Italiano Vino Rosso NV (£4.50, Tesco) The wine trade has historically been pretty resilient in times of crisis. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, for example, a lot of merchants reported an increase in wine spending, as people cut back on eating and drinking out but spent some of the cash they’d saved on treat bottles to drink at home. Something similar happened during the pandemic, when the hospitality shutdown led to a boom in home wine deliveries. The persistent cost-of-living crisis of the past two years seems to have had a different effect, however, with wine sales down as prices have soared. The problem is that wine, as well as being subject to the same inflationary pressures as other food and drink categories, has also had to cope with big duty hikes. In that context, the drinkable bottle of sub-£5 wine, already an endangered species, has become vanishingly rare, making Tesco’s achievement in putting together this characterful, gluggable red this year all the more remarkable.
Morandé Terrarum Patrimonial Semillon, Maule Valley, Chile 2022 (£9.99, Waitrose) One of the more heartening developments in wine in the past year has been the continued rise to prominence of old vines. Thanks to the proselytising work of groups such as the alliance of wine producers, journalists, scientists and others known as The Old Vines Conference, the wine trade is increasingly viewing old vines (by which I mean anything from 35 to more than 100 years old) as a precious cultural asset to be preserved and protected. It’s not just about history. Recent experience has pointed to old vines coping much better in conditions of drought and excessive heat than younger plants. And the wines produced by old vines are frequently among the best, most concentrated yet balanced around. Winemakers’ willingness to hunt out old vines has also given an unexpected boost to some previously neglected grape varieties, such as semillon in Argentina and Chile, 100-year-old vines of which are the basis of this fabulous waxy, richly complex dry white.
Lyme Bay Chardonnay, Essex, England 2021 (from £23.99, lymebaywinery.co.uk; majestic.co.uk) Sadly, the climate crisis remains the single biggest, most urgent topic whenever I meet a winemaker or travel to a wine region. In some of the more extreme cases – notably where a year’s crop has been wiped out by a late spring frost, a savage sudden hailstorm or a rampant wildfire – the conversation can be bleak in the extreme, a feeling that, in many of its warmer traditional heartlands, making wine is now only just viable and will cease to be possible at all if the global temperature continues to rise. In other (formerly) cooler places, it’s more a melancholic matter of enforced stylistic change than full-on existential fear: that the wines don’t taste like they used to; that they no longer have the freshness and snap that once made them distinctive. For this Essex-raised man, however, the freakiest if, for now, most benign consequence of all this frankly terrifying turbulence is the emergence of my native land as a potential challenger to Burgundy’s Côte d’Or: it’s boom time in the Crouch Valley, source of vivid, pristine, Burgundian chardonnays such as Lyme Bay’s.
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