The quality of the 1985 vintage in Bordeaux has been argued over for some time. Everyone agrees it was good. But how good? For the very British palate of Michael Broadbent, it was pretty much perfect, five-star – ‘almost as entrancing as 1953’ but he notes as well ‘Not block-busters, Claret at it’s ingenuous best’. The lack of blockbusters might have been a problem for the American Robert Parker – who is notably less impressed with the vintage.

To my taste, even the very best wines like Lafite and Lynch-Bages, lack a certain quality to be found in their very best vintages. 1985 is missing perhaps just the extra concentration and fine detail that separates the good from the very best.

In Hampshire for a few days, we popped a bottle of Domaine de Chevalier, which was in a nice spot – probably fading but with no huge rush to drink. Very unforced, lovely fresh fruits on the nose. Small production of 4,500 cases this year.

A lovely producer, and nice people. I visited in 2008, escorting a Saudi collector, who was more interested in telling them how many cases of Petrus he owned then learning much about their operation, but they were very gracious and it remains one of my favorite Pessacs.

The night before, we entered the twilight zone with a bottle of 1966 Beaune 1er Cru from Bouchard Pere, certified by the Confrère de Chevaliers du Tastevin. This group awards prizes and endorsement for strong wines of the vintage through tasting alone. The label is not one you see much of today as the cult of producer is now the guiding sign of quality for better or worse, but in my experience their picks are often worth a bit more attention.

Whilst I have my Broadbent on my knee, he tells me that ‘at its best, a five star vintage, and if good wine to begin with, still marvelous to drink’. I can imagine a well stored Rousseau Chambertin would be quite incredible.

After opening the very unusual hard plastic capsule and butchering the cork with a rental corkscrew, this exploded in aromas of faded raspberry and strawberry into the decanter. It’s alive! Was very nice indeed and is performing about at the top level for a Beaune 1er Cru of nearly sixty years.

If you are looking for terroir in the UK. It’s not in the vineyards, it’s in the orchards.

That’s not to say that there’s not some great wines being made here, but in terms of history and national culture they simply can’t hold a candle to the heritage of apple growing we have here. A heritage that is woefully underappreciated by ‘connoisseurs’ who can talk about the lieux-dits of Burgundy or Jura but not the heritage of their own country. People like me that is.

But I can change right? I was blown away by a recent visit to Will Chambers’ Smith Hayne Orchards in Devon, where he makes a tiny amount of glorious cider that will make you think about the entire category in a whole new way.

Currently the orchards have 13 different cider varieties: Tremletts Bitter, Dabinett, Browns, Chisel Jersey, Porters Perfection, Brown Snout, Fillbarrel, Michelin, Sweet Coppin, Yarlington Mill, Harry Masters Jersey, Lambrook Pippin and Stembridge Cluster, as well as walnut, plum, cherry, Bramley, Katy, Reinette d’Obry and Charles Ross. Only 3000 bottles per year are produced from his old 12 acre orchard, planted in an L-shape around the farm. It is hard to convey just how hands-on and artisanal this way of production is. Each apple and bottle has been touched many times.

Everything here is done manually. Harvesting the apples, washing, bottling and labelling. The ciders are unfiltered and unpasteurised. No sugar or yeast is added, with the exception being the Methode Traditionelle (yellow) which is made using the champagne method and so requires yeast and sugar dosage. The orchards are unsprayed and the grass is looked-after by sheep.

Devon was making cider from at least 1280 and was once comparable in terms of production to Somerset and Herefordshire – but now for various reasons declined over the last 200 years, perhaps because what consolidation there was couldn’t rival the big brands like Thatchers, Westons or Bulmers.

Forget about chugging it back – Poured into a wine-glass, it really is an absolutely thrilling counterpoint to pet-nat wines and Champagnes at a fraction of the price and alcohol, and perfect for outside dining and drinking. The ciders being made here are incredibly well-balanced with a touch of tannin, which creates a much more sculptural style then people might be used to. The Petillant Natural method of carbonation gives a really attractive texture and helps balance the natural sweetness from the apples.

I can feel my divining rods twitching right now seeing a new-wave of ambition in small-production English wine and Cider. Producers who have benn influenced by the natural wine movement in France and the market for those styles in larger cities. Why can’t fine English Cider confidently assert itself in that context?

