Caruso & Minini Perricone, Sicily, Italy 2013 (£8, Marks & Spencer) Last time I had a look in the M&S men’s fashion department it was reassuringly fusty, stocked with slacks and sensible jumpers of the kind that Alan Partridge would be happy to wear with his driving gloves. I’m reliably informed that things are a bit different on the women’s floor, where the retailer recently had a high-fashion hit with a certain £200 suede skirt. When it comes to confounding M&S’s safe and sensible reputation, however, it’s the wine department that seems to be closest to the cutting edge. It’s certainly way ahead of the other supermarkets when it comes to stocking grape varieties, regions and styles outside the mainstream, this brilliantly vivid, herby, dark cherry-scented Sicilian red being a particularly delicious example.
Domaine de la Pinte Arbois Chardonnay, Jura, France 2011 (£16, Marks & Spencer) Things get most interesting – and divisive – with the whites, where M&S has been keeping up with the hipsters in Hackney wine bars and Peckham pop-up restaurants by bringing in wines made in clay pots, or amphorae. There were two on the list at its most recent press tasting: Tbilvino Qvevris 2012 (£9), a Georgian wine with a distinctly orange tinge, red wine-like tannin, orange citrus pith, and cherry-pit bite; and the sherry-like, nutty-savoury, Fresquito Vino Nuevo de Tinaja, Montilla-Moriles, Spain 2014 (£9). Both are well worth a look if you’re prepared for something a bit unusual, as is the funky, slightly feral, ripe orchard fruit of the Domaine de la Pinte chardonnay from none-more-trendy eastern French region, the Jura.
Litmus White Pinot, Surrey, England 2011 (£22, Marks & Spencer) If the two amphora wines are challenging, and potentially confusing, in being categorised as white wines but including some of the flavours and textures of either red wines or sherry, Litmus White Pinot bends genders by making a white wine from a red grape, pinot noir. Like blanc de noirs champagne, a white fizz that is also made from pinot noir (and pinot meunier), the juice is removed from the skins before it has a chance to take on any colour (or tannin). It’s then aged in oak barrels to create one of the most successful still English wines I’ve come across, a wine where the spice and plump fruit of an Alsace white pinot gris combines with typically exhilarating English acidity.
