Ever since I learned that sherry is created by blending vintages together in a Solera so that the finished drink contains minute quantities of very old wines, I have tried to incorporate Soleras into my everyday life. When I smoked rolling tobacco, I used to put the the dregs from my packet of Cutter’s Choice into the new packet. Thereby small quantities of ancient tobacco were seamlessly blended in with the fresh stuff. Most of the time you couldn’t taste it though occasionally you’d get a really horrible dry cigarette. The reason I did it, however, was to provide a link to the past even if the past was only two years ago. I was trying, in my own studenty way, to create tradition.  I still do something similar with coffee beans.

I was reminded of this blending when last night I poured myself as glass of La Guita Manzanilla. It was from a litre bottle bought at Gerona airport which had been open in the fridge for nearly a week. It had rather lost its nutty bite and I was going to relegate it to cooking duties when I had the bright idea of pouring it into a glass which had a tiny amount of a Rancio Sec (a sherry style wine from Domaine de Schistes brought back from the Rousillon – more on this wonderful drink later) lurking at the bottom. The ratio was something like one part Rancio (mmmmmm rancid) to a hundred parts sherry but difference was startling. It was as if Dr George Clooney in his ER days before he became all political and tedious had applied those electric shock things to it. The nuts were back and how!

It’s worth trying this experiment at home as it gives you an insight into the wonders blending. It sounds heretical mixing two different wines together but this sort of thing is not uncommon in the wine world. Ripasso Valpolicella is made by fermenting the wine on the lees of an Amarone, Cote Rotie used to be fermented on the lees of Condrieu and I think Randall Grahm used to market a wine which was a blend of Washington State and Mosel Rieslings. In the the wider world of drinks, this sort of mixing wouldn’t raise an eyebrow: Scotch owes much of its complexity to being aged in used Sherry or Bourbon barrels.

What I had created was a kind of sherry martini. The Rancio functioned as the Vermouth and the tired Mazanilla as the gin.  Purists might shudder but really rather fine wines can be used as ingredients in cocktails. At a recent trip to a bar in Islington, 69 Colebrooke Row, I had a drink called a Woodland cocktail which was a blend of gin, amontillado sherry and a homemade bitters made from leaves. Rather than being a waste of the rather good amontillado used – something from Fernando Castilla as I recall – it actually complimented and heightened the flavours. The result was utterly harmonious. A word of warning here, though this kind of alchemy works with fortified wines, I very much doubt your best Burgundy would benefit from the home Solera treatment.

Recently I was faced with a conundrum. We were going on holiday the next day and I’d picked up some Turkish food for supper. We had just under 1/2 a bottle of rose in the fridge (Chateau Barthes Bandol Rose, £9.99 at Majestic and really quite nice), not nearly enough to go with spicy grilled lamb for two. So I opened a bottle of red (Blind Spot GSM £7.50 The Wine Society.) Problem solved but after demolishing nearly half of the red I realised that I had to stop or they’d either be snoring, sleeplessness or even a hangover, none of them good when you have to get up at 5am to catch a flight. I’d have to let the wine go to waste unless of course i could preserve it some way.

Then I had a moment of inspiration/ light drunkenness, I popped the wine in the freezer and off we went to France. On our return I defrosted the bottle  curious as to how it would taste. It would have been interesting (though not very) to try the previously frozen wine against a fresh bottle but instead I had to rely on memory. It still tasted good but it was lighter, fruitier and simpler. A moderately serious wine had been turned into something frivolous and rather delicious. All went well until the last glass because at the bottom of the bottle was a purple sludge. That sludge was the seriousness that had been removed during the freezing process. I had inadvertently created Ice Wine.

