Look beyond the Beano-esque label and this is a very interesting wine: a Vin de Table red from a top French grower made using the solera system more usually found in Jerez, the home of sherry.

A solera system is a way of blending wines of different ages to get a consistent style. Each year, you draw some wine out of the system to bottle or drink, and you top up the system with some fresh wine. Gradually over time you get a mix of wines of various ages that more or less tastes the same, year in, year out.

You can read more about solera systems here

Winemaker Louis Barroul of St Cosme describes Little James thus:

“At Saint Cosme, Little James is the wine of freedom. Our Solera is getting more and more complexity year after year. When we add the current vintage, the solera gains a new element without changing the style… This wine recalls the ancient times when the wine merchants would make wines having only one target: the pleasure. Blending several vintages is considered being a great quality tradition in Champagne. I think it works exactly the same for a great Grenache. The 2011 bottling will be composed with 50% of 2010 along with 50% from all the vintages back to 1999.”

So half new wine and half from the solera; the blend of youth and experience so beloved of football managers everywhere.

The wine is 100% Grenache and has bags of fresh, raspberry fruit with sweet spice and soft tannins. The older wines add some depth and complexity, but not at the expense of the wine’s sense of jollity. I suspect it would enjoy ten minutes in an ice bucket to bring the fruit in to sharper focus and highlight the refreshing acidity.

I’m off to stay with some old uni chums next week and I suspect there will be the odd barbecued banger knocking about of an evening. I’m packing a 6 pack of Little James to keep us all company.

A final Bordeaux 2010 piece for a little while, with a few pictures from our adventures from last week. Don’t forget, if you are interested in tasting Bordeaux 2010 for yourself, then get a ticket to our big tasting on May 4th – over 90 chateaux including the likes of Pontet Canet, Pichon Baron, Angelus, La Conseillante, Montrose, Haut Bailly (pictured above) and Grand Puy Lacoste.

But get in quick – we expect to sell out over the next day or so.

Anyway, back to those pics.

Looking over early morning St Emilion from Ausone..

Disneyland! Or Pichon-Baron as they call it around here…

Wine of the vintage? Tasting at Latour…

Evidence that the American buyers were back in town…

A tropical scene from St Estephe of all places…

The poshest dog on the right bank at L’Angelus…

The daftest form of transport on the left bank, Mouton-Rothschild’s golf buggies…

These may look like ordinary vines but Chateau Lafite is no ordinary wine…

George and Jacques Thienpont at Le Pin…

Vieux Chateau Certan’s gorgeous wysteria…

Alfred Tesseron waxes lyrical about the certified biodynamic Pontet Canet 2010…

Deals being struck over coffee at the Pomerol UGC…

We love a good sign…

Proof we did some work…

The only alarming moment of Day 3 came when the hotel rang to ask why we had left without paying and not taken any of our clothes with us. Evidently, the booking for the second night had gone AWOL. We immediately had visions of everything being chucked out on the street and of Ben Collins’ monogrammed Jermyn Street shirts being sent to the local Oxfam shop.

Thankfully it seems we have avoided the pitiful sight of the great man having to buy his clothes back from the bargain rail before we can head to Latour in the morning. The hotel are letting us stay after all.

It has been another superb day weather-wise. There hasn’t been a cloud in the sky all week and it was scorchio on the right bank today. Short sleeve order all round with much guzzling of Badoit in between the wines. Keeping hydrated is no mean feat in this heat with 80 plus wines to taste.

With regards the wines, it has been a day of two halves. This morning was packed with a raft of outstanding Pomerols. The afternoon session was marred by some less than stellar St Emilions.

There are simply too many wines in St Emilion that match up overtly sweet fruit with coarse, oaky tannins and aggressive alcohol levels. Not much fun – although I suspect many of the Porty wines we hated will still get big scores from you know who. Good for them, but I’d rather give wines that taste like Bonne Maman a wide berth. Coffee and blueberry jam are all very well for breakfast but that’s as far as it goes.

Before I write off the whole commune, I should mention that Ausone is fab (and at £20K a case so it bloody well should be), Cheval Blanc is utterly correct, Angelus and Figeac are excellent, and – further down the price scale – Le Prieure deserves a close look.

Rant over. Back to the superlatives: we absolutely adored Pomerol.

The UGC tasting was almost uniformly excellent with lesser names like La Pointe and La Cabanne showing very well indeed and bigger ones such as La Conseillante and Petit Village living up to their reputations.

