Obviously there is the string of excise duty increases put into place by the former labour government which has increased a bottle of wine by 36 pence, plus vat of course, making it 42 pence per bottle. Thanks to their legacy, it’s set to increase again in 2011 by 2% over inflation which is currently 5%, so 7% in total, with the vat adding another 1.2%. On it’s own this would be no problem, we accept we have to pay a bit more. The biggest increase has come from the extremely weak pound. As (virtually) all wine is imported, we’ve seen increases in the basic cost of the wine by as much as 40%. Add back on the excise duty increases and you can see why the price on our shelves has increased so much. In January we have VAT increasing to 20%!

So how have the supermarkets coped?

We all remember ‘3 for £10′ and although this wine was frankly all crap, it was still affordable. 85% of all retail wine in the UK is sold through the supermarkets and they’ve dominated the market for years, forcing producers to repeatedly cut costs till many went out of business, so they could maintain their price points. Many brands have to pay the supermarkets to have a presence on the shelf! Have the supermarkets cut their margins while the rest of us struggle? No! They still make around 30 to 35%! You may have noticed prices creeping up on the shelves as there is simply no room left for the producers to manouvre. Asda has moved to 3 bottles for £12 presumably to acclimatise consumers before the vat increase. According to inside sources supermarket buyers are instructed to source wines at no more than 34 cents a bottle – about 22 pence. This makes sense on a bottle of wine at £4, as it leaves £1.75 for duty and customs tax, 60 pence vat, 22 pence for the producer (including the bottle, cork and labelling, leaving only 5 pence for the wine!), 20 pence shipping, and a nice 30% (£1.00) for the supermarket.

So next time you see a wine on the shelf in a supermarket at an affordable £4, stop and think what is actually in the bottle – a product that is actually worth about 5 pence! Would you buy orange juice at that price, or milk, or even a piece of fish? No way, at that price you would expect it to be crap! So why are we still surprised when we get the wine home, open it and attempt to drink it? Yes, it is crap! But on the shelf it said ‘Half price, reduced from £8 to £4 so I thought it might be good……’ People are being routinely disappointed time after time in the supermarket, while the supermarkets make literally billions of pounds per year from us. Thankfully many people are beginning to wisen up and look elsewhere for their wines, accepting that due to the weak pound and punitive duty rates, good wine now costs at least £8 per bottle. But those of us on a tight budget, and let’s face it that’s most of us at the moment, will continue our regular bout of weekly disappointment, but at least by the following morning we can’t really remember how bad the wine tasted, because we’re struggling with a horrendous hangover from the 80 different chemicals that were added to it to keep the price down!

Like Everywine.co.uk, Simply Wines Direct appear not to hold any stock. Instead they accept your order then allow themselves 10 working days to source the wine and get it to you. And of course they charge you an astronomical price for the wine. For example the best deal around for Boekenhoutskloof Chocolate Block is with  www.goodwineonline.co.uk at £15.99 a bottle. Simply Wines Direct advertise it at £25.83 per bottle – although they don’t even have it of course! As they are not a bone fide retailer they don’t have an established relationship with the importers, and subsequently can’t even get hold of this kind of wine. On their website they claim to be one of the wine industry leaders, a global company sourcing wines direct from the vineyard for you. Very impressive claims for somebody running a website from a terraced house in Reading! Google their address - 10 Baker Street, Reading , Berkshire RG1 7XU. He could probably fit 20 cases in his shed if he moved the bike out, but a global company? I think not! The problem is Trading Standards will do absolutely nothing to prevent this kind of false advertising.

I was actually contacted by someone (Jim) who thanked me for the warning as he had phoned them to buy some wine. He became suspicious when the guy on the other end appeared to know nothing about Rhone wines. Smelling a rat, Jim offered to pop down and have a browse as he only lived a few miles away……. ‘just email what you’re interested in mate’ was the reply!

It’s the same old formula that people are fed up with. A flashy website offering literally thousands of products, none of which they hold in stock. Enormously inflated prices to compensate for their low volume of sales – and you should also take note of their returns policy. They know that their customers are going to realise they’ve been overcharged, so in complete disregard for the distance selling regulations that they are legally bound to comply with, they don’t offer the two week cancellation period, they only offer 5 days. And they refuse to refund the carriage charge – both of which are completely illegal!

