in a different time zone, I can't help but think to myself as the clock on the screen labours past the five-thirty mark...

Not quite forty minutes to go. And in Bucharest it's already half-past seven!

CJ

The great wine & game con trick – Les Garrigues Carignan 2010

“Goes well with game” – how often do you read that about a wine? But how often do you actually eat game? Exactly.

Most people are ignorant of game. There are many for whom a partridge will only ever be a bird that spends its Christmas in a pear tree. 

But wine merchants clearly think that, by associating a wine with game, they are somehow imbuing that wine with posh, aristocratic qualities – qualities which would not accrue from an association with, say, sausages. Suddenly, they think, that wine will appeal to people who like to imagine themselves going out on a Downton Abbey shooting party.They may not actually eat game, or even know how it tastes – but they will buy a wine which they believe might, on some stately dining table, accompany it.

Such people might visit Berry Bros & Rudd, who, with their Royal appointments, are probably the most aristocratic of what I always describe as the Ampersand wine merchants. This is clearly the place to go if you’re looking for wine to accompany game; just Search various possible main courses, and see how many wines come up. On the day I did this it suggested:

Beef 22 wines

Fish 52

Lamb 27

Pork 9

and Game…53

Are we actually supposed to believe that the aristocracy need twice as many recommendations for game suppers as they do for beef or lamb? To meet that level of consumption, they’d have to be taking to the moors with sub-machine guns.

Or take Majestic, for example, a merchant surely more representative of the wider UK wine-buying public. Their Search pairs some 45 wines with lamb, 43 with fish and 17 with sausages. But they also pair 16 wines with game. Do Majestic customers really need as many wines to match game as they do to match sausages?

And ironically, Majestic seem completely confused about the style of wine which actually pairs with game. Because according to their own style descriptions, the wines they recommend are either: medium-bodied (6); rich, spicy (5); light, elegant (3); full and fruity (1); or powerful (1). You might just as well pick a wine blindfolded.

In any case, what is this blanket term, “game”? Game ranges from the delicate flavour of partridge, through the richness of venison and the darkness of hare to, say, snipe, a bird whose flavour is described as “a woody flavour similar to sweetly rotting wild mushrooms”. (That description is from Rules, a restaurant which I adore for its game, but which clearly has problems understanding the notion of “appetising”.)

There are too many wines, of too great a variety, being recommended to pair with game, for it to be anything other than a marketing exercise. Which is really a pain, when you actually do want a wine to go with game.

Which I did. For here is my supper of pheasant breasts. Now, I realise, because of the aforementioned associations, that this will only fuel CJ’s notion that I am some aspirational Lord Snooty. But in fact this was wire-basketed from Sainsbury’s, at a meagre £4 for two. Pheasant like this lies somewhere between the texture of pork and the taste of chicken, and is quite mild in flavour. (Remember that traditionally, game is hung for a week or so to decompose and give it that “gamey” flavour; in Sainsbury’s meat department, decomposition is not actively encouraged.)

Now, happy as I am to display my skills as plating up – are you watching, John Torode? – I could not begin to pretend that this is an inherently aristocratic meal. Believe me, I am not wearing white tie. Not even black tie. Not even a tie. The closest my supper got to a shooting party is this rogue piece of lead shot, which almost cracked a tooth.

So I thought I should pair it with a wine which (a) claimed on its back label to go with game, but which (b) an aristo would not touch with a shooting stick. Or, for that matter, his woodcock.

Les Garrigues Carignan 2010 was kindly sent to me by the nice people at lovethatwine.co.uk. It’s a wine from the Mont Tauch co-operative in the Languedoc, rapidly becoming a handy imprimatur for decent cheaper wines. Les Garrigues has a light, fruity nose with a burnt edge, and tastes of sharper fruits like plums and damsons. But with its tannins resolved, the result is slightly shallow; it’s alright with my fresh, supermarket pheasant, but definitely lacks the weight I would want to accompany serious game. A reasonable buy at its French price of €5.60, but nothing special at its UK price of £8.75 – and isn’t game supposed to be special?

