La Patrie Cahors 2012

An absolute shocker of a wine. Advertised as '£11 reduced to £6' it remains terrible value at either price point. Thin, sharp and totally lacking in any fruit of any kind. Odorless. Couldn't finish my glass. It went into a coq au vin.

This highlights Sainsburys folly in trying to flog the malbec grape to supermarket consumers by 'dressing it up' with the prestige of the Cahors region. The end result is to defile both. You wonder who on earth actually produces this stuff? Sadly, it's a very long time since I had an interesting Cahors at a sensible price (La Grillade). Granted you don't see it often in the UK (entry point is typically at least £10) but you would think they would want to to cash in on the explosion of interest around Argentine malbecs? The worry here is that this may be a microcosm of a wider problem within the French wine industry: dogged refusal to accept that the cachet of their terroir/regional branding is nowhere near as powerful a draw as they would like it to be. Globalisation means that consumers are increasingly unlikely to care less where the product comes from or what 'heritage' they are buying into.

Vina Ludy, Albarino, Rias Baixas, 2012

Given to me by PVM after our sub zero camping trip in Derbyshire. I gave him a Sicilian shiraz in return.

I fear I got the better deal. Elderflower nose. Initially the pallet gives a strong nutty flavour (at least it did on day 1, that's faded now day 3 has arrived). The fruit is complex. I can't articulate it very well but there's perhaps more elderflower, lychee? Plenty of racy citrus to follow.

Interesting, rewarding and well worth adding to the dry white repertoire. (£8 Morrisons) but is much more restrained and subtle than (and thus doesn't quite have the impact of) the last Picopul I wrote about (just 50p more expensive). 

Rias Baixas is not somewhere I've considered since the 1999 era of Spanish experimentation. In my mind I'd imagined it to be located north west of Ribera de Duero but I hadn't realised just how close it is to the extreme fringes of Galicia:

...where the climate is 'Atlantic' meaning lots of rain and fog with summer temperatures 'rarely exceeding 30C'. Which makes you wonder why we can't produce more decent white wine in the UK. Perhaps the lack of available land means that we could never produce good enough quality wine at a competitive enough price for the enterprise to be worthwhile?