Minimum Unit Pricing "on the rocks"...?

We learn this morning that the government shows “weak leadership” on the issue of a minimum price for alcohol in England and Wales because ministers can’t agree on the policy.  Actually, this is just symptomatic of a government without a working majority rather than indecisiveness; a handful of dissenting voices would be irrelevant with a decent majority in the commons and the policy would probably go through.  The trouble is, that whilst it may be a sensible idea, it’s hardly a vote-winner and is unlikely to appear as a manifesto promise ahead of the next election.

The disagreements over Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP) could still be resolved though since the crux of the problem is not whether it is “fair” but whether or not it will work as a means of tacking alcohol-related health issues.  This is, of course, unknown but the only way we are going to find out is by trying it.  Conservative MP and former GP Sarah Wollaston has now joined us with a call for introducing MUP  for a trial period of 3 years to see whether or not it makes any difference and, if it doesn’t, it can be scrapped.  We suggested this very idea on BBC Radio Suffolk earlier this year.

So far so good you may think, but there is still a problem, and it’s to do with how we measure success (or failure) of the scheme.  In his recent article in Off Licence News Phil Mellows highlights precisely this problem.  He points out that “numbers are essential to the public health approach to alcohol”.  Here is his article in full which is well worth a read.  It calls into question many of the claims made by Alcohol Concern and other similar organisations simply because the figures they use are wrong and simply trotted out as a means of supporting government policy.  It’s not even a matter of opinion, he argues, simply a matter of fact.  We will let you draw your own conclusions.

The main objection to MUP would seem to be that it would penalise moderate drinkers on modest incomes who choose to buy (or can only afford) products at the very cheap end of the market.  This is a valid observation and worth exploring further.  It has been argued that any penalisation of moderate drinkers by price rises on very cheap products would be unfair on consumers, but with the current proposals on MUP, any unfairness is effectively the price that we as a society are being asked to pay for trying to address the problem of alcohol related harm; we simply need to decide whether or not it’s a price worth paying.  It could be seen as unfair to expect a large number of people to pay a bit extra each for a scheme designed to improve the lives of a minority of others, or you could argue that such an arrangement is merely symptomatic of the caring and civilised society that we should be…

In Ipswich there is currently a campaign running called “Reducing the Strength”.  It seeks the voluntary removal of all beers, lagers and ciders from stores in the town with an alcohol volume of 6.5% or over which are sold for a very low price.  In other words, it seeks to target only those products of choice of the small section of consumers who drink specifically to get drunk.  These are drinks designed with only one purpose in mind, to deliver as much alcohol as possible as cheaply as possible.  They are not designed for flavour, or to accompany food, or to refresh, they are simply a means of delivering booze to consumers for whom booze is the only thing that matters.  This is the section of consumers for whom the health risks are greatest, they are frequent and high consumers of alcohol. Might it therefore be worth considering the introduction of MUP on just these products rather than across the board since they seem to be the main culprits?  This would surely show us whether MUP works or not.

The trouble is, the government likes us to drink because of the tax revenue that alcohol brings in, it just can’t say so.  The Chancellor will probably raise Excise Duty again next week, not because he thinks we will drink less as a result, but simply because he needs the money.  He will do it sneakily using words such as “no additional increase” in the hope that this will be widely misreported as “no increase”, saving face whilst he allows the Excise Duty Escalator introduced by his predecessor to automatically raise it by 2% above inflation.

If we’re not going for MUP nationally then local strategies like Ipswich’s own “Reducing the Strength” would seem to be the best bet to tackle the problems caused by low priced booze and we will need to look north of the border to see whether MUP makes any difference.  After all, if it works in Scotland, it ought to work anywhere.

Grape Pips...