This wine would be unlikely to find its way onto a stately dining table. Carignan is a grape historically associated with table and country wines; unlikely to appeal to an aristo trying to impress his chums. Especially when the wine comes from a co-operative, which sounds dashed close to Communism. And most old-school toffs want their chummies to think they paid more than a tenner for their vino, so even if it’s not terribly good, they tend towards tried and trusted B&B – Bordeaux and Burgundy. 

No, this wine is more appropriate for those of you who think “beaters” are chaps who drink Stella. 

So don’t believe the merchants. There is nothing inherently posh about wine which goes well with game. It’s a pretty arcane pairing, given the small amounts of game people actually consume; and pretty pointless, given the variety of game itself. It is a description simply trading upon our notion of class.

Which may, in itself, be misplaced. Peter Jay once memorably wrote in Oxford Today, “As for the aristocracy, are they not better left where PG Wodehouse safely bestowed them, as objects of derision?”

As for me, I shall return to a social position in which snipe and grouse are merely descriptions of my behaviour. 

PK

The Nation's Sweetheart: Blossom Hill Winemaker's Reserve Merlot

So my Mum gave me this bottle of Blossom Hill Merlot for Christmas, and I think it's had long enough settling time in the wine rack, so out it comes, a quick inspection of the screw cap and the label to reassure myself of the provenance (California, via a bottling plant in Italy, thence to an importer's at Park Royal in north-west London, then to my Mum's in the Cotswolds and back to me in London) followed by a sigh over the almost lapis lazuli shades of blue on the packaging and…

Well, I'm not going to use this as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at the American genius for doing crappy things extremely professionally (McDonald's burgers, Avatar, Windows 98) because Blossom Hill is not specifically one of those things. It is in fact, an Anglo-American construct, and, according to the Blossom Hill website, is the UK's number one wine brand (both in volume and value). I will not be deterred by that either, nor by the feeling that its incredible ubiquity - you can buy it in petrol stations, corner shops, newsagents, post offices, rural pubs, department stores, on car ferries and at village fetes, to say nothing of in every supermarket in the land - must have something to do with its apparent popularity, nor by the fact that it is currently owned by the colossal British Diageo drinks combine, based at Park Royal, in north-west London. Nor am I going to wonder what the hell the phrase Winemaker's Reserve is doing on something that must be produced by the thousands of litres in industrial wineries and which must travel down kilometres of stainless steel piping before it reaches the table. Nor am I going to profess surprise that the name Blossom Hill is not an exclusively Californian brand but turns out to be a wide-spectrum packaging concept that takes in wines from Italy and France as well as the West Coast. 

In fact, I am not going to bring any bigotries to this party, not least because a quick trawl of what wine drinkers like on the internet reveals that Blossom Hill really is the people's choice: 'I have no idea what makes a good or bad wine,' writes an amateur reviewer, 'but the Blossom Hill Soft and Fruity is a lovely light red wine'; also, from another source, 'One of my favourite red wines, made even better by the fact that it is also one of the cheapest'; and, 'Blossom Hill wines go down lovely with a warm pasta dish';  and, 'At a price of £5.99 a bottle, the Vineyard Collection isn't a bad choice for a weekend tipple'; and, 'You can never go wrong with  big brand wines like Blossom Hill'; and so on. All right, some of those love-ins may have been planted by Diageo employees, but I'm going to infer from their tender illiteracies, grammatical solecisms and general heartfeltness that they're not all shills.

Better yet: I am going to bathe in its outreach, because your Blossom Hill gives you plenty of hand-holding and gentle instruction to help make your encounter a friendly one, unlike flash French wines which try to maintain their cachet by telling you almost nothing about themselves (I know this because PK and I were recently at a chi-chi Burgundy tasting, where some of the grog was £124 per virtually anonymous bottle, and where Oz Clarke looked at us, appalled, and said You bad boys, I suspect because we were marginally lit up on account of swallowing too much and hardly ever spitting, not least because the wines were fantastically tasty as well as sadistically expensive).


I mean, on the front, Blossom Hill tells you what it is, where it came from, who made it, and has a précis of the flavour: Velvety soft with ripe red cherry & dark berry aromas, just so there's no confusion in your mind that you might be getting a stringy white, smelling of gas. On the back, there are messages about pregnancy, recycling, responsible drinking, sharing Blossom Hill with friends (advised) and a Consumer Careline. This is a wine with its own Consumer Careline! Can it get any better?

