About a month ago the Christmas wine samples started to flood in. Waves and waves of cases of wines, with around the usual percentage hope of finding bottles worth mentioning. I figure that of the tens of thousands of wines I taste every year, only 2% are of a sufficiently high standard to warrant a mention in any one of my regular columns.
Jeroboams sent me just four bottles – they know me and they do not muck around. All four were delicious and these are the two that absolutely shone. Firstly, my featured Chianti, a wine so succulent and profound I had to do a double-take when I saw the price!
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This is a textbook Tuscan beauty with an abundance of unexpected flavour dimensions, all drenched in flair and succulence. It is, in layman’s terms, a no-brainer. In vinous folklore, this might be the most shockingly good Chianti I have never heard of. Buy it now.
In addition to that heady red, here is a white Burgundy that completely floored me with its dramatic stance and its devastating flair: 2017 Meursault, Domaine Michelot (£38.95, reduced to £31.95). It is a global chardonnay bargain and I say that because there is a very high hurdle to leap when you are searching for this grape at this level of delivery, and this wine is at least 20 quid cheaper than you’d expect! This is another Jeros wine that you cannot live without.
2016 Chianti Classico, Casaloste, Tuscany, Italy – £18.95, reduced to £14.95, Jeroboams, 020-7288 8888, jeroboams.co.uk
Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition’s Communicator of the Year (matthewjukes.com).
This article was originally published in MoneyWeek
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