Customers regularly ask us for a brief outline of the characteristics of the main grape varieties when browsing our shop shelves so we wondered whether we should set ourselves a challenge and attempt to provide a brief tweet for each; a snapshop of each major variety in no more than 140 characters.  They will necessarily be opinionated (us? never!) and will inevitably exclude the finer points, but the idea is to give you a flavour of each variety, what we look for when tasting samples and what you should therefore find when you make a purchase.  Please let us know if you’d like us to feature your favourite variety; alternatively just leave it to us and we will work through them in random order…

Chateau Shergar...

Cutting corners to save pennies isn’t just a problem for supermarket ready-meals.  Some wine producers may be equally culpable.

Imagine, just for a moment, that you are a supplier of “value” lasagne to a major national supermarket.  Your costs keep going up yet your customer is not willing to pay more.  Indeed, because they buy so much from you and know that your survival depends on it, they lean on you hard to pay less for your product. 

You find yourself forced to look for ways to save money.  You will naturally look at cheaper packaging and manufacturing costs but eventually you will have nowhere else to go but to reconsider your ingredients list - the stuff that actually gets eaten.  In the case of the lasagne you could look to use less of the expensive ingredients (like meat perhaps?) and more of the cheaper ones and hope nobody notices But suppose that you’re then offered a way to make the same product, with just as much meat in it as before but which will suddenly make the sums add up?  Hey! You might even be able to turn a profit this time too!  What would you do?  Would this apparent winner be worth backing?

None of this is alien to the world of wine.  Back in 1985 the Austrian wine trade was almost killed off by the “antifreeze” scandal where diethylene glycol was added to some wines to make them appear fuller-bodied than they naturally were.  The following year methanol was used by some Italian producers as a means of boosting the booze content of otherwise thin wines.  21 people died having drunk the stuff.

There is a list of ingredients on your value lasagne (though you may have to have been rather creative in writing it) but there are no such labels on bottles of wine.  What’s the answer then? 

Well, the obvious answer in the case of the lasagne is to buy the ingredients you need from trusted sources and make your own.  You’ll know what’s in it and it won’t necessarily cost you more.  I bet it’ll taste better too!  Not that I’m advocating that you suddenly attempt to make your own single vineyard Sangiovese though.  The simple solution with wine is to make sure you pay enough for the stuff you’ll be consuming.  It works for lasagne too by the way.  I know we bang on about this all the time, but in the light of the horsemeat revelations it’s worth remembering that if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. 

Pressure from the big retailers producers to hit price points grows all the time.  Taxation constantly rises, as do fuel costs and the price of dry goods.  The recent loss of the UK’s AAA credit rating has sent sterling into a nose dive making all things foreign that bit more expensive at source.  Recent harvests have been of decent quality (mostly) but low quantity and prices will go up; it’s unavoidable.  Unless, of course, someone is prepared to sell at a loss or simply resorts to cheating of course, in which case you may still be able to find those supermarket deals, but what will you actually be drinking?

People have been caught cutting corners making wine for commercial sale before.  Now, more than ever, the pressure will be on prices.  One famous drink brand has previously used the advertising tag “Reassuringly Expensive” but it’s probably truer of decent wine than it is of lager.  Low yields, a worsening exchange rate, and George Osborne will produce an unhappy combination this year, but take comfort from the fact that there will still be plenty of winemakers (and wine merchants) who will steadfastly refuse to cut corners so that you can be confident of what you’re drinking.  After all, that homemade lasagne deserves nothing less!

Mas Macia - King of Cava

A while back I was lucky to be included on an informal tour of various vineyards across a broad swathe of northern Spain, from Rueda in the west to a Cava producer just outside Barcelona in the east.  It was a fascinating trip providing many insights into the workings of some particularly attractive estates.

On the long run west from the wilds of Campo de Borja to Barcelona for our final visit before heading for the airport we passed hundreds of scattered wind farms, sentinels of modern technology ranked over ancient hilltops.  Some of them were even turning.  It gladdened the heart, as we hummed over the newish motorway in sparse traffic, to know that my own personal kick into the European kitty had been wisely spent.

