Fine New Zealand Pinot Noir is often more boozy than Burgundy but with a similar tannin and acidity profile. Escarpment 2009, made by the brilliant Larry McKenna, provides a really fun and highly enjoyable example of the style.

I must admit to leaning a bit in favour of Larry’s wines. He came to Oxford when I was an undergraduate and provided my first taste of really classy New Zealand Pinot. He was a lovely chap, and seemed amused when Edward Tully and I took him to the McKenna Room in Christ Church.

Martinborough Pinot Noir 2009, Escarpment Vineyard

This smells like it is going to be quite a lot of fun. Yeah, it may be a tad on the boozy side but there is plenty of sappy character to the fruit and there is an edge of leafiness as well. But that fruit is just lovely, really complex and bursting with charm. It is a nose that just wants to tempt you into bed and there’s no danger of beating with harsh wood from this little minx. The palate is even more attractive. It’s fruit is a great combination of the plump and ripe with the leafy and racy. It has great acidity and, whilst they are ripe, there is a good tannic structure on show here as well. Blow me if there isn’t an edge of stony complexity to the finish as well, which I find sophisticated and remarkably persistent for a Pinot of this price. Quality New Zealand Pinot is never cheap by the time it makes it over to the UK, but for the hilarious fun-value and definite class this delivers it is worth every penny. I enjoyed my glass as a warm-up to dinner and I’ll enjoy a glass with dinner; exactly the style of New Zealand Pinot I want. Larry makes single vineyard Pinots as well (which you can score from Ten Acre as well for only a few quid extra) and I think they are beezer and topping value. Cannot go wrong with wines like this.

Availible from Ten Acre Wines, telephone 01992 618017 or email sales@ten-acre.com.

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This will be a brief report, but I hope to capture the brilliance of the occasion that was lunch with Keith Prothero. Not only is he a lovely fellow, but all his friends are too, and all share exquisite taste in food and drink. Best lunch I’ve had in ages – well done Nigel P-M and The Ledbury.

Every wine we drank at lunch was a winner. Since three of them were Clarets some of you might be surprised to hear me report this, but I am prepared to indulge in the greatest of experiences, as long as they don’t drain the madness-vouchers so much I cannot do it again. The Clarets we had were tongue-engorgingly gratifying, but there was better in our little meal.

It’s worth giving a quick summary of The Ledbury – it’s the best two star I’ve been to. The food is always inventive and assembled with creative ability with a focus on intense enjoyment value. The service is unobtrusive and calmly in control and (not that we used this) it has an ace wine list. There are more slack and louche destinations in London, but if you want fine dining forget Ramsay and Tom Aitkens, go to The Ledbury. Or La Trompette, but The Ledbury will keep you chortling well into the night.

Our white wines where Meursault Premier Cru Poruzots 1999 from Domaine Francois and Antoine Jobard and Trimbach Clos Ste Hune 1973. The Meursault started off tasting a touch quaquaversal and I thought it was a touch over the hill. But as it had time to breathe and grow in the glass it expanded into a powerful, intense entity of style and class. Incredible acidity and minerality for a 1999, a vintage I often think of being a bit fat, it ended up drinking supremely well. Lots of enjoyment value here. Modesty forbids me from waxing lyrical too much about the CSH 1973 but it was amazing not only how fresh it started out but moreover how much it expanded and improved with air. Supremely fine, incredibly delicate and utterly refined. Happy birthday me.

Lunch with Keith Prothero is always going to include some cracking Burgundy and the three we tried may have still been early stages of development but were supremely fine and ravishingly enjoyable. 2001 Clos Vougeot from Chateau de la Tour was one of the greatest Clos Vougeot I can remember having. Many years away from maturity it had a robust yet delightful structure intertwined with gorgeously complex fruit. A stunningly fine wine.

Closer to drinkability was 2001 Nuits-Saint-Georges les Vaucrains from Domaine Chauvenet. This was a svelte and sophisticated Nuits that was brilliantly structures but with no hint of toughness or hard, unyielding tannins. It didn’t need so much more time, but I got a lot of pleasure from this bottle – very refined Nuits.

Finally there was a 2001 Latricieres-Chambertin from Rossignol-Trapet which showed all the accessible polish one wants from this producer, but still rather a long way from maturity. I quite liked it but found it so awkwardly hung between youth and maturity it just left me thinking I could have bought something more approachable and pleasure-delivering. It was well-received, though.

Then there were Clarets.

