Wine bargains at Sainsbury's

It's a bit of a while since I've written about wine - hell, it's a bit of a while since I've written about anything Swept up by pre-election fever and post-election drama, suddenly inundated with work (Paid-for. Hurray!) the poor old blog has been suffering a bit. But I came across some good buys at the Sainsbury's wine tasting this week which I thought I'd pass on.

First a lovely Loire red. Sainsbo's has been selling the Domaine du Colombier Chinon for some time but for some extraordinary reason have chosen not to jack up the price - probably because they never do promotions on it. And at £5.99 it's a total steal - most Loire reds cost at least another £3 or £4. It's 100% Cabernet Franc, with a glorious fresh mulberry flavour (berries and leaves) that's everything I want from a summer red. You should drink it cool with anything you like but it's would be great with seared tuna or grilled chicken and herbs.

They also have a new range called House Wines which sounds a bit more enticing than 'budget' or 'cheap plonk' but that is effectively what it is. Most of the wines were a bit weedy (the whites) or a bit over-jammy and coarse (the reds) but there were some real bargains - a very decent dry Chilean rosé - the House Dry Rosé at £3.99, a fresh cherry-flavoured House Valpolicella that is better than it has any right to be at £3.79, a surprisingly decent inexpensive House Chianti at £3.86 that would be perfectly good with a takeaway pizza and - best bargain of all - a good gutsy Carignan and Grenache-based House Red from the Languedoc for £3.49: the sort of carafe wine you find in old-fashioned French bistros. All are available from June 1st.

There's also an excellent new Blanc de Blancs champagne under their own label for £16.99 which is based on wines from the 2006 harvest and made for them by Duval-Leroy. Of course £16.99 is not exactly cheap but it's great value for champagne. A bottle of this quality would cost at least £10 more from one of the Grandes Marques. And if you hang on until there's a special offer or Sainsbury's is discounting wine across the board you'll really hit the jackpot.

The problem with bin ends

Having crowed about my bargains on Saturday, yesterday brought me down to earth with a bump: the Cuilleron Marsanne was badly corked. There's nothing for it but to take it back to the shop and get it exchanged, a task which my longsuffering husband has offered to undertake.

Of course there's no compensation for his time and trouble but at least we should get a replacement bottle. Needless to say we haven't drunk any and stoppered the bottle straight away in case of argument.

It does underline one of the problems about buying bin ends in that they may be of uncertain quality. It's possible they're reduced simply because there were a couple of corked bottles in the batch or because they were over the hill. As I mentioned Marsanne is long-lived for a white so I was reasonably confident about buying a 2006, particularly from a good producer but it does underline why so many winemakers have moved to screwcap.

It's always best to drink a bin-end within a couple of weeks of purchase otherwise you may have a problem getting the store to accept responsibility. Admittedly that's harder if you buy in quantity: I tend to buy one first then buy a couple more if I like it though even that carries some risk as there can be variation from bottle to bottle.

You also need to be careful what you buy. Light wines such as crisp whites and rosés fade faster than more robust red wines so I wouldn't be inclined to pick up inexpensive wines from the 2007 vintage, say, or much older reds from the late '90s. There's a general belief that red wines only improve with age but that isn't the case.

It's also a good reason to avoid suspiciously cheap mixed cases which are usually made up of wines that have passed their peak.

What's been your experience with bin-ends? Have they proved good drinking or a disappointment?

Cut price pink fizz

It may be a cliché but pink fizz is a good buy around Valentine's Day whether you're making a romantic gesture or not.

True, the discounts are not all they might seem. This bottle of vintage Cava isn't worth £12.49 IMO but it's worth at least three quid more than the £5.99 Tesco is currently charging for it. And is far better value than a lot of much more expensive rosé champagne.

The truth is that supermarkets are falling over each other to lure you through their doors on big-spending occasions like Valentine's Day which this year coincides with the Chinese New Year, a double opportunity to part you with more than your usual weekly shopping budget.

Ironically this is a bottle that will serve you well for both celebrations. Fruity rosé is a good partner for Chinese food as well as being a classic Valentine wine. Cordoniu is a decent producer and this vintage rosado, a blend of Monastrell (Mourvèdre) and Pinot Noir, is well balanced and dry without the confected boiled sweet flavours than you might expect from the depth of the colour.

If your local Tesco still has some I'd lay in a few bottles for summer drinking

A good value Grüner Veltliner

If there's one wine that's got impossibly fashionable against all the odds it's Grüner Veltliner. I say against the odds because of its hard-to-remember-verging-on-unpronounceable name (grooner velt-leener, for those of you who wonder), and the fact that many people still resist bottles that look like they might be off-dry or German, let alone one from Austria. (Which if you may remember, though I hesitate to drag it up yet again when their quality is so much improved, was involved in the notorious anti-freeze scandal of 1985)

The Austrians are obviously conscious of this image problem and some producers have marketed it with names like GV to make it sound more sexy or prefixed with the description 'groovy'. But these days you'll find it on any half-way smart winelist.

The reason it's so much in demand is that it's absolutely brilliant with food, especially seafood, light vegetable dishes and tricky-to-match south-east Asian cuisines (it's absolutely perfect with Vietnamese food, for example.) And, as I discovered last night when I opened a bin end of 2007 Huber Alte Setzen Grüner Veltliner from Oddbins, even with a classic Moroccan seven vegetable couscous. If you haven't tasted it before imagine Pinot Grigio with more character and a refreshing white pepper/grapefruity twist to it.

I'd call or nip into your local Oddbins asap and see if they've got any. It was selling at £12.99 but is currently down to £9.09 - a bargain for a wine of this quality.