We were running late.  Hot and conscious of holding the estate’s working day up we nonetheless were welcomed royally by the irrepressible Jordi Casanovas, his sales director Carmen and Angel, a PR lady and were ushered straight into lunch.  Jordi quickly revealed himself to be quite a character who seems to run the estate as a benign dictatorship.  He is a very knowledgeable man, humorous and with a jolly twinkle but when he coughs others jump.

Jordi Casanovas

 With a leg extensively strapped up he was unable to walk far and decided to impart as much information from his rightful place at the head of the table. By way of aperitif, we tasted a couple of Cavas.  First the Rosé which was dry and pretty, quite delicious and positively cleansing.  In the cellar this wine is separated from its lees as soon as possible to maintain freshness.  Next the Brut Nature, which was my favourite.  The second fermentation takes place in bottle, the wine stays in bottle on its lees, unlike the Rosé, for no less than 24 months before dégorgement, it rests further after this before being put onto the market.  It has a fine, persistent mousse that lasts in the glass and shows an appetising, baked apple fruit, together with nutty, yeasty notes from its time on the lees.  There is zero dosage so the wine is naturally completely dry and shows the precision and perfectionist winemaking of a passionate craftsman.

The grapes for his wines come from 60 beautiful hectares of rolling vineyards which, we saw on a post prandial leg-stretch, were punctuated with streams and patches of woodland.  While still table wines, red and white, are an increasingly valued part of the estate’s output, Cava is the mainstay of the business.  The vines for Cava are unfamiliar to UK ears, even if Cava itself is not, with Macabeo, Xarel-lo and Parallada being the traditional varieties.  Jordi grows wheat between the rows which is cut at about half a metre high forming a straw mulch that reduces evaporation in the heat and prevents soil loss in the event of hard rain.  It also suppresses weeds and encourages the roots of the vines to grow downward to look for nutriments.

 As the last of the Brut Nature was consumed the conversation, or rather, lecture, continued with an endless chatter of facts.  Did we know one of the ways that such freshness could be maintained during the hot harvest?  No chance for a stab at the answer which followed instantly - frozen CO2 pellets are mixed in with the freshly picked grapes, reducing the temperature and blanketing out oxygen.  I looked around the timbered dining room in which we were demolishing quantities of jamon iberico and home baked bread and wondered if the ghosts in this wonderful 15^th century building had the faintest idea what your man was on about.

 There is a danger with combining an extensive tasting with a long lunch - there is no provision to spit out.  I see from my notes that we tried eleven different wines poured in lunch quantities rather than a modest tasting splash.  As a succession of the estate’s still table wines appeared, together with delicious salads and enough meat to satisfy the most carnivorous of Spanish appetites, I could not help noticing just how pretty Carmen and Angel were, eye-catching though both of them were in the first place, and how Jordi’s wit was increasingly funnier.

Carmen and Angel

 Afterwards, fortified and perhaps lightly anaesthetised by lunch, Jordi felt up to a brief tour of the winery and cellars.  This was no industrial unit with lavish mod cons; hygienic, yes, organised, well of course, but still kind of home-spun.  The cellars are tight for space and a bit rambling, but cool and still and at a constant temperature all the year round.  We emerged, blinking, into the stark light of a hot afternoon and our host retreated for half an hour while the girls showed us round some of the vineyards closer to the house and we could inspect the young, green berries, no bigger than elder at this stage, with all their swelling potential.

The cellars at Mas Macia

 As we got back in the car, waved off by the smiling team at Mas Macia, I reflected on the friendly feeling of the place and its thoughtful, quality driven ethos and compared it to larger concerns and the dispassionate, clinical attitude of the scientist/accountant board in charge at some places.  We also discussed how it is possible to make such delicious Cava here, yet how much gets processed into truly unremarkable, if not actually bad, price-point fodder for the multiples.  It’s that that presents us with a problem - drinkers who have experienced how truly nasty the industrial variants of Cava can be are now understandably wary of all Cava. 