Do you remember the craze for Ice Beer in the mid nineties? There was a lot of guff about smoothness and ultimate refreshment but actually the purpose of the ice process was to remove flavour from the beer. Tiny particles that contained beery tastes – yeast, hops etc. – were frozen and filtered out of the beer. The brewers had created something for those who found Sol a little too characterful. I think the big wine companies are missing a trick here. Many drinkers love bland products; many commercial wines are already chilled and filtered heavily. Instead of keeping it quiet, they should be shouting it from the treetops: Pinot Grigio Ice! Cava Ice! Sauvignon Blanc Ice! Come on marketing people, wake up!

“Your prejudice won’t keep you warm tonight.” – Steven Morrissey

Prejudices are wonderful things. You can tell a man by his prejudices.  A prejudice is a one off judgement that you hold onto for the rest of your life. They can be irrational but they can also be based on a good piece of evidence e.g. I went to the White Horse in Parson’s Green and didn’t like the braying twats at the table next door ostentatiously arguing over who would pay the bill: ‘no seriously Jasper, fuck the fuck off, I’ll pay’ one of them said waiving his gold card at the nonplussed waitress. From this you can deduce that all former public schoolboys are wankers. Congratulations, you now have a prejudice. Luckily it’s a socially acceptable one so you won’t get arrested for tweeting about it. I’d like to add that it’s not our fault we speak so loudly. If every day of your life someone had shouted ‘speak up Jeffreys! don’t mumble!’ then you too would have a loud braying voice. Anyway I digress, prejudices!

I used to love my wine prejudices: Australian wine is jammy, English a joke and Pinotage unspeakable. When I became wine writer for the Lady I decided to confront them head on. I would go out of my way to drink wines that I would normal avoid. I take my duties extremely seriously and don’t want readers missing out on the fabulous world of wine because of my bigotry. I wrote last year:

“This year I’m to approach all wines with an open mind including ones that I normally avoid. This means you Pinotage, Australian Shiraz and any still wine from England. I will be become an equal opportunities taster, celebrating the diversity of the wine world rather than taking refuge, little Englander-like, in the comforting flavours of the old world.”

So how have I got on? Well I think I might be up for a Commission for Racial Equality award because I doubt there is anyone doing more to celebrate diversity in wine than me. Australian shiraz? Well not only do I now love Australian wine but I’ve learned to love that big rather malty style of shiraz that I used to think was vulgar. It’s not vulgar – it’s just plain delicious. This year I even fell for the ne plus ultra of Oz shirazes, the Dead Arm from d’Arenberg. Tick!

With English wine I wasn’t doing quite so well, I’d had lots of very good sparklers and some reasonable stills, but then last week I had an English chardonnay, Gusbourne Guinevere 2011, that tasted blind I would have said new wave Australian – very dry, very chic, and expensive – superb stuff. And if you’re a fan of very light German reds, their Pinot Noir isn’t bad either. Tick! Another prejudice down.

And Pinotage, well I have tried. I’ve really tried, I’ve drunk lots and I’ve drunk them with an open mind. I don’t want to dislike it. I like nothing better than being a contrarion. It would be cool to champion this underdog but sadly I haven’t found anything that I would want more than one glass of. Still the Warwick Old Vine Pinotage wasn’t bad – nicely smoky, smooth and with only the smallest whiff of burnt plastic.

The best thing about prejudices is that as soon as you demolish old ones, some new ones spring up. My latest is New Zealand Pinor Noir. I’m just not convinced and I’m really looking forward to being proved wrong.

A few years back I met the late Sebastian Horsley for lunch at the Lorelei cafe in Soho. We were there to discuss publicity for his forthcoming memoir, ‘Dandy in the Underworld.’ He waved at the menu dismissively and said: ‘it doesn’t matter what you order here, it all tastes the same.’ I was beginning to feel the same about the wine at Majestic: no matter what I bought, it all tasted the same. It was as if Majestic were using the Winemerchant 2000 ® (originally developed by Laithwaite’s) whereby an entire world of wines can created from an industrial estate in Bedford. They start with a base wine and then add ‘Real Languedoc Garrique’ or ‘Classic Rioja-style’ vanilla extract.