Will is a keen wine-lover as well as leading cider-maker, and I think it shows in his cider, as he has a much broader sense of what is possible, to look not just back at the historic methods of the English but draw on the lessons of the crafty French and their genius for vinification. To this end he even has a few Francois Freres barrels, the tonneliere of choice of Domaine de la Romanee Conti and Armand Rousseau, which he uses for some of his blends, although they are a bugger to keep clean it seems.

Adam Wells of the Cider Review puts it well when he says: “The ciders that Anne and William are bottling at this tiny Devon operation easily stand company with the very best in the UK. “Part of me almost doesn’t want to share the secret when there’s so little to go round. But mainly it’s an absolute pleasure to tell you all about one of the UK’s true, hidden greats. Buy whatever Smith Hayne you come across – in 2021 I expect they won’t remain an inside-tip for long.”

“Each cider I have tried from Smith Hayne has been exceptional,” echoes Cider Voice’s Ben Thompson.

About 100 metres apart, there are two very different versions of Vosne-Romanee laid out upon the RN74. The spotless winery of Charles Lachaux, projecting plenty of ‘quiet luxury’ and the homely one of the Vigot family, that you suspect, has barely changed in the last twenty years.  Whilst for good or bad, everyone is aware of million pound / yen / euro bottles of Bourgogne Rouge made by the new Arnoux regime, less is known about the quiet and incremental progress of the wines by Domaine Fabrice Vigot. I have only visited the Arnoux winery once, whilst it was in a transitionary stage, but you could see what Charles was trying to do – push everything to the max in the pursuit of the highest standards of viticulture and expression in the cellar.  On the basis of this goal, you must say he’s succeeded.

Yet to me, it’s all a bit much, the wines were not very lovable or charming, more like sitting on a modernist chair, that looks great in an interior magazine, but has a hard bit of wood where you want to put your derriere. I got the vibe that the old-school importer who I was with was looking around rather tentatively at all the new oak and expensive lighting and thinking – and how much more are these wines going to cost this year?  At what price 5 extra points from the wine critics?

Leaving the Lachaux winery, you can stroll a few meters down the road, past the Hotel Richebourg and it’s a bit like going back in time to Burgundy in the 1990s. No sculptures or clay eggs, just a warm smile and a great collection of wines for extremely fair prices. The Domaine is not an ancient concern, it only dates back to 1990 when the newly married Fabrice & Christine decided to, in all senses, throw their lots in together. Fabrice inherited relationships from his father with the Mugneret-Gibourg family, where he, like his dad, managed and farmed many of their vineyards under a metayage agreement. His wife Christine brought some prime family vineyards from Gevrey.

Christine from a visit in Dec 2023

That the Mugneret-Gibourg wines are some of the greatest in Burgundy is not disputed. But prices? Like Charles Lachaux, not so great – So what’s to lose in investigating the lovely wines from the family that did much of their farming over the last 40 years. The metayage agreement with the sisters came to an end in 2016 after nearly 60 years – The pay-off was just too small for the massive amounts of work they were having to put in – So from 2017 onward all their wines are from their own Domaine.  

They have some great vineyards, Damaudes – above Malconsorts and abutting La Tache, Chalandins and Les Eletois, just below Griotte-Chambertin, among others. All the wines, from the Gevrey to the Nuits, have been filtered through a Vosne lens, with plenty of spice and fine tannin, but mostly built on the same floral and feminine character that you see in the wines of the Mugneret-Gibourgs.

There has been a lot of progress in vineyard management also – and work now on biodynamic principles, Christine tells me is having really good results to mitigate the stresses caused be the changing climactic conditions.

 With only 2.5 hectares much of their production is sold to private clients and a substantial amount goes to Japan.

Keith Levenberg, one of my very favourite writers notes: “These wines easily transcend village-wine status. The fruit is vibrantly toned, almost has the energy of a Beaujolais but with darker, earthier tones on account of the gingerbread and cinnamon-spice mix which screams Vosne-Romanee in personality”.

Anthony Hanson M.W calls then: “A little-known gem of Vosne-Romanée”

Amongst all the mega developments, ill thought-out swimming pools in the sky and various crappy, soulless and dead-eyed architectural schemes stands Lassco house and the increasingly sophisticated cooking at Brunswick House. Always excellent, our meal last night seemed to be even more precise, flavourful and interesting then my past memories of meals gone by.