If this rings bells with you, ignore the ads for cut price Cava which are already appearing on telly for the Christmas market and give the real thing a try; spend a little more and drink much, much better.  Perhaps the difference is nicely summarised by Jordi’s final sentence as we made our farewells, “ Remember, this is a family business, not a wine factory.”

Certainly not a wine factory.

Buy Mas Macia Brut Nature here.

Champagne: Don't Be Fooled By Big Discounts On Big Brands - Look For Better Value Still...

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and it’s time for too-good-to-be-true Champagne offers to start appearing in the national retailers.  All such deals depend on the customer not knowing enough about the product itself so that they simply default to making their buying decision on the only factor that is easily understandable – price!  The lower the price and the bigger the apparent saving the more likely it is that Joe Customer will take the bait, and the reassurance of a familiar brand is included in the hope of confirming that this is surely a cracking deal.  Hmmmm.....

However, if you buy a bottle of one of the big brand Champagnes at full price (£35-£45 or thereabouts) we reckon you’ll be paying about £10 a bottle more than you should be for the quality of the stuff in the bottle.  We base this on two things: 1.In the tasting we’ve done, the quality of the Champagnes we are able to sell for £25-£35 a bottle has consistently been much higher than the more expensive big brands, and 2. all the big brands have huge marketing departments to support (that’s where your extra tenner goes in case you’d not worked it out) and the small chaps we buy from don’t have to support this expensive marketing.  All that’s happening when the prices of the big Champagne brands are reduced by £10 or so is that they are temporarily suspending their demand for you to pay for their advertising.

Like all wines, Champagne can be too cheap, where you pay so little that all you get is the name on the label, but poor quality fizz inside the bottle.  We don’t go anywhere near such stuff, and if your budget for Christmas fizz is lower than £20 a bottle you’d be better off spending it on top quality fizz that isn’t Champagne – good Prosecco or Cava for instance.  Once you’re through the £20 mark though the Champagne starts to get interesting.  Charles Chevallier Brut d’Honeur nv at £21.85 is super value (just try and find a brand you’ve heard of for that price).  It’s fresh, yeasty and made in the classic tradition of the champagne houses of Aÿ, principally from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay with some Pinot Meunier and matured in cool chalk cellars for 5 years before release.

Move up the scale a bit and we have Rasselet Brut nv from the village of Oeuilly in the Marne Valley.  Halves, bottles, magnums and jeroboams are all available as well as a delicious rose and a demi-sec too, with the 75cl bottles priced in the region of £27.  We have dealt with Joel Rasselet for longer than we can remember and he has never let us down.  His Champagnes are super value – better in fact than any of the brands – and we are the only UK importer. 



Joel & Edwige Rasselet

At the same price is Veuve Fourny Premier Cru Blanc de Blancs, a 100% Chardonnay Champagne, fully organic with a lighter, crisper style.  At the top of the heap we have a stunning pair from Vilmart who are also 100% organic with grapes drawn from 100% Premier Cru sites.  The Vilmart Grand Cellier d’Or is barrique fermented and aged, and a blend of 70% Chardonnay and 30% Pinot Noir.  The Vilmart Coeur de Cuvee comes only from their best juice (80% Chardonnay, 20% Pinot Noir) and spends its first year in barrique.  It is the highest quality champagne, with fantastic richness and concentration.  These aren’t cheap of course, but you get what you pay for.

Vines overlooking the village of Hautvillers in the heart of the Champagne region.

 However, this year’s star looks like being Lallier Grand Cru Vintage Brut 2005.  The grapes that make this come from 100% Grand Cru vineyard sites and are a blend of 55% Pinot Noir from Ay and 45% Chardonnay from the Cote de Blancs.  Lallier Grand Cru Vintage Brut 2005 is aged for 48-72 months and kept a further 5 months after disgorging.  We regard it as one of the best 2005 vintage champagnes produced by anyone anywhere:  It is rich and fine with toasty characteristics yet still fresh and invigorating.  You simply have to try it – and you’ll get your chance…

Williamson & Son outside Lallier's cellars in Ay.

