You spend months tasting wines, without finding a bargain, then three come along at once.

Like buses.

I have been trying to find a bargain basement wine to recommend for a little while now and it’s been a fairly fruitless exercise (pardon the pun). I suppose in my advancing years, I have been reluctant to accept that the wine ‘sweet spot’ these days is closer to £10 than £5 before, and that I expect someone will appear with a £2.99 Côtes de Thongue that’s going to hit the spot.

Well. OK. Obviously those days are gone.

It doesn’t help that the old £2.99 price point is now the £4.99 price point, and wine has always been made to squeeze under that particular limbo pole. The inherently poor value of the £4.99 price pinch combined with the the fact that it is now the entry for any drinkable wine has meant that the chasm in quality between £5 and £9 is more enormous than ever before.

So, I thank the lucky stars that there are any wines worth having anywhere near a fiver.

Friends of mine have ben asking me if I would cook for them, and give a wine tasting where they might learn something and have fun at the same time. Well the fun was provided by the heroic consumption of wine on the evening, and the topic I choose was how to manipulate the taste of wine by food pairing. There are lot of trade secrets here, but the use of oil, chilli, mustard, vinegar, herbs and mushrooms were discussed at great length. I went to Waitrose for the food ingredients, and had a cursory look around the Waitrose wine department. I needed some cooking wine and a couple of entry level wines with which to demostrate some of the food wine pairings. 

I bought a bottle of El Guia 2011, a Spanish Garnacha at £3.99. Not on offer. That’s retail.

The second wine was called Rich and Intense Italian Red. No. I’m not kidding. A multi-varietal blend from Puglia at £4.99. Retail.

I have to say it. I struggled at Waitrose’s last press tasting. Literally hundreds of wines, beers and spirits to taste, and I struggled to pick two dozen wines that I wanted to put under my stairs. Maybe it was me. Maybe it was the day. I did struggle. Started to lose faith even. It was as if Auntie Jean Lewis had forgotten that it was my birthday. 

Anyway. The wines were both good. Actually unbelievably good.

The Garnacha was, well Garnacha. Simple, but dry (a good thing) and full of raspberry fruit. When I look at what the cheaper Aussie and American brands try to achieve at almost double the retail price of this wine, I feel obliged to tell the world quite how good this is.There isn’t a half-price promotion out there that has the honesty and purity that this confident glugger gives. You know what I mean. I’m talking about the aisle ends filled with Hardy’s Crest or some such gruel-in-a-bottle, claiming to save you a fiver every time you buy one, but when opened, rather than tasting like a reward, feels more like a punishment.

The Italian one? Well it was a little more deceptive. It tasted like it had had a smidge of botox in the form of a little sugar left at the end of the fermentation. At the Waitrose press tasting in late Autumn, I thought that this wine was distinctly boxy and contrived, but it has settled into itself far better than I had expected. I used it very effectively in a red wine, chicory and mushroom risotto, but that’s unfairly putting it down. It has Italian tannins, Italian twang, and dare I say it, Italian flair. For a fiver.

It is the wine equivalent of a Fiat Panda.

Earlier that day, I spent yesterday morning helping to groom a very nice chestnut coloured horse called Marmalade in a field near Oxshott. 

Horses are nice. Never been round them much in my life, apart from the odd New Forest pony that I managed to hit on my brother’s Raleigh Chopper. Those cattle-grids can be darned slippery. 

Is this relevant? Not really. Well, only slightly.

Have you notice that horses smell of brett? They smell of pure clean, almost pleasant feral pheromones. Is this why girls like ponies so much?  Or is this why people who go hunting like claret so much? 

Anyway, I reckon that if I spent a day horse-riding, I would be incapable of giving Gruaud Larose1990 such a hard time. I’ll get back to you on that.

Anyway the last wine I want to officially RAVE about IS a claret. And I hadn’t been anywhere near a horse. Not a four legged one anyway. Bristol has a fair number of the two legged variety.

I visited the West Country a couple of weeks ago, with my good friend Sir Richard Siddle of Harpers. We visited a newly opened shop in Clifton, Bristol, owned by Susan McCraith MW, Aidan Bell, and Richard Davis. All old friends of mine. 

I saw a couple of obscene bargains in the shop. I mean XXX rated frosted shop window obscene.

and…

Well, you can’t take bargains like this on face value. How can you? It sounds like the sort of thing that an unscrupulous supermarket would do. Well,…

It had a fragrant, deep mossy Merlot aroma, with flecks of graphite. Deep, deep crimson red, plenty of soft suedy tannins, and a clean herby finish, licked with hints of vanilla. Yup. I’d pay £11 for that. Get in t'Internet! They still have some. 

The Californian Syrah, if anything was an even bigger bargain, if you like that sort of thing. Fragrant, layered, and not jammy in anyway. Mature, but clean, with a velvety finish of mulberry and thyme. 

Right that’s enough proper wine guff for now. 

PS. If you live in Skegness and want to drink well cheaply, it’s Tesco Finest Côtes Catalanes Carignan all day long.

Seven quid with a smile on your face.