Elsewhere, VCC stopped us in our tracks - it is a contender for wine of the week – while Le Pin was its usual sensual, Chambolle-ic self. Standing outside L’Evangile on the border between Pomerol and St Emilion it isn’t immediately obvious why one side of the road should have so outshone its neighbour, but on today’s evidence it has.

Lots of these top-notch Pomerols will be at our Bordeaux 2010 tasting on 4^th May – look out for them.

Whites were rather thin on the ground save for d’Yquem which we tasted at Cheval Blanc. It’s great. Not as ethereal as the 2009 but perfumed, delicate, perfectly balanced and full of the juiciest, most mouthwatering fruit imaginable. Glug glug glug. I’m not sure why they bother with a spittoon when they show it.

Finally, a word about booze. You can’t ignore it in this vintage – one tasting even provided DIY breathalyser kits at 9 o’clock in the morning. Many wines from both banks tip the scales at 14% plus. Several big names will be closer to 15%. If you like your claret to invigorate the palate without impairing the head, this is not the year for you.

As always, balance is everything. Lots of the wines have sufficient fruit and acidity to carry the alcohol and remain fresh and lithe, but a few do not. Beware the burn.

Tomorrow is millionaire’s morning for us as we call in at the four Medoc first growths plus Pontet Canet and Leoville Las Cases in search of the wine of the vintage…

Top 5 Wines of the Day

1. Vieux Chateau Certan – Just brilliant. Structured, intense, balanced, refreshing, poised. Alexandre Thienpont is a genius
2. Angelus – Brutish. In a very good sort of way
3. L’Eglise Clinet – Denis Durantou is another genius – a hedonist’s charter
4. La Conseillante – Structured and focused with genuine class and the capacity to age
5. Siaurac – a lowly Lalande de Pomerol from across the brook, but one that tastes like a mini-Petit Village

There’s been one main hot topic of conversation today: the name of Alex’s soon-to-be-born baby. With a surname like Marton the options are clearly limited. The current favourite option is Anthony Leoville Marton. Daddy is secretly hoping it might get us an extra big allocation.

Apart from Marton Jr, we’ve been talking about the weather (we are Brits after all, and the mercury has been pushing 28C here today) and the wine – lots of wine.

The news from the frontline is much the same as yesterday. 2010 is a strong left bank vintage that is big on tannins, big on freshness and big on alcohol. There are lots of very good wines and fans of traditionally-styled Bordeaux to age will find much to enjoy. One nameless chateau principal described it as a vintage for Les Anglais, compared to the richer, more exuberant 2009s which they suspect are more suited to wine lovers across the Atlantic.

We started and finished in the Medoc with a detour via the Graves. An unscheduled early morning trip to Lanessan was an unexpected highlight. The chateau is a delight – a properly lived-in house full of curious chandeliers and awful paintings. The wine is even better. It will be at the top if our list of cheap wines to buy.

The Margaux UGC was very good. Too often in recent years, this tasting has been a mixed bag at best. Today there were a number of very good wines. Durfort Vivens, Giscours and Rauzan-Segla all excelled but best in class by a country mile was Malescot St-Exupery.  

Down in the Graves, we found some very fine reds and some outstanding whites. The latter – led by Haut Brion and Domaine de Chevalier – are brilliant this year. Will anyone buy them? Probably not. Should they? Definitely. Value tips include Carbonnieux, Couhins-Lurton and Malartic-Lagraviere. The best have expressive grapefruit-scented fruit underpinned by fantastic, focused acidity.

The red Graves were tannic and bright with a dense core of sweet fruit. Fans of Haut Bailly will be delighted to know it has excelled again. We tasted it next to the 2009 and 2008 and it more than held its own. The 2010 is blessed with wonderful purity of fruit and focused, precise tannins. The 2009 is creamier, richer and full of joy. The 2008 is less than half the price and an absolute steal.

One of our last visits was Haut Brion – our first 1^st Growth of the campaign. Potential buyers will be pleased to know that is built to last. It is chock-full of tannins with wonderful freshness and layers of silky, mineral-infused black fruit. The only downside was the lack of a goody bag.

We love a good goody bag.