Perhaps it was my fault for being tempted by their special offers. Chianti Riserva at only £5.99 really was too good to be true. I had tried asking the staff for recommendations but these always turned out to be equally lacklustre. Perhaps they had gauged me as one of those customers who like their wines ‘smooth’ and would be put off by anything too interesting. After one too many disappointments, I’d stopped visiting my local branch in Shoreditch. But then we ran out of everyday wine, it was too late for a Wine Society delivery so I went back.

There was some late 90s house music pumping out of the speakers. It was about noon. Over the din, I asked the manager to suggest something red, cheap and Southern French and he suggested this malbec (I know more malbec, it’s as if I’m in the pay of the powerful malbec lobby.) This wine is all about fragrance, it’s floral, ripe and not heavy, it takes well to a light chilling, but there’s also a firmness at the end to let you know that you’re in Gascony. It’s made by a well-known Cahors producer but for reasons known only to the French it’s a Cotes du Lot rather than a Cahors. It’s not a complicated wine so I can’t think of anymore to say about it except buy lots and drink. Oh and it’s on special offer for only £6.99 a bottle. Sometimes those offers aren’t too good to be true.

Just in case anyone’s lawyers are reading I’m not claiming that Laithwaite’s and Majestic wines are concocted on an industrial estate in Bedford only that some of them taste as if they are. 

I remember my first wine tasting. It was the Oddbins wine fair in Edinburgh in 2000. I didn’t spit in those days and was later found sliding slowly down the stairs muttering, ‘I’m so drunk, I’m so drunk.’ (Not so drunk, however that I can’t still recall a Bonnezeaux from Chateau de Fesles.) Perhaps part of the reason I got so drunk was because I felt so awkward asking for the wine and then trying to pull a suitably wine-tasty expression when tasting it. Everyone around me seemed to know exactly what they were doing.

One way to make tasting a little more youth-friendly is to embrace the boozy side of wine rather than acting as if we’re judging Pomeranians at Crufts. We drink alcohol when we’re celebrating, why not combine wine with festivity? It’s pretty radical stuff but it seems to be catching on.  Whilst I was in California recently, a local wine merchant, Domaine LA, was offering Morgons on Superbowl Sunday, a day more usually associated with hot dogs and Budweiser. Now for World Malbec Day on the 17th April there’s an event in Dalston (I just resisted the urge to use the epithet fashionable before Dalston) called Cambalanche which combines wine tasting with other noted Argentine exports such as music, food and, er, graffiti.

It sounds fun. Instead of having to talk about fermentation temperatures or worrying about your spitting technique, you can munch on an empanada and strut around dramatically to Astor Piazzollo. I tried to persuade my dear old Dad to come but he’s boycotting Argentina because of their continued claim on the Falkland Islands. Instead he’s going to celebrate World Malbec Day by staying at home with a bottle of Cahors and some reheated cassoulet. Actually that sounds quite fun as well. What to do?

Penfolds epitomse this no-nonsense attitude towards wine. Their wines are given numbers and they exhibit a cheerful disregard for the modern shibboleths of regionality and localism. Many of them are blended into a house style from fruit bought from all over South Australia. The most revered wine in Australia, Grange, is made this way. You can’t get less pretentious than Penfolds. However, something seems to have gone awry in their marketing department. Here’s the tasting note for their Bin 150 Shiraz:

‘A waft of ristretto coffee – first-run – synergises with soy and a dark char, almost tar and pitch. . . . Bright red fruits conspire to create an amalgam, a continuum of flavour basking texturally avec sheen, gloss. These fruits do not travel solo – chinotto, licorice, bread and butter pudding flavours peddle (sic, one assumes) in parallel, quietly courted by stylish oak(s).’

