One handy rule of wine drinking is to steer clear of anything from European cooperatives. Generally speaking, the words “Cantina Coop. Soc.” on an Italian label or “Cave Cooperative” on a French one are shorthand for “Evil-tasting muck, indifferently produced by lazy, ill-shaven peasants stultified by government handouts.”

And as with all rules of wine drinking, there is at least one distinguished exception. The Cave de Tain was founded in 1933 by a hundred growers from the district of Tain l’Hermitage, on the Rhône. Over the years they were joined by growers from Cornas and Saint Péray, and they later merged with another cooperative, the Cave de Saint Donat. Today the Cave de Tain has 370 members and a total vineyard area of over a thousand hectares. Such a history ought to make for industrial quantities of awful wine, but miraculously it doesn’t.

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“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”   Harry Lime, The Third Man

And good Pinot Noir, he might have added. You don’t hear much about it because the Swiss tend to keep it to themselves. Until very recently only two percent of the country’s wine was consumed abroad. The Swiss wine industry was heavily protected, and its winemakers had little reason to seek foreign attention. For the same reason, quality varied wildly.

From the 1990s onwards everything changed. Read the rest of this entry »

We all have our little daydreams. One of mine is that someone mistakenly sells me a bottle of 1961 La Tâche for the price of a supermarket Chianti. I am sad to report that this has yet to happen, but last week, for a short, blissful interval, I thought I had achieved something comparable.

Although Contado is new to me, I have known its makers for many years. Di Majo Norante are the most highly regarded producers of Molise, in southern Italy. Read the rest of this entry »

When talking about wine I often feel like the little boy who blurts out that the Emperor has no clothes.

Many houses offer us good budget label wines in the hope that these will tempt us to try their more serious offerings. Needless to say, the serious stuff costs twice, thrice, even four times as much as the cheapo. But the expectation is that on trying it we will nod solemnly, say “Mmm, one does see the difference,” and banish all memory of the budget wine.

Often this strategy works. But now and again I am left feeling that the budget wine is the better bet. Read the rest of this entry »