As France’s famous wine region prepares to reveal the latest vintage of its top wines, here are some lesser known and more affordable bottles to look out for

Château Beynat Castillon Côtes de Bordeaux, France 2021 (£19, Forest
Wines ; Whisky Exchange ) It’s Bordeaux time, with the great unveiling of the latest (2023) vintage set to draw thousands of members of the world’s wine trade and press to France at the end of this month. Visitors will spend their days tasting samples of unfinished wines that are still maturing, looking for wines to buy upfront, or ‘en primeur’, three years before they are bottled. The focus will be on the region’s elite: the few dozen famous châteaux whose wines can command three-figure prices per bottle, and which have a track record of gaining in value. But there is so much more to this vast wine region than that, with plenty of excitement in less celebrated, outlying appellations, such as Castillon Côtes de Bordeaux, home of the delightfully fragrant, crunchy 2021 red from Château Beynat.

Château des Antonins Bordeaux Blanc, Bordeaux, France 2022 (£11.90, Noble Green Wines ) The other purpose of the ‘en primeur’ tastings is to get a sense of the overall quality of the vintage. Last year, when the 2022s were on display, the verdict was unanimously positive: a bumper crop of very high-quality wines. The elite 2022 red wines are yet to be released, but there are plenty of less pretentious, youthfully vibrant red Bordeaux 2022 bottlings around, such as the refreshing plum succulence of Chosen by Majestic Claret 2022 (£10.99, or £8.99 as part of a mixed case of six, majestic.co.uk ). In general, the 2022 whites are slightly less impressive than those produced in the cooler, wetter 2021. But there are always exceptions, with Château des Antonins offering a satisfying mix of tangy grapefruit, herbiness and creamy weightiness.

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A zippy, sparkling wine cocktail with a strawberry vermouth and citrus edge

This lower-than-usual ABV cocktail features a delicious base of infused Italian vermouth and crémant, a French sparkling wine made in the traditional method, but just not from the region of Champagne.

Douglas Murray, bar manager, Lady Libertine, Edinburgh

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Italians tend to serve fresher, more restrained and lower-abv whites with their food, not least so as not to overpower it

I don’t know how many of you buy wine specifically to drink with food, but the Italians do and we could learn a few lessons from them. If you taste wines such as soave and pinot grigio on their own, you might think they’re a bit bland and boring, but sip a glass with a plate of antipasti or spaghetti carbonara, say, and they spring into life. Italians by and large don’t want wines with overt fruit flavours, too much oak or overly high levels of alcohol, because they overwhelm their fundamentally simple food, which tends to respect both the raw ingredient and the season in which you’re serving it.

Interestingly, I often find that people who are new to wine enjoy pinot grigio for that very reason – it doesn’t have too much flavour. It’s easy to be sniffy about that, and there are some cynically made commercial examples to be sure, but it can also be an enjoyably easy-drinking companion to a simple spring meal, especially if it’s from one of the supermarkets’ premium ranges, which tend to come from Trentino; gavi and gavi di gavi are also popular, I think, for a similar reason – Asda, for example, has a gavi in its Extra Special range for £9.25 that is often, though not currently, on promotion. The other virtue of Italian whites is that they are relatively inexpensive. The regular price of the Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi in today’s pick, for instance, is only £7.25 in store at the Co-op (and a little more online ).

For more by Fiona Beckett, go to fionabeckett.substack.com

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UK vineyards are sprouting as far north as Yorkshire and Scotland as investors cash in on tax breaks and hotter summers

“We’ve never had frost here,” says Adrian Pike, gesturing across rows of vines just starting to show signs of tiny buds in the weak Kent spring sunshine.

Westwell vineyard is on the site of a former monastery and sits close to the Pilgrims’ Way on the North Downs, the historic route to Canterbury that runs along the top of the hill behind the vineyard.

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Milder dishes tend to beckon cool, crisp sauvignon blancs, while spicier dishes call for more aromatic and sweeter wines

Using the words “wine” and “Thai food” in the same sentence is, I realise, a risky proposition, and one that’s almost always greeted with a chorus of “Why would you want to drink anything other than beer?!” But bear with, as they say, because there’s Thai and there’s Thai, and I’m guessing that the beer drinkers (of whom I am often one) aren’t always eating the real deal – more Thai-ish, with the emphasis on the “ish”.

Supermarket ready meals, for example, are quite mild and/or bland, depending on how pejorative you’re being. Ditto many takeaways. It’s really only in more authentic restaurants that you’ll find the characteristic combo of sweetness and heat that makes Thai food quite challenging for a wine match, yet many do have ambitious wine lists. At Kolae , for example, a new London restaurant I visited a couple of months ago, they serve several orange wines with their kitchen offerings, though I preferred a halbtrocken (or off-dry) German riesling from Rheinhessen, Köster-Wolf 2022 (12%), which is currently on offer at Strictly Wine for £12.59 a bottle .

For more by Fiona Beckett, go to fionabeckett.substack.com

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Fern Stroud got inspired on a later wine tour in South Africa, so after a pandemic layoff, she started her business, sip by sip

When Fern Stroud was growing up, she would tag along with her father as he drove a tour bus taking visitors from their hometown of Berkeley, California, to Napa valley’s wine country. She would notice how happy people were after a couple hours into the trip, and think: “I can’t wait until I’m 21.”