Yes: when you drink it. My tasting notes read: Interesting tannins, followed by whoof, liquorice, tar and interminable finish. Which so far as I'm concerned, is a result. It didn't taste an awful lot like Merlot (I'll be brutal) until I'd given it a fair breather and served up some warm pasta as an accompaniment. After that? A glow of complacency. It got a bit velvety, in a loon-pants kind of way, and there were dark aromas. The new ad campaign claims that Blossom Hill wines are Award-winning, although I can't see anywhere which awards, but still. This stuff may be commonplace, but it's not contemptible. My plan from here? To get PK round for dinner, decant a bottle of BH into the groovy decanter he gave me in an effort to raise my standards, and not tell him what he's drinking. I predict hilarity will ensue. 

CJ

Back to Basics – Clos La Coutale Cahors

My brother-in-law Nick knows his wine, and enjoys Cru Classé clarets and vintage ports when he can. But he has a particular thing about simpler, more fundamental French wines. What he likes about them is that you somehow feel closer to the soil and the vines. There’s an authenticity about certain French wines, which is almost literally ‘down to earth’. Nick once baffled CJ by talking about how you could ‘taste the stems’. I baffled CJ myself (it’s really not hard…) trying to explain this, by making gestures which were meant to evoke the horny hands of a son of toil, but which unfortunately looked more like an arthritic groper.

Let’s just say that great wines may be like symphonies – but there is a different merit in folk music.

At Christmas, Nick kindly left gifts for Mrs K and I; unlabelled, but I ventured a guess that mine was the one shaped like a bottle. Indeed it was; a bottle of Clos La Coutale 2009 – a Cahors, one of his favourite wines from the South-West of France.

Now, Cahors has a noble heritage. Among the first vineyards planted by the conquering Romans 2000 years ago, their wine was loved by the Russian Tsars, served at Henry II’s wedding to Eleanor of Aquitaine and known as “black wine”, because… well, guess. It’s very dark.

To me, Cahors is a proper peasant’s wine. I have an image of a gnarled old chap in a blue cotton jacket, his face lined and etched by the sun. The sort of chap you look at and think, “If that’s his face, imagine what his scrotum must look like.”

Cahors is, effectively, Malbec – although they call the grape by a different local name (Auxerrois) – and in many cases, it’s softened by blending it, in this case with Merlot. There’s a fierce punchiness about this wine; it’s sharp and light, with an aggressive bouquet and a taut, green flavour. It’s austere, tannic but warm. 

This is a bottle to stand upon a red gingham-checked tablecloth, to pour into Duralex  tumblers, to recork and carry to a corner of a field for a lunch of bread and cheese. The label even has an aged, brownish hue, as if it’s been cured with tobacco smoke, like the ceiling in one of those French rural bars. (Just a step down and a door in a stone wall, and where, once the silence that would greet your entrance had dissolved, you imagine having to defend yourself like a scene out of Straw Dogs…)

So, on a white linen tablecloth, for educated dinner guests? 

The danger here lies in a kind of inverse snobbery, like paying a fortune for peasant cooking in posh restaurants. Are we in the social guilt-making territory of slumming, by enjoying a degree of crude, a bit of rough? I’m reminded of a cartoon of American tourists abroad, buying handmade indigenous artefacts to take back home, with a local craftsman pointing out that “This one, senor, has even more flaws…!”

Then, thanks to Liberty Wines, who kindly invited Sediment to their 15^th anniversary portfolio tasting, I was able to compare two “better” versions of this wine. 

Chateau de Chambert Cahors Grand Vin 2007 at £16.97, is almost double the price of my traditional Cahors. It’s clearly aiming for greater status, greater finesse and elegance – look at its modern label – look at its price! – and despite being 100% Malbec it’s a more relaxed wine altogether, with the additional smoky richness of a couple of years’ aging. But that also means more sleepy, less alert somehow; that tight, green simple taste has softened into something lazier, more comfortable, more…decadent. Perhaps a Cahors Grand Vin is something of an oxymoron – like a gourmet Cornish pasty.

