Domaine Lyrarakis Okto White, Crete, Greece 2016 (£11.50, bbr.com)
With its royal warrant, its claim to be the UK’s oldest wine and spirit merchant, and a St James’s Street HQ that wouldn’t be out of place in Harry Potter, Berry Bros & Rudd is the quintessential traditional English wine merchant. It’s the kind of place the red-trousered and red-faced go for their claret, port and burgundy, and there are few better places in the world to go if you’re after the best of wine’s classical Old World. But a recent tasting of 80-odd bottles from the retailer’s 4,000-strong list showed its buyers are just as good at picking out fine wines from more offbeat or unheralded sources, such as this enchantingly fragrant Cretan white, with its pretty white flowers and gentle Muscat grapey fruit.
Eymann Toreye Spätburgunder, Pfalz, Germany 2015 (£19.50, bbr.com)
Despite the departure of arguably the UK’s foremost authority on Burgundy, Jasper Morris, from the Berry Bros team earlier this summer, the company remains a specialist in the region, with fine wines both white (the pristine, steely Domaine Sébastien Dampt Chablis 2016, £19.50) and red (the super-supple berry juiciness of Berry Bros & Rudd Nuits-St-Georges by Benjamin Leroux 2014, £35) jostling for Christmas-list attention. Pound-for-pound, however, the best Burgundy-style red (made, like the French classic, from pinot noir) on show for me was Eymann’s German beauty, with its delectable purity of racy red fruit and nimble dusky annins.
MOB Lote 3 Dão, Portugal 2014 (£14.95, bbr.com)
Germany also provided one of the highlights of Berry’s white selection. Quite apart from being lovely in a juicy-fruity but racy way, Eva Fricke’s Mellifluous Elements Riesling 2016 (£17.75) also deserves a prize for best and most apt wine name of the year. And even if Berry’s is never going to go head-to-head with Aldi and Lidl, it does have wines that offer genuine value: the herbal zip of Berry Bros & Rudd Chilean Sauvignon Blanc 2016 (£9.95); the dark cassis of Berry Bros & Rudd Good Ordinary Claret 2015 (£9.95) and the wine I’m most likely to buy: this gorgeously pale, perfumed red from the MOB collaboration of three top Portuguese winemakers.
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