However, Stroud’s first visit to wine country as an adult was anything but pleasant. The name of the winery has faded from her memory, but Stroud, who’s now 45 and identifies as LGBTQ, remembers the feeling and her unhealthy efforts to belong. “I would go into that space with my braids, just being me and be ignored,” she says. “I didn’t feel very welcomed. I would overdo it, spending way too much money to prove to them that I can be in that space. … I was like, that’s BS. Why can’t I just be treated like anyone else?”

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Quaffable reds with the lots of interest and lowish abvs that could soon be your best ‘everyday’ wine

Tesco finest Cahors Malbec, Cahors, France 2022 (£8.50, Tesco ) Late on a Friday evening, a text arrives from a dear family friend. “Friends to dinner and I thought of you as I tried a Wine Society red, which we all enjoyed. It was a red from the Cevennes called Camp Galhan. My idea of an everyday wine: unoaked and 13%. Syrah and grenache… Try it!” I’ve yet to get my hands on a bottle (£10.50 from thewinesociety.com for the 2022 vintage), but I have a feeling I’d agree with Bill that this is exactly my – and many Observer readers’ – idea of an everyday wine, too. Such wines should be thirst-quenching, not obtrusively oaky or syrupy-thick (and, therefore, food-friendly) and, perhaps most importantly of all, not too heavy on the alcohol – a quality that means you can drink more than a glass on a weeknight without feeling any ill-effects on the morning after (sadly not the case with so many 14%+ modern reds). All qualities that are present and correct in another everyday French red I’ve enjoyed recently: Tesco’s ebullient blueberry-juicy 12.5% abv malbec from Cahors.

Agricola Cortese Nostru Frappato, Terre Siciliane, Sicily, Italy 2022 (from £13, ndjohn.co.uk ; reservewines.co.uk ; hoults.com ) Of course, “everyday” doesn’t have to imply “every day” – not least because wine, like every other food and drink, has got so much more expensive over the past couple of years, and the prices of “everyday” wines have crept up to a point where the term might better be replaced with “everyweek”. Whatever your preferred or affordable frequency, France, and specifically southern France, is a fertile source for the kind of quaffable, unpretentious but well-made and flavour-filled reds that are designed to fit into normal life rather than a special occasion. Another is Italy, with every region offering an approachable style to have by the glass with lunch as an alternative to their more serious vini da meditazione . In Sicily, one grape variety that is particularly adept at making lipsmacking lighter reds is frappato, with Agricola Cortese’s (13% abv) version beautifully capturing frappato’s characteristically perfectly ripe strawberry fruit in a wine to herald the beginning of spring.

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Spring forward into a light reds – look for grapes such as cinsault, gamay, and pinot noir or bardolino

Although I argued last week that, since Easter was early this year, we should drink as if it was still winter, a week can be as long a time in the wine world as it is in politics. So, all of seven days later, and with the clocks going forward in the UK tonight, I’m now advocating you switch into light red mode.

In fact, those are the sort of reds I like most of the time, but I appreciate that many people regard them as a bit wimpy. Not that winemakers think that way so much these days: overall, wine styles are getting lighter and fresher, and not just from the traditional regions of Beaujolais, Burgundy and the Loire; you’ll also now find lighter reds in Australia, such as the sangiovese in today’s pick below, as well as in South Africa and Chile.

For more by Fiona Beckett, go to fionabeckett.substack.com

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Whether a roast or meze, these wines are the perfect partners for a magnificent Easter Sunday meal

Domaine des Tourelles Cuvée Pierre Brun, Lebanon 2020, £14.99, or £11.99 as part of a mixed six, Majestic Easter feasting in the UK is rather less bound by family traditions than Christmas. There’s an echo of Christmas excess in settling down after lunch to watch a film with a haul of chocolate eggs and a glass of smoothly, darkly, sweetly comforting port (such as Graham’s Late Bottled Vintage, now on offer for £12 at Asda , and widely available). Another common theme is lamb, which, when roasted with rosemary, garlic and all the usual trimmings, is ideally matched to the softened dark fruit and savoury tones of a classic, mature bordeaux such as Asda Extra Special Château Le Bosq Médoc 2016 (currently £11.50, down from £14). For sweetly spicier, Levantine-style lamb, I’d go for the fine Lebanese producer Domaine des Tourelles’ darker, more robust and spicy red blend.

Karavitakis Kompsos Liatiko, Crete, Greece 2022, £10.95, The Wine Society I’d be tempted by a Lebanese wine for my own lamb-free Easter feast plans this year, an Ottolenghi-ish array of dishes that will include at least one element based on what Ottolenghi’s longtime collaborator Ixta Belfrage calls his ‘unbeatable formula’ of ‘flavoured yoghurt base plus roasted aubergines plus vibrant toppings’. The Lebanese choice could be a red such as the Domaine des Tourelles, but I’m increasingly smitten with the country’s distinctive and gastronomic whites. These tend to have a certain richness and power while retaining verve and flow, giving them the food-matching versatility you need for the variety of a meze-type meal. A wine such as the very special Ixsir Grande Reserve 2022 (from £25.50, vinum ; greatwine.co.uk ), a perfumed fleshy-peachy, citrus-pithy blend of viognier, sauvignon blanc and chardonnay, would be ideal. As would a red from another country with a meze tradition: Karavitakis’s take on the Cretan grape liatiko, with its food-friendly sweet-sour red-fruit tanginess.

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