I think we can all agree that this is terrible even for wine writing: a mish-mash of mixed metaphors, tautology, marketing jargon and malapropism. I expect they mean that the chinotto etc. are pedaling rather than out selling clothes pegs door-to-door but that scarcely makes more sense. It’s like a parody of Malcolm Gluck (former Guardian wine writer.)

The Bin 150 is one of their newer wines, a single vineyard one as opposed to a multi-region blend, but not even the venerable Bin 28 can escape the corporate gibberish:

‘Mocha/ malt and spice sequentially volatilise, consorting to form an initial aromatic wave.’

There was always something not entirely convincing in the old Australian line that making good wine was just a matter of applying common sense. Nowadays, of course, the Australians have embraced terroir, and are, in my experience, making far better wines than they’ve ever made. Sadly some of them have also embraced the flowery prose that goes along with this and they’re simply not very good at it. Rather than being honest-to-god haughty French pretentiousness, they’re doing it in a matey Australian way and the results are just horrible.

Both wines in the 2010 vintage are excellent with the Bin 28 particularly wonderful having a traditionally Australian generosity combined with lovely balance and freshness. Slurp have it for £18.95 a bottle which seems reasonable though I’m sure it used to be a lot cheaper not that long ago. 

Nearly one year ago to this date my boyfriend Pablo and I began de Porres. Our idea was to host a monthly dinner party with dishes influenced by his native Peru and desserts inspired by my American South for the intellectually and gastronomically curious. Having cooked for one another often we knew it was winning combination of flavors, spices, and histories. We began, as one might expect, with ceviche, anticuchos de corazón (heavily seasoned heart, cubed, seared and served on a stick) with yuca cooked in duck fat followed. Our main course was arroz con pato with duck quarters Pablo and I had confited ourselves and for dessert derby pie.  At the close of the meal we gave out small bags of my lemon curd and buttercream coconut alfajores to our guests. “Perfect with tea or coffee in the morning,” we told our friends—most of whom devoured the cookies on the spot.

While I can recall the look and flavors of each dish, I cannot say the same for the wine. I’m sure they were fine, as people drank them with no complaint, but remarkable they were not. In the months that followed  great attention was paid to the food. We were very particular about creating an an atmosphere that encouraged conversation, laughter, and bonhomie. Each dish was meticulously plated and for drink we’d offer our guest the option of red,  white, and, in the summer, rosé. However, as our menus and execution improved I began to wonder if we were doing Pablo’s food justice by not paying adequate attention to what we served with it. From then on pairing de Porres became a mission of mine.

Currently Peruvian cuisine is not particularly well known in the United States. Even some of the most adventurous gourmands, whilst open to the idea of it, have had little, if any, of it. Often with the mention of aji amarillo, Peru’s yellow pepper of choice, someone would suggest Riesling. Other times, as when describing aji de gallina, we’d be directed to Chile and Argentina for no reason other than Peru sharing a continent with these two countries. This, of course, was not particularly useful considering the many differences between Peruvian cuisine—Limeño in particular—and that of its neighbors. Hence, pairing de Porres was not easy even while it was delightfully fun.

We began with asking questions. We’d explain our dishes and their components to a wide range wine shop clerks, barmen and woman, waiters, and beverage directors. I contacted noted sommeliers and wine writers online (some named Henry Jeffreys*, some not). I made use of my highlighter with molecular sommelier/mad scientist and Adria Ferran frequent collaborator François Chartier’s Taste buds and Molecules: The Art and Science of Food, Wine, and Flavor . Pablo and I would gleefully take advantage of many a happy hours, we made weekly trips to wine shops throughout the city, none more so than Astor Wines. During all of this what surprised us most was how readily these professionals engaged with us and  how eager they were to share their knowledge. That wine need not be elitist or stuffy was news to me and my boyfriend.

Pablo and I took what we learned back to de Porres. We got our always engaged diners involved by pairing separate courses with more than one beverage and asking that they be the judge. Many got in on the fun, graciously bringing bottles of their own to our dining table. We drank, we compared notes. Below are some observations from our year in pairing.

