Forgotten bottles
As a buyer, I'm fortunate enough to be able to drink or taste some of the finest and rarest of bottles. But real pleasure can sometimes be found where you least expect it. This was the case last year when I had all my colleagues in the buying department round to my place.
Crawling around in the ‘cellar’ I found some interesting-looking bottles from the Loire. There was a 1990 Saint-Nicolas de Bourgueil from Joël Taluau which was pretty amazing. But more amazing still was a bottle from my favourite vigneron. He was called Claude Pavy though on his labels, he was Gaston Pavy, which I think I preferred.
His cellar was a lock-up garage very close to the river Indre. The château of Azay-le-Rideau (which also gives its name to the appellation) was just around the corner and he once gave me a personal guided tour. His secondary occupation was basket weaving and he had all the raw material, or osiers, at his feet. His three hectares of vineyards were nowhere to be seen at first as they were sited away from the valley floor.
Most of what he made was white from the chenin blanc grape and the style of wine tended to change with the vintage. The bottle I found was from 1993, hardly a great vintage and now 30 years old. The cork had more-or-less disintegrated and smelled mouldy. The wine was yellow gold with little obvious ageing. It was bright to look at, a little closed at first but then quickly opened to something completely magical, a world of gentle honey and lemon with such freshness still.
Sadly, Gaston passed away in 2003. He was a proper vigneron, or wine grower, humble and meticulous in his work, whose wines helped to raise this tiny, fragmented wine region out of relative obscurity.
Marcel Orford-Williams
Buyer for Rhône, French Country and Germany
>> Read more about Marcel’s career highlights
Time-capsule wines
In August 2016 when I was trainee buyer, the team held a tasting of a number of very old vintages of Vouvray from Domaine Huet, many of which I think were from keeping stock, some we’d had the privilege of buying directly from the property’s archive cellar.
It was a fascinating tasting with wines going back to the very early 1900s. When I got to a bottle of off-dry 1924 Moelleux from Le Haut Lieu I remember it hit me like a train. The thought that the grapes for the liquid that I was drinking would have been picked 92 years ago by people who would no longer be alive, was magical to me.
It was a powerful lesson in wine’s ability to act as a time-capsule or a snapshot of a particular place from a particular time. I thought about what a different place the world would have been in 1924 as I sipped the wine. There was a glass or two left in the bottle after the tasting and I was lucky enough to take it home. I remember becoming quite tearful as I drank it – it’s one of the very few wines to have had such a profoundly emotional effect on me.
Freddy Bulmer
Buyer for Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Portugal & Bee
Flag carriers of quality
Chéreau-Carré’s Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine, Le Clos du Château L'Oiselinière 2003 is a wine that both surprised and delighted me. It was an early pioneer for what was to become one of the ten Muscadet communal crus – now labelled as La Haie Foussière. I bought it in 2008 when my notes compared it to the maiden 2002, a much cooler vintage with marked acidity, characteristics that I generally prefer.
In contrast, 2003 was a hot, dry summer and yet I noted that the wine had retained freshness and life, thanks to its long ageing on the fine yeast lees in the cellar. The original drinking window I gave it was to 2010 which was proved woefully inadequate a few years later when I found a forgotten bottle that was not just remarkably good, but absolutely delicious too.
Joanna Locke MW
Buyer for Loire and Portugal, until she retired in summer 2024 after 20 years with The Wine Society
>> Read more about Jo’s time with us and her memorable bottles
Love it, hate it
The Society’s Fino sherry is perhaps a slightly odd choice for a memorable bottle in that this is a wine I actively hated. Back when I joined The Wine Society full-time in 2013, I was quickly put into the Level 2 WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) course conducted in-house by Simon Mason, now Head of Wine Sustainability. After multiple flights of pretty standard whites, reds, rosés and fizz, it was time to taste fortifieds.
My experience of sherry prior to joining The Society was (as for many) Harvey’s Bristol Cream at my grandparents’ house – I had no idea how it was made and barely knew that dry styles such as this fino existed. Anyway, I remember us all taking a sip and our faces crunching up like the rear-end of a cat (one person still at The Wine Society who shall not be named even ran off to be sick!).