It’s websites like this that discourage the general public from ordering online, and give genuine internet retailers a bad name. I recommend voting with your feet (or mouse finger!) and only purchase your wine through a bone fide wine merchant who can confirm they actually have the stock and offer immediate delivery. Don’t be fooled by a flashy high tec website with ‘free delivery’ plastered all over it. At £10 per bottle over the real price of the wine, I’d expect the wine to be delivered in a chauffeur driven limo! There are plenty of ‘Jack the lads’ out there who see internet retailing as a way to make a quick buck without any set up costs. Always check them out first to make sure they are a genuine business! It only takes a few minutes on Google. Nobody would fault an honest entrepreneur trying to establish a bone fide new business, but simply telling lies on your website to con potential customers into paying way over the odds for products they could buy elsewhere is both morally wrong and illegal, and we shouldn’t tolerate it.

Firstly, just to explain the technical definitions, ’sulphite free wine’ is a layman’s term, which should be more accurately called ‘no added sulphur wine’ or ‘no added preservative wine’, purely because tiny amounts of bound sulphur are a natural biproduct of the fermentation process, so there is no such thing as a sulphite free wine. These tiny amounts of bound sulphur are harmless, it’s the added free sulphur which can cause allergic reactions in sulphite intolerant people, so these wines can safely be regarded as ’sulphite free’.

www.goodwineonline.co.uk have specialised in low sulphite wines for a couple of years, but are very excited by these latest additions to their portfolio, as good quality sulphite free wine is as rare as hen’s teeth. There are a handful of wineries around the world who produce wines with no added sulphur, but most of these wines are pretty poor quality. Goodwineonline have always specialised in top quality, award winning boutique wines, which by their nature are hand made with pride, and a minimal amount of additives.  Now they’ve partnered up with a unique winery called Domaine Viret in the northern Rhone Valley.

Domaine Viret, owned by father and son - Alain and Philippe Viret, is a unique concept in wine making. They have developed their own system called ‘cosmoculture’ which is a combination of advanced biodynamic principles with traditonal respect for the land, nature and natural energy. They use the earth’s natural magnetic field and the cell structure of water to transfer this energy to their vines – it’s a highly complex approach which some traditional winemakers may consider a little eccentric, but it has amazing results. Oz Clarke described their wines as ‘cosmic nectar’.

On the biodynamic side of cosmoculture, they produce their own ‘plant food’ for the vines from 14 different plants on the estate. Each plant lends a different property to the mix, so with 14 different plants it takes some expertise to get it right. Lavendar for example, has been used for milennia as an antiseptic, and so forth with all the other ingredients. They’ve studied plant microbiology and adopted trusted philosophies from tradional oriental herbal medicine, the Aborigines and even the Red Indians.

Their wines are quite simply amazing. Philippe’s approach isn’t just about making a wine with no added sulphur, nor is it about just making a wine with great flavour. It’s about making a wine which is complete - it tastes great, has good balance and is actively good for you. They all have a real purity, an absence of chemicals, that you really notice and which may make it difficult for you to revert to drinking normal wines again! The acidity is beautifully balanced as Philippe explains it’s not just about the flavour, but the whole experience of drinking the wine – it should be agreeable to your whole body not just your taste buds.

This labour intensive method of hand production restricts Domaine Viret to only making a limited amount of wine, around 10 000 cases per year. As these are distributed globally there isn’t much to go round, so Goodwineonline consider themselves very fortunate to have secured regular supply.

Checkout Domaine Viret’s website for more details on Cosmoculture.

It’s likely that organic wines will contain less BOUND sulphur and therefore also less TOTAL sulphur, as the regulations for organic wines tend to be more strict than for normal wines, although these regulations will differ between organic bodies and countries/regions. This BOUND sulphur is partly responsible for the hangover/headache, whereas it’s the FREE sulphur which is responsible for causing the allergic reaction in sulphite intolerant people. If you are intolerant to sulphites it’s possible you may be able to safely drink one or two organic wines, but simply being certified organic doesn’t mean a wine will be safe for you. You need to find wines that are low in FREE sulphur. There are only a handful of ‘No Added Preservative’ wines or ‘No Added Suphur’ wines produced globally and frankly most of these are awful quality. However www.goodwineonline.co.uk  specialise in wines very low in FREE sulphur (although there is no official classification for this and producers don’t put this information on the label). If you have a reaction to sulphites in wine try some of their recommended low sulphite wines, they should be absolutely fine for you, and of course they’re all selected for their great taste too.