Unfortunately, the glasses were a bit on the crap side, or to be more accurate, for the Burgs, did not really work that great. More on that later on.
We did the wines sort of blind, and they were all great, difficult to choose a wine of the evening.

Starting with a Chablis, a 1er Vaulorent from Patrick Piuze – was very nice, probably could have benefitted from more time in the decanter. Young Chablis must be the one style that benefits the most from a decant. It was good. I read that he ferments and ages 1er and Grand Cru for 10 months in used barrels. It was pretty difficult to detect any oak at all on the wine. Probably much better the day after. Unlike me.

As the glasses emptied, we moved to the reds – starting with ooh, what is it? It is New World? It’s oaky, it’s full bodied – is it Cabernet? Ah, no Gilmour, you total boob, it’s 2003 Volnay 1er Clos des Ducs from d’Angervillle. Well, ahh. What can I say? The glasses were difficult to get the Pinosite, and really it is very dense and oaky. 2003 is a weird vintage, but the winemaking style at the domaine and the sun didn’t combine in the best way. It would have been fascinating to try the Lafarge version side by side, which I feel might have had a bit more natural character to it.
The next wine was utterly lovely, a 1995 CNDP Cuvee Laurence from Pegau. I really dig this wine – the Laurence iteration always seems a step up from the regular cuvee. Perfectly drinking now but in no hurry at all.

Finally came bit of a cuvee-ball, which I knew about, so not so much for me. 1979 Barbacarlo from Lino Maga.

This iconic Italian arguably deserves to be more widely known than it is. But it really is in a category all by itself. As Alice Feiring writes: “Maga lacks the star status of Bartolo Mascarello, the rakishness of Lorenzo Accomasso, or the established sanity of Emidio Pepe, but he should be up there for those who seek out the most profound traditionalists.”. Luca Veronelli, the great Italian intellectual adored the wine, and put it on the highest pedestal as offering satisfaction to mind and body. It was superb, almost timeless, very perfumed and drinkable like the great Barolos of the period.

And that was that, like the German saying, ‘everything has an end, except a sausage, that has two’, we stumbled into the night, sure to return soon.

“Just one more thing” says Lieutenant Columbo. “Just one more barrel” says Jean-Pierre Robinot. And so it turns out to be more difficult to leave the cellars of JMR then it was to find him in the first place.

Outside we wondered a few hours before, calling various numbers, knocking on various doors in his winemaking compound. But eventually, amongst the abandoned cars, industrial oddments and agricultural detritus, we were shown gleaming, golden, treasures of Chenin Blanc, fermenting at rates so slow they would have teachers at UC Davis or Montepellier Viticultural Schools scratching their heads. Rare wines, alive and bubbling away.

But looking back, my deepest impression wasn’t made by the superb wines made by Jean-Pierre, or his striking figure, it was of his stories of being there, at the birth of natural wine culture in Paris in the 1980s, with his wine bar, L’Ange Vin. This was to me, a hidden history. Dating movements, histories or even defining what ‘natural wine’ is, is open to interpretation, some people, like the Haquet sisters were so wilfully outside the loop, they missed the advent of conventional winemaking in the first place. But as we left his cellars my colleague started thinking seriously about getting this stuff down and writing a sort of anglophone book on the earlier years of the natural wine movement. It was a great idea that never came to fruition, but here are – 12 years later, and Aaron Ayscough has done the job.

I picked up a copy of this book at Hamblin Bread, in Oxford, close to my mums house, a few months ago. It was such a happy find as I had a copy on pre-order that for various reasons I’d forgotten about. The bread is very fine indeed, and they clearly love their natural wine – they clearly have a strong link, bread and wine. Indeed – when I visited Pierre Overnoy in the Jura, one of the fathers of the movement, he was more interested in talking about his bread making efforts then his wines.*

More formally written then Aarons brilliant blog ‘not drinking poison in paris’, which was joyfully unafraid to load some barbs here and there and had, for want of a better word, style. If only all wine writing could be so good.

I was interested to see what he was going to write about real and perceived ‘faults’ in some of the wines from the movement. Mousiness in particular, but also I was interested to hear what he thought about whether terroir definition is most ably transmitted by this style of winemaking. You know, would you vinify Batard-Montrachet the same way as Bourgogne Blanc? I love the wines of Sarnin-Berrux in St-Romain for example, but as you went up the terroir and price hierarchy there, I didn’t feel you got a lot more. He was, I thought, very relaxed on the subject of mousiness. Yes they’re a nuisance, he says, but if you leave them, they usually go away. Well, I suppose it depends how much annoyance you want to tolerate.