Slowly but surely, as the years have passed and my palate has matured, this first experience with fino has lit a sherry-fuelled fire within my belly and now I simply cannot get enough of the stuff. If you come to my house for dinner then you’re almost certainly going to be presented with a glass of dry sherry – with its briny, salty and lithe style, it beats almost any other drink when it comes to a conversation starter or delicious appetite enhancer.
Matthew Horsley
Buyer for Bordeaux, England, Greece, and South Africa
What makes a special bottle anyway?
We are lucky as buyers to be able to taste and drink thousands of different wines, so what constitutes a special bottle is quite a challenge in some ways. For me, rather than how a wine tastes or its inherent quality, it has more to do with time and place – when a wine and experience come together to create a memorable moment.
One, in particular, springs to mind – a lunch in Stevenage with Paul Draper, former chief winemaker at famous California winery, Ridge. We drank a sublime bottle of Hermitage La Chapelle 1990 which inspired Paul to start recounting his memories of travelling the world selling Ridge wines alongside the late Gérard Jaboulet, the ebullient face of Paul Jaboulet Aîné. Such was his (understandable) fondness for Gérard, a true Rhône character, there was a tear in his eye as he reminisced on this time spent together.
Pierre Mansour
Director of Wine
A taste of antiquity
The bottle I have chosen is a Wine Society bottling, IECWS (International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society)
as we were known at the time, of Château Mouton-d'Armailhacq 1934. I selected it for two reasons. Firstly, because the wine, tasted last year, was wonderful and the equal of two other lovely 1934s tasted at the same time – Château Margaux and Carruades de Château Lafite. It was incredible to taste a wine 88 years old which was so delicious with delicate aromas of coffee and chocolate and a light, but still very much alive, palate. The property was purchased by Baron Philippe de Rothschild in 1934, and the estate is currently owned by the Mouton Rothschild branch of the Rothschild family and now known as Château d’Armailhac.
The other reason for choosing this wine as my special bottle was that it was supplied by, and tasted with, Roy Richards, a long-time supplier of The Wine Society. He has taught me more about wine than anyone else and done so with much fun, wit and incredible generosity. I am forever in his debt.
Toby Morrhall
Buyer for Burgundy and South America
… and a Rhône rarity
One of the most memorable wines from my time at The Society has been the Vacqueyras Blanc Vieilles Vignes from Clos des Cazaux. I tasted the 2018 at one of our press tastings a while ago and was blown away by the extraordinarily high quality of the wine, particularly in view of its relatively modest appellation. I immediately ordered a case and have been buying the wine ever since.
White Vacqueyras is a Rhône rarity, but Clos des Cazaux makes one of the appellation’s star wines. The key is the old-vine clairette, which makes up the majority of the blend and lends the wine grip and freshness, with smaller proportions of roussanne and viognier bringing flavour and roundness on the palate. This is the estate’s top white cuvée, and, rather unusually, is only bottled in magnums. It is barrel aged and bears more than a passing resemblance to a top white Burgundy (which, sadly, I can no longer afford to buy!) though at a considerably more affordable price.
Tim Sykes
Buyer for Bordeaux, Beaujolais & Sherry
Wine buyers’ memorable visits
On my first Wine Society visit to Tuscany with Sebastian Payne MW, as the Italian buying baton was being passed from him to me, we had a great tasting with Giovanni Manetti of Fontodi. The estate is in Panzano at the heart of the Chianti Classico region, a beautiful location for a brilliant visit. As well as tasting from vat, barrel and bottle with Giovanni, we saw the meticulous way he designed his winery, paralleled in his detailed approach to organic sustainable farming.
Following this great introduction, we were booked to have a ‘light lunch’, so that we could discuss the special 150th anniversary wine we were hoping he would agree to supplying (which, happily he did). A light lunch in Italy, though, is a little bit of a misnomer, especially when you are being led into the butcher’s shop-come-restaurant of famous Panzano resident Dario Cecchini! We were treated to a classic bistecca Fiorentina accompanied perfectly by Fontodi’s flagship Flaccianello wine in the outstanding 2006 vintage – it was singing beautifully, although clearly with decades to go.
Sarah Knowles MW
Buyer for Italy, North America, Champagne & Spirits
