The other night I opened a red from Moulis en Medoc.  It smelled like a rugby player’s socks and tasted like oven cleaner.  “Oh well,” I told myself philosophically. “Duff bottle.  Can’t win ‘em all.”

But if we are to believe a story that ran throughout the British media last week, the fault was entirely mine.  Apparently I had opened the bottle on the wrong day of the week.  On another day the same wine would have smelled of tulips and tasted like nectar, or something like that. Read the rest of this entry »

My name on the label is a guarantee of irreproachable quality, recognized around the world.
André Lurton

Immodest?  Moi?  But the maddening thing is, he’s right. Lurton is one of the big names of Bordeaux, and his wines are excellent.

The family’s empire began with François Lurton’s Château Bonnet.  In the 1920s François added the Margaux property Château Brane Cantenac. Then, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his sons André and Lucien bought up many more vineyards, so that André himself now owns eleven châteaux in Bordeaux and his wider family owns properties in Languedoc, Corbieres, Spain, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.  Family members also consult for two dozen other firms all over the world.

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Now and again over the past year I have dispensed advice about buying wine during these times of economic woe. This advice was given only partly with tongue in cheek. The fact is, very many of us must now tighten our belts. Those of us who love fine wine must either drink less of it, or lower our standards, or find some way of getting the same for less money.

The third option seems the least unattractive. But what does this amount to in practice? In the case of French wine, one trick is to seek out the more obscure appellations, such as Quincy or Monthelie or St. Aubin, whose better examples are almost indistinguishable from their more famous (and much costlier) neighbours – respectively Sancerre, Volnay and Puligny-Montrachet.  But there is another strategy. Read the rest of this entry »