However, that has now all changed, as more and more quality producers are turning to organic or biodynamic methods of production in order to produce purer wines. I was always sceptical as the early organic wines I drank were frankly awful – and we mustn’t let our guard down now, plenty of the organic wines available in the UK today are still awful – but if you get a good one, it can be not only delicious but also a real pleasure to drink as it somehow gives you a sense of well being. I don’t think this is psychological, as I’m not into feeling good about myself for eating ‘only fruit that has fallen fom the tree’ but I do firmly believe that the vast amount of chemicals and additives in our food (and wine) today has effects on us that we’re just so used to that we don’t even notice them – but I am noticing their absence! For example I had a bad car crash in New Zealand many years ago and my back was quite badly damaged. I struggled on and went back to work as normal. Three years later back in the UK, I went to an osteopath for a shoulder problem and she relieved pain in my back I didn’t even realise I had, as I’d just got used to it. I believe it’s the same when we eat or drink these additives.

I always feel sluggish after white bread, although not sluggish enough to make me have a bacon butty on brown! There’s an awful lot of additives in white bread, and since cutting down on such foods I’ve felt a lot healthier.

Organic wine is wine made from organically grown grapes – that is from vines which have not been treated with synthetic man made fertilisers or herbicides. Organic vineyards tend to grow other beneficial plants between the rows of vines which add nutrients to the soil and can help combat pests and disease in natural ways.

Biodynamic wines are a legacy of Rudolf Steiner who introduced his system long before ‘organic’ was even recognised. Biodynamic looks at the vineyard as a larger part of nature, almost an organism in itself. Sustainability is the focus with recycling and composts and fertilisers made from other plants in the vineyard used to nourish the vines. They also take account of the earth’s natural cycles and rythyms, and lunar cycles, and time specific tasks to coincide with them to harmonise the environment and produce premium fruit.

It’s actually not easy to gain official certification as ‘organic’ or ‘biodynamic’ as it takes time and a lot of dedication. There are relevant certifying bodies for organic in most countries with the Demeter Association certifying worldwide for biodynamic.

Now that we’ve covered the introduction, we’re left with the same old problem as before.

Where do we find GOOD and DELICIOUS organic or biodynamic wines?

Wine is like any other food product – there’s good, mediocre and bad examples available. So how do we find the good ones? There are various places offering a plethora of different organic wines, maybe hundreds if not even thousands, but this doesn’t differentiate between the good and the bad. That’s left for you to discover by trial and error. However there is one website who specialise in only GOOD wine, and they are launching a dedicated section on LOW SULPHITE, PRESERVATIVE FREE, ORGANIC and BIODYNAMIC wines with a difference – they’re all picked for their outstanding quality. They’re produced by boutique vineyards with the focus clearly on quality, that they’re also organic is an important but secondary consideration. The site is also full of useful information for people looking to avoid sulphites in wine. Visit www.goodwineonline.co.uk and see for yourself.

It’s written as if the people who want to find low sulphite or sulphite free wines to drink are doing it just to be awkward, like somebody at your dinner party announcing at the last minute that they’re a vegan! The truth is these sulphites trigger reactions in a minority of people which can be fatal, and having experienced it first hand I don’t think it’s something which should be trivialised by ill informed wine journalists. My partner Jane has been sulphite intolerant since 1999 and that is how we’ve come to do so much research on the subject. This intolerance (not our research!) has nearly cost her life on several occassions. These same sulphites killed 30 people in the USA in the 1970s who ate from a salad bar infused with sulphites to prevent the lettuce from discolouring, which led to the American government bringing in legislation that any food product containing more than 10 parts per million must state ‘contains sulphites’ on the label. Australia is now at the forefront in the world imposing legisation on the sulphite issue.

