Manzanilla and fino sherry are testament to the wonders of yeast. Here are a selection of sturdy favourites and a few quality options, too

Morrisons Fino Sherry, Jerez, Spain NV (£8.50, Morrisons ) Yeast. That’s the secret to the intensely savoury appeal of dry fino and manzanilla sherry. If that sounds like a boneheadedly simplistic statement of the bleeding obvious given that of course, yeast – specifically the strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae – plays an essential role in all wine as the agent of fermentation turning sugar into alcohol, please bear with me. With fino and manzanilla, a specially adapted form of the strain has an extra part to play, with winemakers in and around Jerez in Andalucía, encouraging a thick, almost crusty layer known as flor to form on top of the wines in the barrel as they age. The flor, which acts as barrier between sherry and the air at the top of the barrel, helps create a much lighter (in colour and feel) style than other, darker forms of sherry such as oloroso. It also creates flavours that range from fresh apple to grilled almond, sourdough bread and Marmite, all adding up to such compulsively drinkable bottlings as Morrisons’ bargain own-label bottling.

Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla En Rama Spring 2024, Jerez, Spain NV (£19.95, Tanners ) If you find that yeasty tang as compelling as I do, you might want to look for the term ‘en rama’, which translates, literally, as ‘from the branch’, but is best understood as ‘in the raw’. These are fino and manzanilla sherries that are much less heavily filtered than others, bottled straight from the barrel, often in the spring, when the flor layer in the butts is at its most active. The idea is that you get a more intensely lively and savoury-flavoury style. But the annual release of new bottlings also gives sherry producers (the vast majority of whose bottlings rely on blending several years in a consistent house style) the chance to make a wine that is different each year. Among my spring-bottled favourites this year is one from the Hidalgo bodega, which is based in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, home of manzanilla. It’s a vivacious dry sherry with a pronounced, mouthwatering sea-salty seasoning that is particularly good with miso ramen noodles.

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Contrary to popular belief, there are some wines – and even one or two reds – that you can pair with this superstar spring vegetable

Four weeks or so into the asparagus season, and are you getting bored yet? Not me: at this time of year, I could happily eat the stuff every day, and frequently do, but not always cooked the same way. And how you cook or serve your asparagus will affect which wine you drink with it.

What’s that, you say – you thought wine was supposed to be a no-no with asparagus? Like most of these so-called rules, the difficulties are massively overstated. Do you think the Germans or Austrians, mad asparagus fiends that they are, don’t drink wine with their spargel ? Of course they do. In Alsace, too.

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

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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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