Mirabeau Rosé Gin, France (£27, Waitrose) Earlier this month the Fladgate Partnership, the family firm behind some of the biggest and best names in port (Taylor’s, Fonseca, Croft), launched their new table wine division in the UK. The new wines, in shops later this year, are rather impressive, but what’s made them such a talking point in the British wine trade is what they represent. Fladgate, after all, was one of the last of the top-flight port producers to resist a move into unfortified wine. The Fladgate table wines are evidence of a global trend for diversification among wine producers. It’s a trend that is responsible for a number of often rather lovely drinks and other products, such as, for example, Provence rosé wine producer Mirabeau’s very pretty-looking and smelling zesty fresh pink gin.
Denbies Orange Vermouth, England (£25.60, Denbies) I’m not at all surprised that Provençal rosé producers have been branching out into gin. The likes of Mirabeau and Famille Perrin, the family of winemakers behind Brad Pitt’s Miraval wines, and the actor’s The Gardener Riviera Gin (as well as some terrific and often excellent-value wines in the Rhône Valley), have a way with packaging that shares the gin trade’s willingness to embrace the kind of bottle forms and shapes, and marketing, you might find in the perfume business. It’s not just gin. Another botanical-based spin-off that has become increasingly popular with winemakers is vermouth, with such vinous luminaries as Badenhorst in South Africa, Mathiasson in California, and Germany’s Dr Loosen all having been involved in making a take on the herb-and-root-enriched fortified wine style. English winemakers have been getting in on the act, with Surrey’s Denbies using the pressings from their terrific orange wine, Solaris 2022 (£28.25, denbies.co.uk; grapebritannia.co.uk) to make the super-tangy, blood-orangey, gently Campari or Aperol-like bittersweet Orange Vermouth.
Fontodi Chianti Classico Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Tuscany, Italy (£25, 50cl, Hic!) The wine business gets some stick for encouraging monocultures. Too often, large-scale vineyards sweep across the horizon without so much as a single tree breaking up the remorseless march of the vines. Such environments are terrible for biodiversity – and that is, in turn, terrible for the long-term health of the vineyards, which only flourish when they are filled with diverse animal and plant life. One way in which winegrowers have attempted to break away from this is to move back towards mixed farming, with olive trees, which thrive in similar conditions to the vine, a popular choice of crop in southern Europe. Many wineries, notably in Italy and Spain, double up as olive oil producers, and the oil produced at top chianti classico estate Fontodi is the equivalent of their wine.
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