Today’s Top 5 wines (in no particular order but excluding Haut Brion)

1. Malescot St Exupery – Everyone’s darling chateau at the moment but it really is worth the hype. Great expectations, justified

2. Lanessan – buy in bulk

3. Domaine de Chevalier Blanc – The red is brilliant but the white is even better. Focused, taut, mineral and fun

4. Haut Bailly – Outstanding. Most of the team preferred it to the much lauded 2009

5. Pichon Lalande – The team is divided about which Pichon is best this year, but there is no denying the purity and elegance of La Comtesse in 2010

My wife has recently been on a nine-month long diet that forbade wine, any cheese worth eating, shellfish and bloody meat amongst other things. Happily the diet is now over and red wine and rare steak is back on the menu. We celebrated with some thick-cut ribeye steaks and a bottle of Domaine du Colombier’s wonderful 2009 Crozes-Hermitage.

The steak was fabulous, the wine young but delicious.

2009 is a fantastic Northern Rhone vintage producing wines with power and richness but lots of freshness too. Drinking the Colombier Crozes now is really vinous infanticide but lots of fun nevertheless. On first opening it gave little away. A good shake into the decanter and an hour later, the nose began to open up with floral notes and spicy berries. Tasted before dinner, the tannins were a mite dry and chewy. Tasted with the steak, there was still plenty of structure but the firmer tannins had melted away and the fruit was ripe, rich and peppery.

As is so often the case with young wines like this, the last glass was the best – hinting at what those with more patience than me can enjoy in the future.

Interestingly a second bottle was left open overnight and finished the next day. I wondered whether the wine would be even better with almost 24 hours air. It wasn’t to be. A little bit of tiredness had crept into the fruit.

So if you do open a bottle of this any time soon, my advice is to decant well in advance of dinner time but make sure you finish the bottle!

It’s a great day for England!

Not in cricketing terms admittedly, but we are world champions in the world of cheese. Cornish Blue, a creamy cow’s milk cheese from Liskeard, has walked off with the top award at the World Cheese Awards. Hurrah!

My weekend mission is to track some down and celebrate the English cheese revolution. But what shall I drink with our world-beating blue?

There is a lot of nonsense talked and written about food and wine matching. It isn’t an exact science and what might be the perfect combination for me could leave a sour taste in your mouth, but if you do get it right then the experience is definitely worth the effort.

I decided to ask the great and the good of Twitter for their advice.

There were some patriotic choices – @winescriber suggested an Eglantine Vineyard North Star sweet wine from Nottinghamshire and @winematcher a very local Cornish fizz from Camel Valley.

Unsurprisingly, the classics also got a look in. @Bristol411 thought Chateau d’Yquem might be “nice”, @pgmarchant suggested one of Alois Kracher’s legendary sweet wines and @wamthomas plumped for a Tokaji Aszu.

There some more off the wall choices too. @BernardBudel recommended a Noble Riesling from Villa Maria in New Zealand, @BarcelonaTapas went for Dinastia Vivanco Reserva Rioja and supperclub organiser @stuffyaface picked out a Bisceglia Aglianico from the south of Italy.

Quite a varied selection to choose from.

The one that really piqued my interest however, came from our very own gourmand-in-chief @WillieLebus who suggested Anjou Blanc Le Haut de la Garde Chateau Pierre Bise 2007 from the Loire. This is not your usual Chenin Blanc.

Vigneron Claude Papin is a huge believer that botrytis is incredibly important when making Chenin Blanc and lets the noble rot develop on grapes he uses for dry wines as as well as sweet wines.

This very unusual method of production means this dry white has honeyed, bitter lemon-marmalade like notes alongside the ripe apple and citrus fruit. A touch of spicy oak and some deliberate low level oxidation add extra layers of complexity. It is a rich, mouth-filling wine that tastes like nothing else in our portfolio. Not everyone likes it but I do – a lot.

Will it be a perfect match for the Cornish Blue? I’ll find out at the weekend and report back.

Photo taken from The Guardian’s website. @winematcher – or top food and wine writer Fiona Beckett as she is also known – has also posted about matching wines with Cornish Blue on www.matchingfoodandwine.com.

A slightly daft wine of the week today as it is a rather difficult bottle to track down.

Montrachet is perhaps the world’s most famous vineyard, producing tiny quantities of mouth-watering Chardonnay to be sold at eye-watering prices. The vineyard itself (see below) is a rather unassuming plot of rocks and earth to look at it but the qualities this terroir bestows on the grapes its produces are legendary.