Tokaji Furmint Sec:
I suppose I could keep this post short and sweet by advising you to pick up a few bottles of  Királyudvar Tokaji Furmint Sec. Indeed, no other wine has proved to be as versatile and consistently reliable as this Hungarian white. Seductive, floral, tropical, endlessly charming, pleasingly honeyed we’ve found this bottle to pair exceptionally well with scallop tiradito, flounder ceviche, and arroz con pato. It’s gone on to be delicious with lomo saltado and I suspect would work wonderfully with aji de gallina, pulpo al olivo, and arroz con mariscos.  Upon our second encounter with the ‘o9 Királyudvar  I wrote on our blog, “One feels special when drinking Tokaji, even the smallest pour makes the room a bit more heady.” Many months later I remain enchanted. While it’s true we favor the ‘o9 Királyudvar, the ‘11 Evolúció Tokaji from the curiously named producer Love Over Money, at half the price is lovely in its own right.

Beer:
As mentioned above Tokaji with ceviches and tiraditos makes for elegant, spirited pairings. However, as many Peruvians already know, a lighter beer (for us  Brooklyn Brewery Pilsner) goes well with both. Beer would also pair well with anticuchos and jalea, although Cava would be my first choice for the latter.

Anticuchos:
As with ceviche the question you’d want to ask yourself when pairing is which direction you want to go. Should you want a more laid back presentation, by all means pour yourself a Pilsner or even a darker beer to go with your anticuchos. If you want to give your meal a more formal feel then go for red wine. We chose D. Ventura’s Viña do Burato ‘11, a fresh and playful Mencia from Galicia. I do think considering the earthiness and spice of the heart a Rhone Valley red could work very well.

Pulpo al Olivo (see left):
At our one year anniversary dinner we served pulpo al olivo for a second time. With the first we were pleased to see how nicely Manzanilla Sherry paired with the dish. For the second time I had something else in mind. We pitted Jorge Ordonez Botani ‘10, a dry Moscatel from Málaga, against Bodegas O. Fournier Urban Eco Torrontes ‘11. While both worked, the clear winner was the Botani. Aromatic, floral, with traces of limestone and enough acidity to cut through the richness of the aioli, while almost mirroring the brininess of the octopus and olives. You’d be hard pressed to find something better for your pulpo. We can confidently recommend the same bottle with choros a la chalaca,  arroz con mariscos and smoked fish causas.
Lastly, dessert:
Ever had an Yalumba Antique Tawny Port with your alfajores? No? What a shame. Rich, with notes of chocolate, caramel, dried fruit, and mocha, this Australian Tawny Port along with my signature ganache, buttercream coconut, and salted manjarblanco alfajores proved to be an epiphany, three in fact. Of course, if you’re like me and love an alfajor or seven in the morning, at an earlier hour a cup Cafe du Monde Chicory Coffee will more than do the trick.

While writing this I could not help but relive the fun that got me here in the first place. I by no means wish to imply this list is definitive, as it is certainly not complete! Rather, I wish to share with you the beginning of what is sure to be a winding, lengthy journey. With that in mind, use my selections for inspiration but do not hesitate to try your own.  And after, do share what you gathered. With me. Please.

* Danielle is being kind here, I think this is the last place one would go for help matching wines to food or vice versa.

Perhaps tea and buns can’t help us through the winter but what Ray Davies really should have tried was fortified wine. I read a lovely article a few years back exploring this phenomenon in the Financial Times by Harry Eyres:

“The varied styles of sherry seem to me one of the most humane ways ever discovered of shepherding human beings through the changing seasons, and especially through the hard change to winter.”