I had pre-judged two of them as being rubbish, and bugger me if I wasn’t wrong. The Mouton 1989 was very elegant and refined, with a sophisticated, serious structure and precise, defined fruit. This is normally the kind of Claret I hate but I found myself drinking this with a great deal of pleasure. Damn.

Even worse was the Montrose 1989, a wine I am pathologically determined to hate. Much to my chargrin this bottle had classy structure, complexity and an awfully large amount of pleasure value. It wasn’t blowsy and overblown, nor was it lean and miserable, it was quite what one would wish for if one could imagine such a thing as a fun and reasonably mature bottle of Montrose.

Finally there was La Mission Haut Brion 1982. I’ve long maintained this is one of the only two Clarets worth bothering with and this bottle demonstrated that with embarrassing ease. With its gravelly texture, mature, ripe fruit and sophisticatedly silky tannins it was a joyfully pleasurable experience for someone who hates red Bordeaux as much as me. Quite, quite brilliant, and obviously it has a long and glorious future ahead of it. Perhaps not another 1966, 1970, 1975, 1983, 1988 or, 1990, but close and definitely a great vintage of La Mission that I hope we were all suitably gobsmacked by. I was.

Finally we finished off with a Mullineux Straw Wine from 2008. The considered opinion was that this was for ageing 20-30 years or more. I wasn’t quite on that wavelength as, like brilliant German eisweins, I think this super sweet intense mega bombs are hilarious when young and I drank mine with gusto and great pleasure.

I must finish by thanking The Ledbury for a brilliant meal, which was somewhat eclipsed by transcendent wines, my dining companions for providing such wonderful wines and scintillating company and, most of all, our host who made the lunch with Keith Prothero experience even more exciting, fun and enjoyable than even my most enthusiastic spies had reported. Thank you Keith, you did it for me in my pleasure centres today.

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Sometimes you fancy something different, happens to us all, and so you shop outside your normal parameters. Of course, this is a path fraught with danger and the peril of heinous suffering. We all do it anyway. The Albarino was the only white wine, beyond Sherry, I have found I could reliably manage to tolerate on my jaunts to Spain. As I am sure stomach churning experience has taught you Spanish whites are generally of a quality that makes them unfit even to clean the toilets in particularly unkempt dysentery wards. But I felt reasonably safe with this.

I got a recommendation to try the Seresin from a normally reliable source. Whilst it was far from cheap it seemed a good risk; I am a firm believer that New Zealand can produce properly grown-up Pinot, Larry Mackenna can certainly do it. I hoped this would show some of the allure and lubricity that make Pinot the obvious red wine choice for enlightened lovers of fine things.

Albarino 2010, Pazo Senorans

Bloody hell, does this smell of anything at all?^[1] If I strain my most acutely trained and finely honed of tasting faculties I think I might be able to discern a suggestion of yeastiness and maybe even something, that with the application of my active and slightly unhinged imagination, could have a vague resemblance to fruit. But sweaty tests to that! This nose is bland, torpid and tedious, matched only in anodyne character by the wit and erudition displayed in the lunchtime banter at a Trappist monastery. Arse, it is staggeringly dreary. The palate pushes back the boundaries of insipid, anaemic boredom. So devoid of character is it that I am more able to detect the flavour of my tonsils than the wine. What really worries me is that I have drank at least several bottles of this wine, indeed exchanged actual money I could have used for Burgundy or fizzy cherry sweets to get it, because it was preferable to what else was on offer. The staggeringly noisome qualities of things worse than this lacklustre contrivance so perturb me that the trip to Spain has been burnt from my diary with a laser and I’ll go and visit my chum Jeremy in Burgundy this October with the instruction that any appearance of Spanish whites will result in the agonisingly severe application of my Singapore Judicial. If, most likely given threats of having to drink something as execrable as Cava, I were forced to endure such a soulless entity of woe just to satisfy my white wine requirements the only path open to me would be to repeatedly force cocktail sticks violently into my sinuses just to prevent sensory deprevation. I must make it luridly clear that spending money on this wine will only leave you weeping with bleak depression; mind-bendingly sub-interest. Get some Sherry, it is cheaper and better.

Pinot Noir ‘Rachel’ 2008, Seresin

This has a nice, fruity nose of strawberries and raspberries, but that, I’m afraid, seems pretty much it. They claim some expensive oak influence but I don’t see it. Sure, it’ll please, but it will ask no questions and deliver little stimulation. The palate is much the same. I like the fruit, the acid level is refreshing and there is what approaches a convincing approximation of structure. It is a simple quaffer, and over-priced at that. Only buy if you like your vinous conquests to be of extravagently easy virtue and most definitely hanging around the embarrassing end of the ‘gifted’ pond.