I have been lucky enough to taste a few samples of Montrachet over the years, but only from barrel. A quick sniff, slurp and spit (or more likely swallow). I had never had the chance to sit down with a proper glass of the stuff and drink it. Until Wednesday, that is.

We had dinner at the appropriately named Le Montrachet restaurant in Puligny with Sebastien Roux and he incredibly generously brought a bottle of his family’s 2008. The Roux family produce just 2 barrels in an average year. The wine sells for around £200 a bottle ex-cellars.

The most amazing aspect of the wine was its sheer density and depth. It didn’t jump out of the glass with aromatic fireworks and explosions of tropical fruit. It was quite tight and restrained – it is still a babe in arms, after all – with the incredible weight of fruit underpinned by high acidity and dry, stony minerality. There was new oak too but it had been easily absorbed by the fruit.

We drank it alongside a much more expressive 2008 Corton-Charlemagne that had much richer, more obvious fruit but which seemed lighter, almost frivolous, in comparison to the Montrachet.

The concentration of the Montrachet can be seen by this photo:

Tim had spotted how the slow-running legs of glycerol in the glass were beautifully reflected on the linen tablecloth, coating the glass as thoroughly as the wine coats the mouth. It was an extraordinary wine and a pleasure to drink.

Big thanks to Sebastien for his generosity.

We had touched down two hours earlier. In that time we had managed to get into the wrong hire car, drive to the wrong hotel and tried desperately to find a restaurant that had shut many hours earlier. Timmy (our resident MW) was hungry and sweary. So  off we went in a mad dash to find the last eatery still open within 20 miles of Lyon airport.

We arrived as the shutters we coming down. Camilla screeched the car to a halt – stopping half on a zebra crossing, half in a disabled bay – and in we dashed to order. The Happy Meals did not make us very happy. I for one was rather upset that a French cheeseburger does not involve Epoisses. Still, the sight of Ben Collins avec un Big Mac made it all worthwhile.

Today has been more successful. We have tasted 90 wines from 8 growers and got our first glimpse of a very exciting vintage: Burgundy 2009. I say we have tasted 90 wines but that is not quite true. We tasted 89 and drank one. The latter was Fontaine-Gagnard’s Montrachet. No-one spat that out.

What have we learned? That 2009 is not just a “red wine vintage”.

Before we came much of the chat around the vintage was that the reds were the stars and the whites was were too overripe, overblown and – quite possibly – overpriced.

The bit about the reds may well turn out to be true. The bit about the whites is definitely wrong.

Having tasted over 75 whites today, there are a lot of very, very good wines. Not all of them are wonderful but the hit rate is much higher than we expected. As is always the case, some producers have done better than others.Today’s winners included Fontaine-Gagnard, Latour-Giraud, Vincent Giradin, Thierry Matrot and Robert-Denogent.

The trap some of the wines fall into is to be slightly too ripe and heavy, not quite cumbersome but not fleet of foot either. The best, however, are wonderful; full of richness and concentration of fruit but with plenty of lemon-fresh acidity and no shortage of the Cote de Beaune’s signature minerality.

Three of the very best examples were the barrels of different Corton-Charlemagne that we tasted chez Girardin. The wines were wonderfully focused and streamlined with just a touch of exotic exuberance. Classic Corton-Charlies, in other words.

I can’t ignore the reds, however. We have tasted only a handful today but they have got our mouths watering in anticipation of what the rest of the week holds. If the inexpensive Cote de Beaune reds taste this good then the Grand Crus further north should be terrific.

Matrot’s Monthelie was everything a humble red Burgundy should be: lively, refreshing, fruity and appetising. His Blagny 1er Cru La Piece Sous le Bois was extraordinary: perfumed, floral, powerful and elegant with wonderfully pure hedgerow fruit.

Tomorrow we head north in search of even greater prizes.

Monday’s Top Five (in alphabetical order by domaine)
1. St Romain Clos Sous Le Chateau Domaine Bohrmann – The best value monopole on the Cote d’Or. Bar none.
2. Corton-Charlemagne Quintessence Vincent Girardin – Old vine parcel with incredible richness, finesse and minerality
3. Meursault 1er Cru Perrieres Domaine Latour-Giraud – Grand Cru quality from one of the finest vineyards in the village
4. Blagny 1er Cru La Piece Sous le Bois Thierry & Pascale Matrot – A brilliant red that really stood out in a day of very impressive whites
5. Pouilly-Fuisse Cuvee Claude Denogent Domaine Robert-Denogent – An uber-posh Maconnais from one of the region’s few superstar growers

Dinner at Racine on Tuesday. There can be few better places to eat French food in London. There is an old school richness about Henry Harris’ dishes. A knowing two fingers are thrown in the direction of foodie fads and fashion. This is food as has been cooked by classically trained chefs for decades. The menu is littered with wonderful words: ris de veau, ceps on toast, ballotine of foie gras. I’d love to know how much butter the kitchen gets through.

