![]() ![]() And, while often you can open a Burgundy pinot noir for £20-£25 and be disappointed, this delivers at less than half that price. Lots of New World pinots are just fruit bombs but this is earthy and delicious. Like this Chilean (Vina Leyda Pinot Noir Cahuil Vineyard 2006, £11.00). 'We’re like our customers: we have to be careful what we spend, so we look out for wines that over-deliver. We try to find wines that punch above their weight, like this New Zealand red (Waipara West Two Terraces Red 2003, £9.95) which costs a tenner but tastes like £15. Swig started in 1996 as a Hampstead shop but by 2001 we’d outgrown ourselves - we either needed more shops, which we didn’t like the idea of, or none at all so we became exclusively mail order. James Bloom, partner: ‘I was a focus-puller in the film industry before I fell into the wine trade. We have a warehouse and a courier and if you order before 1pm you can be drinking your wine by the next working day.’ It’s for drinking now – all our wines are, it’s in the nature of mail order. They work hard, they know what they’re trying to achieve and the result is a wine like this, balanced, elegant and rounded. Their land is crammed right up against the Massif Central. Her family have been here 500 years his are winemakers from Bandol. And the area’s full of young, hungry winemakers like Geraldine and Xavier Peyraud (Mas des Brousses, Coteaux du Languedoc, Terrasses du Larzac, 2005, £10.95). They’re fantastic value – this is the best source of good reds in the £6-£9 bracket in the world. In this country, we think of their wines as chugging wines but there are some marvellous small producers. 'But if you told me I was only allowed to drink the wines of one region for the rest of my life, I’d go for Languedoc-Roussillon in France. ![]() The Atlantic is freezing there: the wind off them keeps the grapes cool and means they can make intensely flavoured wines. The sauvignon blanc (Fryer's Cove, Sauvignon Blanc, Bamboes Bay, South Africa, 2007 £10.25) is from another place on the edges: Bamboes Bay, 300km up from Cape Town, where the vineyards are in sight of the sea. But this tastes pure and fruity, with none of the jamminess Argentinian malbecs sometimes have. It’s a frankly insane place to make wine. There’s no hail, no bugs, no fungus – no rain, either, they get their water from snowmelt. For instance, this malbec (Vicien Malbec, Argentina 2006, £6.25) is from some of the remotest vineyards in the world, 5,000 feet up, on the edge of the Andes mountains in Catamarca, north-west Argentina. Now I’m owner, director… in a small wine business you do everything. But I got fed up with meetings, admin and making people redundant, so I left in 2002 and set up my wine business the next month. Simon Taylor, owner-director: ‘I was at Sotheby’s for 23 years, as a picture expert and then as a manager. ![]()
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