A brilliant New Zealand red - not cheap but a bargain

I spent the afternoon today at the annual New Zealand trade tasting - one of the best of the so-called generic (i.e. country-based) tastings. Each year I'm impressed at how good the overall standard is though it usually confirms my view that New Zealand's whites outperform its reds - with the exception of Pinot Noir.

In general I find that that the other reds - mainly Cabernet blends and Syrah - tend to be overworked and over-extracted and after two and a half hour's tasting was ready to call it a day when the guy at the Adnams' stand persuaded me to try three wines from the Gimblett Gravels area of Hawkes Bay on the North Island: a Syrah, a Cabernet and most impressive of all - a blend of Cabernet, Merlot and Malbec under the Newton Forrest label called Cornerstone.

So this is basically a style of wine that doesn't hugely appeal to me and which I'm not convinced New Zealand handles particularly well and from a producer (John Forrest) better known for his Sauvignon, Riesling and Pinot Noir. And yet it was fantastic - soft, fluid, elegant, as good as a top-class Bordeaux. And I'm not the only one to think so. In a tasting last year of Gimblett Gravels reds alongside first growth Bordeaux the 2006 Cornerstone came out sixth.

The best news of all is that it costs only £17.50 a bottle which is a fantastic price for a wine of this class. Snap some up while you can.

Vacqueyras - our everyday red

Asking a winewriter what their favourite wine is usually results in a long explanation about how it depends on the mood, the food and the time of year and I'm no exception. But there's one bottle we buy regularly because it pretty well always pleases us and goes with a lot of the food we like to eat (rustic French and Italian)

It's a basic Vacqueyras from the Vignerons de Beaumes de Venise, better known for their sweet wine and sells for £6.99 a bottle in Somerfield. Or at the moment it does. Somerfield converts to the Co-op next Monday so I'm hoping they'll still stock it.

Vacqueyras for those of you who aren't familiar with it is one of the named villages of the Côtes du Rhône appellation which means its quality is generally higher than basic Côtes du Rhône Villages. The splendidly old-fashioned label doesn't indicate the proportions of the grape varieties which are used but it's normally Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre and Cinsault (for more about the area see here) It does however state in rather charming Franglais that it is "perfect with an elaborated cooking such as leg of lamb, games, braised meat and cheese" with which I would concur.

I doubt if it will stay this price beyond the 2008 vintage as it sells direct off the producer's site for 7 euros so get in there quick (but not in my local branch if you don't mind).

What's your favourite everyday drinking?

What kind of wine to mull

I've been looking out for a wine to mull and think I've found the perfect candidate. Not that it looks or sounds promising. It's called La Maison de Michel and is basically the sort of wine you'd pick up if you went to the local co-op in a French village with a 5 litre 'cubi' and filled up at the pump. It's only 11.5%, quite dry but sufficiently full-flavoured to carry a fair amount of spicing and costs just £10 for 2 bottles in Tesco - or slightly less if you buy a case of six.

For one bottle* I'd add a small glass of inexpensive ruby port (like Vintage character), a couple of tablespoons of soft brown sugar, a cinnamon stick, a piece of star anise, a few cloves and a finely pared slice of orange peel, bring the whole lot slowly to the boil then immediately take the pan off the heat and infuse the spices for 20-30 minutes. Then remove the spices and reheat it carefully without boiling. Makes around 6 cups or glasses.

Other good bets for mulling are inexpensive unoaked Portuguese and Spanish reds (oak aged wines can taste bitter when they're mulled). And as with with cooking with wine never mull a wine you wouldn't be prepared to drink on it's own!

What sort of wine do you like to mull? Do you have a favourite recipe?

* If you use more than one bottle increase the amount of port and sugar proportionately but you don't need to double or treble the spices.

Cynical champagne ‘deals’

Having been to a champagne tasting this week I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought as to how good these headline-grabbing half-price champagne offers are.

Initally I got quite excited about them myself - Moet for £14, Bollinger for £18 (both at Morrisons, if they’ve not run out) sound like the deal of the decade. Certainly the visitors to the popular money site moneysavingexpert.com think so. Traffic has peaked at 1 million visitors a day this week with champagne being the most regularly viewed subject

But you need to pause a moment and ask how much these bottles are worth in the first place. The best known names like Bollinger and Louis Roederer now have a recommended retail price of around £37-£40 a bottle. Forty pounds a bottle. That’s ludicrously over-priced even allowing for the exchange rate.

The standard price for Averys Special Cuvee Brut which is blended in the Bollinger house style is £21.99 (and they’re bound to do some kind of an offer on it before Christmas). Sainsbury’s very decent Blanc de Noirs, which was recently only narrowly pipped at the post by Veuve Clicquot in a recent Which? tasting is currently selling for £14. (Moet incidentally only came 13th out of the 14 champagnes tested.) OK Avery’s and Sainsbury’s don’t have the cachet of a Bolly but are you prepared to spend an extra 15 quid a bottle for a label?

The champagne producers are not alone in these cynical pricing practices. Most leading brands of sparkling wine are also priced on the basis that they are going to be discounted. The standard price for Cordoniu Cava now is £11.99 enabling supermarkets to ‘slash the price’ to £5.99 (at which it’s a pretty good buy it’s fair to say) But consumers aren’t stupid as the recent demise of Wine Rack which routinely overcharged for wine in order to be able to discount it shows.

What the champagne houses offer - and have been immensely skilled at exploiting - is glamour and a sense of special occasion but don’t let the deals lure you into the idea that they're doing you any favours. If you merely want some simple party fizz I’d head to Majestic and buy the Underraga Brut from Chile at £4.99 or order some Lindauer Brut for £39.90 a case of six from Tesco (Oddbins has a few bottles of the even better rosé if you can track it down)

Have you succumbed any of the champagne offers yet? Will you? Or are you perfectly happy to serve a cheaper sparkling wine to your family and friends?