And then there’s Argentina, who have made the Malbec grape their own. Vista Flores, a single vineyard Malbec from one of the top five Argentinian producers, has a price of £42.50, a significant sum for any peasant, and which would send CJ into cardiac arrest. But oh, this is a glorious wine, rich, heavy and more substantial – 100% Malbec again, and in a way, more palatable, easier and certainly more impressive drinking than its blended peasant alternative. (The Valle de Uco Malbec,  from the same producer, is slightly sweeter but less grand, and great value at £10.63). 

But these cleverly created wines are also less…discursive. They have less to say. A wine like Cahors has character, a simple authenticity, which is enormously enjoyable. It is Fourme d’Ambert to their Lymeswold.

And here’s a final irony. In London, Clos La Coutale is sold for £8.95 by Berry Bros & Rudd,  one of our most aristocratic wine merchants, by Royal appointment to both HM The Queen and HRH The Prince of Wales. 

But then, our aristocracy always were better than the French at dealing with the peasantry. As that great English historian GM Trevelyan pointed out, “If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.”

PK

Festive Drinking - Miwok Ridge Shiraz

So Christmas came and went with the usual Cava cock-up from Tesco: they delivered the order (some Cordoniu 1551, rather a step up for us, very tasty when it finally arrived) ten days late and then delivered it again, five days after that, minus one bottle, a second, uninvited case of eleven bottles. The courier blamed Tesco, Tesco sighed with exasperation down the phone about the couriers. This makes three out of four Tesco deliveries that have gone cranky on us. I'm sure our house is on a ley line but everyone else can manage it.

Things improved when my brother-in-law came round with his partner for supper on the 23rd, with a properly uncompromising bottle of JackTone Ranch Pinot Noir, while on Christmas Day, my Ma gave me a nice bottle of Blossom Hill Merlot which she bought at the Post Office. I've laid it down until next week, looking forward to drinking it.

After this it was on to my Pa-in-law's. He has a kink for something called Pilastro, fruity, shouty, which one gets to quite like, not as much as he likes it, but enough all the same, and that was going okay until he produced a magnum of - I can't remember what, exactly, a Cabernet Sauvignon it might have said on the label, but either way it was unashamedly perverse, tasting of treacle and earwax and wood glue. And a magnum: since we were the only two people drinking it, it seemed to last forever, but what can you do? He was savouring it as if it might have been a three-figure Margaux. 'This certainly packs a punch,' I managed to say. I mean it would have been churlish to bitch about this endless bottle of wine, but two days went by and I don't think we managed to finish it, despite our best efforts, my bowels slowly turning into tyre compound. And while, as it turned out, PK was doing his impersonation of Lord Snooty and his Pals, drinking a drink with two K's in its name, several hundred miles away, which I'm glad I didn't know at the time.

Which is churlish of me because the same Pa-in-law had already sent me a case of Miwok Ridge Californian Shiraz (2010 vintage), and this is an assertive, alarmingly candid wine, a wine with, frankly, pubic hair; but in a way that causes surprisingly little offence. According to the instructions, the drink takes its name from the Miwok Indians (they're still around) and is 'Soft and supple'. This latter is not true. The first glassful I poured was so volcanic I had to leave it on the table for an hour while it fizzed and burped in the glass, but once I'd got used to the gusts coming out, I found myself rather liking it: peppery, tarry, all that - and with incredible staying power. It doesn't seem to matter how long you leave an already-opened bottle before you return to it, the flavour only softens and becomes more obliging. Three and a half days is the most I've had one bottle on the go so far, but I'm tempted to try for the full week.

In fact, I may use this experience to take a proper, or at least half-arsed, interest in Shiraz/Syrah wherever it occurs. As far as I can see, wine made from this grape almost always delivers something, and quite probably what I want. I can't count the number of Cabernet Sauvignon mixtures I've drunk which have been like old fountain pen ink or rusty rainwater, whereas the most bolted-together Mediterranean supermarket Shiraz/Syrah has usually managed to entertain, even it meant drinking it with oven gloves. My tiny moment of revelation for 2012, and I have the Pa-in-law to thank for it.

So how was it for you?

CJ