Piero Busso Langhe Nebbiolo, Piemonte, Italy 2017 (£23.21, justerinis.com) Like many – most – people, I wouldn’t say I’m at my best in January. But I have at least come to a kind of accommodation with this long, dark month, a grudging respect for its uncompromising January-ness, which, looked at in the right way, can be seen as a kind of tonic or antidote to the glittery, sugary, fatty excesses of December. Certainly, in the kitchen so far this year, I’ve come to appreciate the unfussy, almost austere charms of this season’s vegetables cooked simply: the sweetly earthy bass tones of root vegetables and the trilling variations on a theme of bittersweet of cabbages, kale and sprouts. As for wine, I reckon the ideal style for this sort of food and mood, and weather, are reds that are filled with flavour, depth and texture, but don’t feel fat or sweet or overly rich and syrupy, and which invigorate with acidity like a shaft of piercing wintry light: over to you Piero Busso.
Tesco Finest Ribera del Duero, Spain 2021 (£12, Tesco) Italy is a fertile source of wines that have the balance of depth and brightness I’m looking for in January. The nebbiolo grape used to produce the delightfully pristine, fragrant red fruit in Piero Busso Langhe Nebbiolo, for example, is also used to make Barolo and Barbaresco, two great Piemontese wines which, with their trademark mix of satisfyingly sandpapery tannins and ethereal fragrance would be on my table every night in winter were I a considerably wealthier man. (If you do have circa £50 to £60 to spare, you could do worse than spend it on one of Piero Busso’s Barberesco wines from justerinis.com and others). More affordably, from Piedmont, Morrisons The Best Barbera d’Asti 2020 (£7) offers a robust, high-acid hit of intense dark plum and cherry, while Tesco can offer a wintry alternative from the high-altitude Spanish region of Ribera del Duero, where the ample inky mulberry fruit is offset by a dusting of spice and a shaft of cool-night freshness.
Teliani Valley Winery 97 Saperavi, Kakheti, Georgia 2021 (from £11.69, premiercrufinewine.co.uk; nywines.co.uk; ndjohn.co.uk) Other red wines that seem to fit this moment can be found farther east from two ancient wine cultures that have been enjoying a renaissance in recent years: Georgia and Greece. In Georgia, it’s the saperavi grape variety that offers the collection of qualities that I seem to crave: it makes dark, inky, almost opaque red wines that at their best are fit to burst with blackberry juiciness and peppery and dark chocolatey flavour, but which, as is the case of the wines of Teliani, are succulent, bright and invigoratingly sappy, grippy and savoury. In Greece, meanwhile, I love the red-plum skin tang and cherry-ish acidity that enlivens Semeli Feast Red, Nemea 2022 (from £9.95, thewinesociety.com; henningswine.co.uk; novelwine.co.uk), while the xinomavro grape variety, as used in star winemaker Apostolos Thymiopoulos’ Earth & Sky 2021 (from £26, thewinesociety.com; vincognito.co.uk) has notes of juniper, pomegranate and red cherry in a perfume-and-power combination that makes it the Macedonian answer to Barolo.
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