Taylor-Made Wine Tasting

Barbecue Wines

With a wet and cold May behind us, glorious weather has arrived.   And I’m sure the barbecues are out.  This can present a dilemma for wine-lovers: how do we select wines to match such a wide range of barbecue food?  Here are a few tips:

Rosés: Much maligned even by some of my closest friends, rosés can provide a good match for chargrilled chickens, salmon, halloumi and dare I say, even a burger.   I always avoid the confected strawberry flavours of sweeter rosés, but as long as you stay with dry or off-dry styles, they can be both refreshing and good with food.  Le Bijou Rosé de Sophie Valrose is a light one from the Languedoc was a delightful blush pink, dry with enough fruit to give it some body and interest.  Great value. Waitrose, £5.99

For a more full-bodied rosé, the Basilicata Rosato Le Ralle, Alovini 2020 is an Aglianico-based southern-Italian wine which has a fascinating profile: the Wine Society website says that it matches well with dishes such as meatballs and lamb stew, and it delivers great punch.  The Wine Society, £8.95.

But if all this talk of the pink stuff is too much and all you want is a full-bodied red, then you can’t go wrong with Argentinian Malbec.  Widely available in all supermarkets, Morrison’s The Best provides the perfect foil for the well-cooked (or burnt!) meats that furnish most bar-b-cues.  Doesn’t have to be expensive, but if you pay more, you’ll get more intensity and full flavours.
Try Morrison’s The Best Malbec, currently on offer at £6.50 but still good value at £7.75.

People often ask whether it is worth paying more for a bottle of wine, and of course the answer is entirely up to you. The most expensive bottle ever sold was a 1945 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti which, in 2018 was sold for $558,000 – not even a case, that was for a single bottle!

That is incomprehensibly expensive, but UK government tax and duties means if you only pay £5 a bottle, the amount of actual wine you are buying is somewhere around 30p. Escalate your buying to £10 a bottle, and you’re buying roughly £2.70 worth of wine.

Pay twice as much for the bottle and get 9x as much wine – “You do the math” as they say across the pond!

PS: Had a great Barolo from Lidl last week – Will Lyons in the Sunday Times is always recommending wines from Aldi and Lidl in his weekly columns. This Barolo was £12 though, perhaps further illustrating my point above – even from budget supermarkets, it’s worth paying a little more.

Wines of Spain are incredible value for money..

and are known for their age and their oak.

On average, Spanish wines are sold, older than any other country in the world. With a tradition of selling their wines when they are ready (as opposed to the French selling their wines en primeur and a need to age), Spain has thousand of kilometres of undergrounds cellars to back this up. Pound-for-euro, even Spanish wines of age can be picked up for song.

Oak is of course the other classic feature of Spanish (and occasionally white, such as from Rioja) wines. Touring the cooperage at Bodegas Muga recently, you understand why Muga would decide to make them in-house because of the cost and quality control that they enjoy; (French barrels can cost up to 1,000 euros and are usually only used for a few years!)

Rioja is of course the world-famous region, and my ‘go-to’ Riojan red is a 2015 Navajas Crianza from The Wine Society at £9.50 – a perfect example of why you should pay a little more for your wine. I also bought – en primeur as it happens – a 2010 Bohorquez from Ribera del Duero. Sumptuous and opulent.