July News
With the England football team reaching the Euros final, I finally have managed to sit down and take time to write. Meantime I wish them all the very best come Sunday against Spain!
As we are now in the middle of July and schools are slowly winding down towards the Summer holiday break it’s only appropriate to recommend some summer white wines to look out for, even if the weather is thus far not playing the game!
We are thrilled to have back in stock the Groote Post Seasalter (and from a recent Instagram post one of their bottles ventured to centre court Wimbledon last week). Based in the region of Darling in South Africa, Groote Post were seriously good dairy farmers by tradition and built up a large farm and herd, at the same time in the late 1970s early 1980a they diversified into making wines and since 2001 this has become their sole vocation.
I am a huge fan of this wine, a blend of Sauvignon blanc 90% and Semillon 10%. The Seasalter is wonderfully expressive on the nose and the palate with captivating notes of black current, stone fruit and green apple together with hints of fynbos and kelp, sea-breeze and a touch of oak. Rich, layered and long, this subtly powerful blend is intense but not weighty: an elegant well-balanced wine showing typical Darling minerality, vibrant acidity and some leesy complexity before a saline finish. Just ideal for a long BBQ lunch where there are lots of different food and flavours going on this will certainly stand from the crowd.
For those of you/us not heading off on their Mediterranean summer holiday but want to try and immerse yourself in some warmth and relaxation, these two next white wines will transport you there!
From Attica just north of Athens with the Acropolis in the distance we have Domaine Papagiannakos Assyrtiko, 2023 and this just screams out for seafood, whether lightly fried with a know of butter or just off the BBQ this white wine (more often associated with the island of Santorini but here old vines grown on the mainland), has lovely fresh lemony and more zesty notes but with a saline background which invites you onto another glass, just kick back and watch the Durrells with glass of this in your hand.
It leads well into the offering from Sicily, and the Pellegrino estate this a Grillo is called ‘il Salinaro’ for that very reason whilst it has a slightly riper and fuller white peach notes than the Assyrtiko it sill has this tight refreshing, saline notes which comes from the volcanic soils as the vines are just 800 metres from the sea.
Lastly but by not means least, another welcome return for La Mecanique wines of southern France, here the La Mecanique Vermentino, a grape variety that can withstand the heat of southern France as well as the isles of Sardinia, Corsica and parts of Bolgheri in Tuscany where it predominantly originates from.
Lovely stone fruits and white floral notes, and almonds, good freshness and light alcohol at 12.5% vol. A real crowd pleaser and whilst I won’t be holidaying in the Med, I will be drinking a bottle of this in West Wales later this month, whilst digging my toes into the sand and ‘probably’ sheltering from the rain in my woolly jumper…
So, whatever to wherever you are heading to in the coming weeks, make sure you have at least one bottle of the above detailed wines to keep you company!
Santé!