 Lallier are situated at the heart of the historic village of Ay and have some of the oldest cellars there, dating back to the 18^th century.  In 2004 Francis Tribault purchased the house from Rene James Lallier and developed their speciality of producing champagnes sourced only from Grand Cru and Premier Cru classified vineyards.  They have several more familiar champagne houses as their neighbours yet outshine all of them.  Francis Tribaut’s artisan approach to winemaking, using only natural yeasts and low dosage, allows the purity and richness of each Grand Cru terroir to shine through, creating distinctive and original wines.  We are pleased to offer the Lallier Grand Cru Vintage Brut 2005 at £42.50 a bottle, though with some help from Lallier themselves we are able to reduce this price to £39.50 per bottle until 31^st December 2012.  It will also be available to taste at our Christmas Winetasting on 22^nd November in Ipswich.  If the £20 mark is more your thing though then we’d steer you back to the Charles Chevallier Brut d’Honeur at £21.85 we mentioned earlier.  It’s also made by Lallier incidentally, though doesn’t come exclusively from Premier and Grand Cru vineyards that the Lallier label is reserved for.

Lallier's vines high on the slopes above Hautvillers

 So when you see the supposedly cracking deals offered on Champagne, just take a minute, engage your "common sense chip" and wonder, for a moment, whether what you're thinking of buying is the right product at the right price, or whether you're in danger of being fooled by a big discount on a familiar name.  After all, if they can afford to sell it to you at Christmastime at £10 a bottle cheaper than normal, why isn't the regular price £10 lower?  Could it be because the price isn't actually £10 lower at Christmastime, but rather it is £10 too high for the rest of the year?

Chilean Wine, What’s All The Fuss About?

Well, the fuss is all about quality and value for money and we’re all interested in that, right?  The trick though is to recognise the difference between “value for money” and “cheap” because they are not the same thing at all.  I will explain…

I’ve just looked at the Chilean wine selection on the website of the major national supermarket where we do our family grocery shop.  Here the vast majority of the 35 wines are either £4.00 or £5.00.  Cracking value on the face of it, but that’s only half the story.  Well over half of a £5.00 bottle of wine is tax (£2.73) and at £4.00 it’s nearly two thirds tax (£2.57).  With much of what remains occupied by the cost of the bottle, label, cork, transport (and dare we mention some profit) what are your expectations of a wine where only a few pence is left to cover the stuff which you are actually going to consume?  A £4.00 bottle might be considered comparatively cheap, but value for money it ain’t, because you’ve not spent enough on the wine itself.

35 Chilean wines sounds like lots of choice too doesn't it, yet it represents only a small cross-section of what is available.  It's a bit like having 35 different feature films to choose from at your local cinema but then realising that they all star Sylvester Stallone.  Not much choice at all then...

There is good news though, because if you are prepared to spend a little more on your bottle only a small proportion of your extra spend goes in taxes.  At £8.00 only 40% of what you pay is tax and this drops further if you are prepared spend more still.  What are you likely to get more fun from anyway, two bottles of forgettable £4.00 plonk or one cracking bottle at £8.00?  Unless you’re only in it for the booze my money is on the £8.00 bottle!

Our September Chilean Offer is about helping you to discover the huge jump in quality for only a modest increase in spend.  This applies everywhere of course, not just in Chile, but Chile is an excellent place to start and we’re making it easy for you to do by offering a discount on all our Chilean wines above £7.00 per bottle, and a discount kicks in even if you initially only want to dip your toe in the shallow end of the offer by buying a single bottle.  The Chilean Offer discount doubles from 5% to 10% when you hit 6 bottles though, which may be mixed.  Our Chilean Explorer Six Pack offers an impressive 15% discount and contains some real treats.  Have a look here.

