When it comes to affordable sparkling wine this summer, the answer comes from Moldova by way of Waitrose. The upmarket grocer has turned up with a new “Loved & Found fetească albă brut”, a hugely enjoyable sparkling wine for £9.25 a bottle.
For the price, it’s perfect: light, easy to drink, full of pears and a little spice; it’s comfortably dry and sophisticated. And don’t be put off by how light in colour it is. Fetească albă is a Romanian grape whose name translates as “white maiden”. It’s pale but not at all devoid of flavour.
The fizz is new, interesting and something completely different to what’s come before in the mainstream market, at least in terms of more accessible alternatives to Champagne and English sparkling wine.
Aldi’s crémant du Jura is still a favourite low-cost sparkling wine, but it’s rarely in stock these days. Clearly the supply chain hit a snag. Other options include Graham Beck from South Africa, but at around £16 it’s pushing towards being more mid-market than budget. It’s the same story with Bird in Hand from Australia, a fizzy pinot noir that I adore but which is similarly priced.
There are decent proseccos (there are, calm down) but finding them never seems to be straightforward. Post-Brexit that is often the case with cava, too. And while there are plenty of good cremants available in British supermarkets today, most now top the £10 mark. Lidl’s cremant du Loire is £9 and worth putting in the fridge but is better as a second or third batsman, really.
And so it’s time for fetească albă, a lesser-known grape used lovingly in Romania, Moldova, Hungary and Ukraine. I tried it by mistake the other day and found myself sated.
It’s not famous here, though the name sounded familiar when I came across it. I racked my brain. And then journeyed back to Transylvania in Romania to recall a boozy lunch with Ken Hom, Jeremy Lee and Donald Sloan, three titans of gastronomy in Britain. It was at a bistro in Cluj — Bistro 1568, perhaps? — and we ate a lot of sausages and cheese in between bottles of wine.
This was about a decade ago and the afternoon was spontaneous, sandwiched between a busy schedule of events. The big one was a dinner put on by the Ratui family who were celebrating long-lasting relationships with high society in the UK and who had invited Ken to oversee the food. Charles — now King, but then Prince — was in town at some point, though I wasn’t allowed to meet him. I was just there to write about Romanian pinot noir, newly being sold in Waitrose. I think Jeremy was writing something about pudding.
The Waitrose Blueprint pinot noir is still being sold 10 years on. Lots of berries, quite juicy but savoury. It’s not spectacular but it’s by no means upsetting to drink either and, at £7 a bottle, it’s no more expensive than when it launched.
This fetească albă, though. A stunner. I recall trying another version while on some farm in a far more remote part of Transylvania a day or two after the epic lunch in Cluj. At the time it was being imported to the UK, at least not at any tangible scale, despite being produced widely across Eastern Europe.
Of course this version at Waitrose is Moldovan, not Romanian — Hungary and Ukraine plant a lot of fetească albă too — but I’m afraid I don’t know enough about it, the intricacies of terroir, climate and method, to tell you about how it might differ between countries. But I can tell you to drink it.