Eyres does what few wine writers even attempt and melds history, wine and personal reflection into his article. Since then I’ve always looked out for his writings. He was wine columnist for the Spectator in the 1980s and has written a series of books on the subject. I was delighted when his publishers sent me an electronic copy of his latest, The Bluffer’s Guide to Wine. Normally I’d avoid a book with this sort of title but as it’s by Eyres, I thought it’s sure to be a quality product. It’s not entirely by Eyres though. This edition is written in conjunction with Jonathan Goodall whose work I am not familiar with it.

A book like this must succeed on two levels: 1) it must be funny 2) it must be accurate – if you’re going to bluff about wine you need a very firm based on which to bluff from. I wrote in an earlier post about the Les Dawson rule, in order to make playing the piano badly funny, you have to be a very good pianist.

So is it funny? Well I didn’t disturb my wife with snorts of hilarity but there are some funny bits:

‘An unfeasibly long and narrow strip of land. . . . Chile might seem a silly shape for a wine-producing country, certainly when compared with the no-nonsense square shapes of leading producers France and Spain’

Both nicely surreal and informative, this is a good wine joke. The tone of the book is light and witty and rarely descends into facetiousness. I abhor facetiousness! Unless I’m doing it, of course.The book opens with some general information about wine and wine tasting, moves logically onto grape varieties then takes a gallop around the world of wine and ends with a short section on wining and dining. The book is really just an amusingly written introduction to wine but scattered in it are tips to impress and to justify the bluffers guide title. Some of these are actually rather useful and on the nose such as recommending chilling some reds because it makes you look like you know what you’re doing (it does though it can also cause a furore in certain Spanish restaurants on Charlotte Street.)

Is it accurate? Again up to a point. The grape variety chapter initially seems a bit scant but there’s a very useful section where the authors not only tell us which wines are made from which varieties but also what they are often blended with.  The authors manage to distill quite complicated concepts accurately and their simplifications, on the whole, work. As a pedant, however, I was delighted to notice a few mistakes. This is probably the biggest one:

“the grand crus or top villages of the Cotes de Nuits include Gevrey-Chambertin. . . .” Grand Cru is not the same thing as top village. Gevrey-Chambertin is a village not a Grand Cru

Mistakes such as this one mean the reader has to be careful when bluffing from these pages. As Morrissey once sang: “there’s always someone somewhere, with a big nose who knows and trips you up and laughs when you fall.” I think I approached this book with the wrong expectations given it was co-written by someone of Eyre’s talents. On it’s own terms, it’s enjoyable and would make a good gift or something to read on a cold winter’s night with a roaring fire and a nice old amontillado.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote something about how over-specific food and wine matching suggestions take the fun out of wine. It wasn’t a polemical article. I wrote it on a whim after reading some pretentious suggestions. On another day I might have written something mocking over-vague suggestions, good with food, good with friends etc. It seemed to get people going though with even the Telegraph’s wine writer, Victoria Moore, commenting. Now Victoria Moore has written an article on just this subject:

“Among wine nerds there is a great deal of disdain for this sort of thing, which they call “pairing”. This is principally because they have not grasped that food suggestions are just that, suggestions, as in a recipe book when a cook helpfully says that such and such a dish is especially delicious with the parsnip and rosemary purée on another page.”

The truth, in my experience, is exactly the opposite: it’s the ‘wine nerds’ (not a term I like but I’m using it as Victoria Moore did to mean people who are over-obsessive about wine) who fetishise the perfect match and as a long-term reader and admirer of Victoria Moore’s columns, I know that she is no stranger to the word ‘pairing.’ Of course, I am aware that they are just suggestions, what else could they be? Mandates?

There’s a very good analysis by Sam Leith in the Guardian of how the press reduce, simplify and deliberately misunderstand things that writers say to make a story:

“Tabloid papers – actually, all papers if we’re honest – deal in templates and received ideas: in pretty princesses, snooty highbrow authors, smirking fiends and tragic tots.”