1. ^[1] Guy will remind us of when, moving onto to white wine number two at one of our little gatherings, I annouced it was rather aroma free. Much laughter ensued as he pointed out I was sniffing the swill of water I poured to clean my glass. I did feel a bit of a large, unsightly arse. ↩

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I’ll come clean, when I find that a Riesling has low alcohol and is bottled with a bit of residual sugar I am a real sucker for it. I buy a bottle enthusiastically and hope it’ll deliver even a small fraction of the thrilling, nervy tension of wines made in the home of this style, Germany, can deliver. I’m happy to admit I usually end up feeling as disappointed, wilted and dejected as a three month old banana.

This bottle is 9%. “Great!”, I hear you think (and I often do hear you think, this is the power of paranoid schizophrenia), “that’d lubricate my lunch just a treat!”. I agree. But it is 5.3 standard drinks and I am sure if the unspeakable swine Don Shenker from the utterly venom-worthy organisation Alcohol Concern or, perhaps, one of the more rabidly sanctimonious, self-opinionated and generally loathsome doctors from the British Meddling Association, heard that someone was having such a healthful and improving amount of drink with their luncheon they’d immediately get them locked up for being a ‘hazardous drinker’. What a bunch of detestable filth-peddlers.

Riesling Moutere 2008, Neudorf

By freaking arse this has the most utterly repellent and loathsome nose I’ve ever encountered! I use the word ‘repellent’ advisedly as it positively reeks of purest flyspray. There is bugger all else there apart from insecticide – it is disgusting, seriously disgusting! I am going to leave my glass for a bit and go and rant to my guests about how people who abuse Riesling like this should have their toes cut off with rusty garden shears. OK, it is ten minutes later, I’ve calmed down somewhat, and I am amazed (and rather pleased) to report that the bug poison aspects have largely gone. I can just detect them under the surface desperate to leap out and massacre blowflies, but the main aroma is quite nice, although depressingly one-dimensional, lime fruit. Nicer, but dull as particularly prosaic dishwater. The palate is nice to drink. It has good enough acidity, reasonable sugar levels and some lime fruit. But it, too, is also definitely of the humdrum idiom. It is so simple you’ve almost got to wonder if the winemaker has added a bit of bleach to the fermentation tanks to strip out a bit of flavour – Riesling surely cannot be so banal? Indeed, if I owned a vineyard producing such utterly tedious Riesling I’d get an ampelographer to check I didn’t have some vastly inferior clone planted and a psychiatrist to check the winemaker didn’t have a pathological aversion to flavour. For sure, once the noisome fly spray aroma has gone you can drink this easily enough but you’ll be frighteningly bored and generally disenchanted by the end of your first glass. It is just so dreary. This definitely sub-interest, and I almost feel it would wear that epithet with pride.

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Sometimes one forgets how fortunate one is. Editor Daniel pointed out this bottle of dry Tokaji in Fortnum and Mason and asked if it was worth buying as he had never tried one. “You’ve never tried dry Tokaji!” I said with such incredulity he could have just said that ex-PM Gordon Brown was a really top geezer and certainly not a saturnine sourpuss of the dreariest kind. “No, David, but then I also didn’t try over 3,000 wines during one year at university.” It was a good point – as far as tasting experience goes I have been a really jammy fellow.

For those who finding it hard to glean information from this label I’ll explain. Furmint is the main grape variety used for making the more widely-known sweet Tokaji. Szent Tamas is a distinctly favoured plot of land for growing these grapes and Szepsy is a producer of reliable quality. Given that 2005 is a serious vintage in the region I felt the portents for pleasurable drinking were promising. So he dropped the sponds and we are about to share it with our good friends the neighbours.

Tokaji Furmint ‘Szent Tamas’ 2005, Szepsy

Pulling this straight from the fridge demonstrated the folly of drinking decent wine too cold, it was rather anonymous to start with. We let it warm up to a slight chill and dived in. There is a Grand Cru Chablis like density to this set of aromas, the pear fruit also seems a bit Chablis in character. It has a toasty set of smells but I think this is more due to the grape and vineyard character than any silliness with new wood. There is also a slight dusty hint that has suggestions of fungus which seems similar to aromas from the sweet version. The palate has great acidity and some mineral characters. Whilst this is not the world’s fruitiest palate there is enough pear fruit present. It is quite a large mouthful, but not super-long or super-complex. Good wine, though, but not ultimately top bunny. Daniel said, “I’m pleased to have tried it and will happily buy some should I find myself in Hungary; no more from Fortnum’s, I feel.”

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