Tesco Finest Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Rhône, France NV (£18, Tesco) The idea of the vintage is a big part of the romance of wine, and it’s easy enough to understand why. By basing each release on a single year’s crop, we’re reminded that wine is an agricultural product, one that changes from year to year according to the conditions. That brings a constant flow of novelty, too, with each vintage effectively a new wine, which in turn provides endless excuses for wine enthusiasts to indulge their never-very-well-disguised trainspotter tendencies. One possibly malign side-effect of the emphasis on vintage, however, has been to ingrain the idea that non-vintage still wines, containing wines from two or more years, can never be as good as those from a single season – an assumption that is given credence by the fact that cheap mass market plonk doesn’t mention a year on the label. A bold move, then, by Tesco to make the latest release of one of its most upmarket own-labels – its Finest Châteauneuf-du-Pape – a non-vintage wine.
Arbousset Lirac, Rhône, France 2020 (£12, Tesco) I initially assumed that cost-cutting, or scarcity of supply, was behind the switch to non-vintage, but when I asked Tesco buyer Charlotte Lemoine what was going on, she offered a different explanation. Apparently, Julie Rouffignac, the talented Rhône Valley winemaker responsible for making Tesco’s Châteauneuf (and other Rhône wines in the Tesco lineup, such as the succulent, spicy red Arbousset Lirac), had managed to find some small parcels of wine from the outstanding 2015 and 2016 vintages in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Since there wasn’t quite enough of either vintage to stretch far enough to make it worth Tesco’s while (the company has a little over 2,800 stores in total, and its Châteauneuf is sold in 609), Lemoine’s solution was to use the parcels as the basis of a blend with other, more recent vintages. The result is excellent, a typically robust but keenly balanced take on the classic southern Rhône red blend, with herb, black pepper, meaty savouriness, liquorice and hedgerow fruit all jostling for attention.
Maison du Vin Crémant de Loire, France NV (£12, The Co-op) There are plenty of other examples of non-vintage fine winemaking around. One of Spain’s finest reds, Vega Sicilia Reserva Unico Especial, draws on a long Spanish tradition of multi-vintage blending. I also love both north-eastern Italian producer Pasqua’s luxurious, fennel-flecked, deftly made, daftly named dry white Hey French! You Could Have Made This But You Didn’t NV (£32, Harrods) and the intensely complex (and Châteauneuf-alike) Sami-Odi Little Wine non-vintage Barossa blend made by winemaker Fraser McKinley. But the most obvious retort to anyone still questioning the quality credentials of non-vintage is Champagne, where blending between vintages developed as a kind of insurance policy in a climate where a healthy crop could not be guaranteed in many years. Champagne cellarmasters are justly proud of the blending skills that go into such glorious multi-vintage wines as Louis Roederer Collection 243 (£59.99, Waitrose) – skills that are also used to create the tangy apple and cream of Maison du Vin Crémant, a wine made using the same model in another northerly French region, the Loire.
Follow David Williams on Twitter @Daveydaibach