One could add wine nerds, lips curled with disdain, to that list. These faux-debates are all great fun and certainly liven up potentially boring topics such as breakfast and wine but I wonder if readers realise quite how manufactured they are. In my case, it doesn’t really matter. I’m actually rather pleased to have inspired a column in a national newspaper and at least I didn’t inadvertently upset the Duchess of Cambridge.

I’m a contributor to The Breakfast Bible. 

At the annual California tasting in London last year I was dismayed by how most of the wines I tried lived up to the big & dumb stereotype. I’d hoped for more (or less rather). When I spoke to a friend who knew a bit about Californian wine, he’d even written a book on it, he said that that’s the style, I’d just have to get used to it. Whilst I was in LA, I was keen to find out if there was an alternative. Knowing next to nothing about California wine, I asked for recommendations in two wine merchants, stating that I wanted something made from Rhone varieties for about $20.

From an old school shop, Duck Blind in Santa Monica, I bought a Punchdown Syrah 2010 and from the trendy Domaine LA in Santa Monica, I bought Lucques Rouge 09. The first reminded me of something very chic from the Northern Rhone but with a distinct Californian brightness about it. The second one reminded me of Beaujolais, really good Beaujolais at its most moreish, like something from George Descombes. This was the last thing that I  expected to find in California.

I had unwittingly stumbled on a movement in California wines: low alcohol, low extract and lowish price. They call it In Pursuit of Balance. Actually the low price thing isn’t an intrinsic part of pursuing balance but I like to think that they are pursuing moderation in all areas. Later my wife and I took a trip with our friend Ari up to Santa Barbara to visit Qupé whose Grenache impressed me recently. Not everything was good but all their Syrahs were delicious and for the most part affordable.

Perhaps the best thing we had on our trip, however, was cheaper still, about $17 retail though we drank it at the Hungry Cat  (great food, not so good service) in Santa Barbara. It was the Patelin de Tablas Blanc 2011 from Tablas Creek, a blend of Viognier, Roussanne, Marsanne and Grenache Blanc. This producer is owned by the Perrin family of Château de Beaucastel fame and are famed for their pricey Chateauneuf-de-Pape-style estate wines. This is a new venture using grapes from other people’s vineyards as well as their own estate much as their parent company does in the Southern Rhone (see Cotes-du-Rhone challenge.)

So Californian wines are not necessarily big nor even particularly expensive but sadly most of these wines are not available in Britain. Oddbins have the more expensive wines from Tablas Creek at £38 a bottle. You can also buy some Qupé wines but by the time they’ve made it over here they go from $25 to £25.

These producers don’t care if we can’t buy their wines. They can sell everything without a problem to an eager home audience. Unlike the Australians or New Zealanders they’re not interested in the prestige of having their wines internationally available. We should care though because we’re missing out on some of the most downright delicious wines in the world.

Some tips if you’re in California:

Punchdown Syrah, Spicerack Vineyards, Sonoma Coast 2010 – This smelt of cloves, liquorice with a touch of coffee. It’s medium-bodied with some tannin and vibrant vein of acidity. The finish was long with a touch of vanilla. $26

Lucques Rouge, North Coast 2009 - A blend of Grenache, Syrah and some other things. It’s bright red and smells a little pooey. It’s light-bodied with bright fruit and a slight bitter taste. It’s not hugely complex but it is tremendously appealing. $20

Patelin de Tablas Blanc 2011 – Initially very dry and a little peachy and floral. After warming up a bit becomes fatter and honeyed with some length and complexity. Delicious. Approx $17 retail.

Qupé, Bien Nacido Syrah 2008 – Meaty nose, light body and then really fragrant with ripe fruit and some spiciness. Intense and long but also refreshing. Superb value at $25 from the winery.

In amendment to this article I am delighted to say that Divine Fine Wines in Birmingham (that’s Birmingham, England) sell Californian wines at reasonable prices including the Bien Nacido Syrah at £18.95