Egg-cellent bargains for Easter
Easter is around the corner and that means (unless, like me, you hate it..) lamb! So it’s time to start thinking about substantial reds that make a magical match with a big meat.
Easter’s one of the key points for retailers because we are likely to 1) have time off and 2) feel like treating ourselves, even if that ‘treat’ has to wait until the end of Lent. So the supermarkets all line up some winning wines for the Easter break.
I’ve been on my own ‘Easter wine hunt’, at the Spring press tastings (more about those to follow) and the most impressive selection this time around came from Lidl, who have really upped their game of late, when it comes to wine.
We need a wine of some substance for lamb
It’s the smell of lamb that I’ve never really liked, but that’s also a good place to start, because it requires a wine of some substance to both stand up to, and obviously compliment, that most traditional of Easter lunches (I’m a beef man at Easter, but happily most of the same choices can apply to both).
Bordeaux’s a great place to look for some robust, well-structured, blended beauties for the Easter lunch table, but it’s not historically synonymous with a bargain.
That’s where Lidl’s big-boy-buying-power comes in. Their buyers have struck some great deals lately that must surely have left a few winemakers weeping into their barriques.
Blason de Montbelly 2015 (Lidl £5.99) might not have the most beautiful of names, sounding somewhat porcine to me, but it’s astonishingly good value for the quality. It’s a young wine, ripe for drinking now, with fresh red berry-cherry-yumminess, and it’s very well balanced for a sub-£10 wine. Its easy-drinking style must owe a lot to Merlot, as you might expect from the Right Bank town of Blaye (if you ever go there, head to the marvellous Maison du Vin and load your boot with delicious wines that don’t hit our shores often enough!).
Some of that ‘je ne sais quoi’
For just a couple of quid more, head further south, right down to the Languedoc, in the deep South, close to the Massif Central, to check out Val De Salis, Saint Chinian 2015 (Lidl £7.99), which is an absolutely wonderful wine, at another eyebrow-raising price point. At the press tasting, I assumed there was some mistake with the price tag. Its spicy, savoury warmth and beguiling red fruit character certainly fooled me into assuming it was around twice the price. To me, it has some of that ‘je ne sais quoi’ – you might get from a Bandol wine, from several hundred miles along the coast.
If Sir Brucie was here, he’d say “you’re my favourite”, at this point.
So, if you’re wondering why this next one gets my (err, coveted..) ‘must try’, then it’s because it’s relatively unusual to get it for under £20, and it’s a really interesting style of wine (my mantra being ‘things to try, and why’), which would sit very comfortably on the Easter lunch table, and not just with the main course!
Tenuta Pule Amarone Della Valpolicella (Lidl £16.99) is a deep, intensely-flavoured silky red wine, with bags of black fruit flavour, ideal for savoury dishes but also – very unusually for a red – in with a chance when consumed with chocolate. Why? Well the grapes are dried in huge fruit sheds (that’s the ‘Amarone’ bit), giving them not just an added intensity of fruit flavour (and alcohol, it’s 16%), but also a sense of sweetness that’s not often found in red wine. It’s delicious and, although pricey when compared with our previous bargain buys, well worth a try.