There’s something for everyone here.  Thanks to the unique geography of Chile, a long narrow country bordered by the Pacific Ocean to the west and the snow-capped peaks of the Andes to the east, the climate is so varied that the diversity of the wines is tremendous.  Compare the cool freshness of our Gewurztraminer from Torres in Curico with the ripe luscious Chardonnay from Tabali in Limari for instance.  Or the rich bramble-and-vanilla of Novas Carmenere/Cabernet with the delicate perfume of their Casablancan Pinot Noir.  Not everything is a new world fruit bomb, there is subtlety and elegance here too and flavours that will truly amaze.

So, here’s your chance to do two things; try a few bottles at the next level of price up to see if you can spot the difference, and explore the fascinating array of flavours from Chile.  I’m sure you will be impressed at just how good Chilean wine is once you release the winemakers from the shackles of the supermarket buyers and let them make the best wines they can!

Manzanilla La Sanluquena

A sample bottle of a previously untasted Manzanilla found its way onto our tasting table (Ok, desk) recently (via the fridge of course).  We are both mad about Sherry in all its beguiling forms, but in its crispest, most appetite-awakening incarnation, Manzanilla, it is just about the best aperitif in the world.  Frankly, it's something of a mystery why more people don't "get" just how brilliant a drink this is.  With a handful of olives or some toasted almonds (Er, both please actually) this stuff is our idea of heaven on earth.

We currently list 2 different Manzanilla, both from Bodegas Argueso; the Las Medallas which is their mainstay, and San Leon which is a Manzanilla Pasada (Pasada is aged for longer  - about 7 years as opposed to 5 - to develop a fuller flavour).  What landed on our desk was Manzanilla La Sanluquena from Bodegas Teresa Rivero.  It has a wonderfully old-fashioned pre-Raphaelite style label, presumably depicting “La Sanluquena” herself, though no classic beauty she seems to fall into that category of Spanish lady who always gets more attractive as the evening progresses…

We have tasted Manzanilla in its homeland, and we have tasted it here and we’re not sure why there always seems to be a bit of a difference.  In Spain - specifically in Andalucia - it is fresher and more delicious somehow.  Maybe it's the surroundings (and a particular memory of the Bar Zapata in Cadiz comes to mind) perhaps it's the travelling that it doesn't like, or more likely it's the fact that Manzanilla for the UK market is kept at 15.0% abv so that it attracts the regular Excise Duty rate rather than the higher fortified rate which the traditional Spanish level of 15.5% abv would attract.  Either way finding Manzanilla in the UK that comes close to that tasted in Spain always seems to be a bit of a challenge.  To date, the closest we've got is with the Manzanilla En Rama bottled unfiltered for the Ferria de Sanlucar (in May) by Bodegas Argueso.  The trouble with this is that it's only available for a short while, only then in limited quantities, has a short shelf-life, and costs plenty.

What a revelation it was therefore to open this chilled sample of La Sanluquena (and compare it with the San Leon from Argueso of course).  Whilst the San Leon was delicious, fresh and tangy the La Sanluquena was equally so, still with the same level of yeasty freshness but with somehow more depth and length.  The best news though is that it’s cheaper than the San Leon too.  In fact, La Sanluquena is only slightly more expensive than Las Medallas which is even better news!

If you know what we’re on about when we rave about Sherry then we understand each other, and we know you’ll be in to snaffle some before it all goes.  However, if you have read this blog and still don’t know what all the fuss is about, do yourself a favour and chuck £6.25 at a half bottle and stick it in the fridge for a day.  When you get home, prepare some posh nibbles (olives, nuts, stuff with proscuitto on, you know what we mean) and serve yourself a chilled glass of Manzanilla La Sanluquena.

Click here to visit our website and order some.