I had a mouse in our chimney at the same time as reading this book, and I couldn’t leave it be. But I pulled a bottle out from the dark recesses of my cellar to test his theory, a bottle of Gamay (Les Dolomies Madalaine 2018) from Jura, that was so mousy 18 months ago it was miserable drinking – and lo, aren’t I the fool, it was delicious and the mouse either gone, or substantially reduced. I don’t know, I guess some people are more relaxed then others, maybe I should chill out a bit. It’s probably true that if you want to drink these types of wines, you have to be open to them when they take their own pathways.

My first love really remains drinking old wine. “Where is the truth” says Gerard Chave, “The truth is in the old bottles”. Sometimes that truth is simply that the wine has fallen apart, but sometimes a humble bottle can be elevated to heights that remain to me, absolutely thrilling. It is an equal opportunity thing, and when a cheap bottle outperforms after a few years, well, be still my heart. 

But, in my lifetime, the movement of ‘natural wine’ that I was unaware of for many years in the industry, is so incredibly vital. I’ll never forget the moment when I was in the cellars of Antony Tortul of La Sorga and I saw what was scribbled in chalk onto one of his barrels with a skull and crossbones. “French Wine is not Dead”. When I saw that I thought of all the dead French winemakers and thought, if they could, they’d be smiling in their graves at the efforts of their children to make wine real and relevant for another generation.

• Great profile here

‘The thing about Zaltos’, I pompously opined, ‘is that they look delicate but they’re actually surprisingly strong’. He looked at me bemusedly. Look, I said, ‘Look how they can actually flex if you squeeze them slightly’.

The glass shattered in my hands. “Ben – I’m so sorry – I’ll buy you a replacement”

These beautiful but fragile glasses that you could almost balance on your little finger are bound up  with the new movement of acidity dominant wines and traditional winemaking styles.

At times they are almost too precise and uncharitable on a wine that make drinking for pleasure a bit difficult. They put the balance of a wine pretty mercilessly under the spotlight.

In the UK they were so popular there was quite a waiting list to order them as every restaurant looked at the other Jones’ and wanted the same glass.

To my mind everything about wine, including the glasses we drink it from reflects a cultural moment, a soft indication of a system of belief of the consumer and the producer. Certain Napa trophy wines seem to me to be mostly made and consumed by a certain ‘bigger is better’ wealthy, ‘Republican’ mindset. Wines like statues devoted to their needy owners. Riedel was the glassware of choice, endorsed by Bob Parker. Indeed – when I poured a full-bodied Shiraz into the Zalto, it didn’t quite work – was it all in my head?

In Robert Parkers Wine Guide he writes in his breezily confident fashion: “The finest glasses for both hedonistic and technical purposes are those made by the Riedel Company of Austria” – Georges’ mission he says, “Is to provide the ‘finest tools’ enabling the taster to capture the dull potential of a particular varietal”. And this was the stall he set out in the 1990s – to provide a different glass for each different wine.  That was a lot of glasses – in both his expensive hand-blown Sommelier series and the cheaper Vinum range, there was everything from the Grand Cru Pinot Noir glass to (cringe) the Coca Cola and Prosecco glass.

Where are we now? Going back to weedy ‘Democrat’ wines, sipped from these wafer-thin glasses, in rooms of bare brick and distressed wood. Wines with high acidity and traditional leanings. Men in tortoiseshell glasses, French worker shirts and soft hands from experiencing no harder labour then tapping on their laptops all day.

We did have a Riedel sales rep into our shop back in the day to lead a tasting with different glasses and different wines – and I don’t know, some people found it worthwhile. For me, and I imagine most others, they just brought the Chianti / Riesling glasses and drank everything out of them. They were good glasses, made by the Spiegelau factory under license from Riedel.

Indeed – It was this fact that led us to purchase 400 of them to run our tasting program with. Before then, we were using the miserly ISO glasses, that resemble tiny sherry copitas and are used for the WSET Wine Education program in the UK. It makes me cringe to look back and remember we were using them to serve such wines as 1942 Vega Sicila and Henri Jayer Echezeaux. Oh my days! Xavier Ausus, the winemaker from VS took us to one side after the tasting and suggested maybe we upgrade.