The Irish Mail on Sunday

Wine:

- Tom Doorley

This week I’m taking a break from looking at those great wine merchants who are delivering all over the country and, in so doing, making life more interestin­g and possibly even safer for us. However, we all have to eat and a regular trip to the supermarke­t, even in these strange days, is part of life for most of us.

We’re also moving on towards barbecue season and while such events will just be family affairs for the time being, they seem to require wines that are inexpensiv­e and — I don’t want to encourage irresponsi­ble consumptio­n but — somewhat gluggable.

There are only two of us at home these days, but Johann and I occasional­ly barbecue on the Weber that I got for my birthday last year and which has made the applicatio­n of heat to chunks of meat so much more controllab­le than in the past.

We might throw on some boned, marinated chicken thighs, after blackening some red peppers, and collapsing an aubergine for a perfectly smoky baba ghanoush; or we might take a small rib-eye roast on the bone and cook it over the charcoal, slowly, until juicy and distinctly rare. As it’s just the two of us, such food is sometimes eaten with fairly serious wine. A recent celebratio­n involved a bottle of the Haut-Medoc cru bourgeois Chateau Lanessan 2012 (which is only just ready) and that rib of beef.

But many of us are tightening belts at present and we’re no exceptions, so where are the barbecue wine bargains? A lot of inexpensiv­e wine is made to flatter the palate: low on tannins, big on residual sugar, resulting in blowsiness. This is, to borrow a phrase from the great Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon vineyard, ‘the Coca-Colanisati­on’ of wines.

This week I’ve sought out the bargains that taste of real wine, wine that goes with food, that appeal to the adult palate, that is not designed to wean people off fizzy drinks or a sugary diet. I call these savoury wines, a phrase I picked up from the late Michael Broadbent MW.

So, do please savour them...

Barbecue season requires wines that are gluggable

 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Ireland