We took some suitably old school French wines: Haut Bailly 1983 was very good but not quite great, and a Gigondas Domaine St Gayan 1978 was corked. You wait three decades to open the bottle and then this. It was left to the whites to shine.

Sam Harrop and Tom Lubbe’s Matassa Blanc was delicious – further proof of how exciting Roussillon and old vine Grenache Gris is. Patrick Piuze’s Chablis 1er Cru Vaillons ‘Les Minots’ 2008 was equally good if not better.

Piuze is an outsider in Burgundy. A French-Canadian Montreal wine bar owner turned micro-negociant. In a recent article Jancis Robinson called Patrick “a truly thrilling new producer of hand-crafted Chablis.” High praise for someone currently vinifying only his third solo vintage.

His philosophy is simple. In an interview with Burghound’s Allen Meadows, he said: “The only thing truly original in the world of wine is the underlying terroir and I have nothing else interesting to add. Anyone can copy anyone else’s techniques so what else is there to make great wines? I believe the answer is simple: Terroir. I want to work only with the fruit from old vines and even then, only old vines that are planted exclusively within the original boundaries of Chablis. If I respect these things, it will be almost impossible to make bad wine.”

So it seems. The wine we drank was classic Chablis: lean, focused and fresh with cool green apple fruit and stony minerality. There is no toasty, creamy new oak just a steely, concentrated wine that will slowly unfurl its charms over the next decade. It had sufficient weight to stand up to my ceps with egg yolk and more than enough acidity to cut through the dish’s autumnal richness. It is a wine packed with potential – we may have drunk it far too young, but no one was complaining at the time.

Piuze may not have a family history in Burgundy that stretches back into the mists of time but he is clearly one of the region’s rising stars. Look out for his wines – from the Petit Chablis right up to the Grand Cru Blanchots, these are wonderful wines from an appellation that gets taken for granted far too often.

2009 is a fantastic Beaujolais vintage. Not that anyone really cares. Unlike Bordeaux 2009 there are no hyped-up sales campaigns, no 100 point Parker scores and sky-rocketing prices, no-one talking about investment potential or a booming Far East market.

It is a crying shame. Good Beaujolais is one of the wine world’s best kept secrets. Light, fruity, refreshing and chillable, it is an easy-going, no-strings-attached sort of wine. Uncomplicated vinous fun for the dinner table.

Actually, this wine from Marcel Lapierre is a good bit better than that. Marcel is one of the region’s stars and has been at the forefront of biodynamic winemaking in France for nearly three decades. Burying cow horns at the autumn equinox may be all the rage among a certain sort of vigneron nowadays but that certainly wasn’t the case back in 1981. Marcel also eschews full carbonic maceration (the usual way of vinifying grapes in Beaujolais) in favour of just a couple of days under gas followed by more traditional vinfication in ex-Burgundy barrels he picks up from Domaine Prieure-Roch in Vosne-Romanee.

The 2009 is just wonderful. Last summer was perfect for grape growing in the Beaujolais vineyards to the north of Lyon. The growers started getting excited as soon as they crushed the grapes and they saw the deep colour of the juice. It was evident that this was going to be a year for rich, concentrated wines.

Lapierre’s Morgon (which includes some grapes grown on the Cote de Py, the village’s unofficial Grand Cru) is deeper in colour than previous years but everything is relative. It is still a vibrant light ruby in the glass with lifted floral red fruit, fine tannins and crisp acidity. It is bright, refreshing and elegant, unmistakeably Gamay in its flavour profile but reminiscent of very good red Burgundy in its structure. Where it differs from very good red Burgundy is the price. £16 does not buy you very much from Chambolle-Musigny these days.

It was one of the stars of our Harvest Festival Tasting on Tuesday, which seems very appropriate given it seems ideally suited to the gamey, mushroomy, warming richness of the autumnal kitchen.