Big business elsewhere is happy to brush this problem under the carpet as sulphites (E-numbers E220 to E229) are present in a huge variety of foods, and the financial implications of a major health scare would be extremely damaging.

Let’s sort out the confusion

It’s really not that complicated to understand the basics and then avoid wines high in sulphites. Please bear with me if things get a little technical, it will all be made clear in the end. The problem and confusion lies with the myriad of differing ill informed opinions and poorly written incomplete articles. Plus of course the similar names of sulphites, sulphides and sulphates, and the difference between ‘free sulphur’ and ‘bound sulphur’. I will now explain the basics to make it clear for everyone who uses this site.

Wines are produced all over the world and although most regions try to set common standards, legislation does vary from country to country. Basically ALL WINES (with an absolutely tiny minority in some countries with wines under 10ppm) must have, by law, ‘contains sulphites’ on their label. This is because Sulphites, in tiny quantities, are a natural bi-product of the fermentation process.  The potentially dangerous sulphites are the ones which are added to the wine as ‘free sulphur’  at various stages of it’s production, sometimes in powder form (potassium bisulphate), sometimes as a gas (sulphur dioxide) and occassionally dissolved in the wine itself in liquid form. The purpose of this free sulphur is to react with any oxygen before the oxygen can react with (and spoil) the wine. It also inhibits the growth of bacteria which could also potentially spoil the wine. It’s also useful in controlling the process of malolactic fermentation where malic acid is transformed into lactic acid. In some wines a certain amount of malolactic fermentation can be desirable, it all depends on the grapes’ natural acidity, fruit quality and sugar content, and of course the style of wine being produced. This can be very confusing for those of us without a master’s degree in chemistry. This sulphure dioxide (SO2) can exist in different molecular forms, known as sulpite, bisulphite or molecular SO2, depending on the acidity of the wine and the temperature during fermentation. Thus a temperature controlled (28 degree) grape must with high acidity will have a completely different split of the three SO2s than a wine fermented in warmer temperatures with lower acidity. Confused yet?

So to make a wine without adding sulphur is actually quite difficult because you have to tackle these problems in other ways, and this can be time consuming and expensive. The biggest problem is oxidation – the wine reacting with oxygen present and discolouring and developing a stale taste. In red wines this can be overcome as red wines contain natural anti oxidants in the form of tannins derived from the the grape skin. (Alcohol is also very useful as an anti oxidant). Whites and roses don’t have this ability so they need far more sulphur than quality reds to prevent this reaction. Good quality fruit, ripe, with good acidity is a also a natural defense as is temperature controlled fermentation. Unfortunately the cheap brands start off with cheap, poor quality fruit and subsequently are fighting an uphill battle – at least they would be if they bothered fighting it. Instead they’re quite happy to splash in the sulphur and let us all suffer with horrendous hangovers every time we have a bottle of their wine!

These poor quality brands have dominated the UK wine market in the off trade (supermarkets and national chains) for years and many people accept this is what wine actually tastes like. They also assume their hangover is due to the alcohol – no, it’s due to these chemicals. I can comfortably drink 2 bottles of good wine without even an inkling of feeling rough the next day. Give me one glass of a mass produced brand – or a couple of pints of UK brewed lager – and I wake up with a banging headache because of the chemicals.

Most producers and wine journalists think that the handful of wineries making ‘no added sulphur’ wines are all ‘mad professor types’  just being awkward for the sake of it. Jane, on the other hand, will tell you they’re not!

Which wines are safe for sulphite intolerant people to drink?

No added sulphur wines of course, but a good low sulphur wine should also be safe for a sulphite intolerant person. By law a wine can contain up to 350 parts per million of sulphites, and the vast majority of cheap branded wines are right up there around the limit. (One Shiraz tested recently in Australia had a massive 10 times the legal limit!) This is because the initial fruit is poor quality, the methods are mechanised for mass production and they’re driven by keeping costs down. A low sulphur wine needs care and attention, good quality grapes, hand picking, hand sorting, more expensive bottling procedures, constant monitoring, and all this costs money.

There are low sulphite wines around from family owned wineries who take pride in the wines they produce. The grapes are hand picked and the wine made with care, expertise and dedication. Many of these only have very minimal sulphur added and have a total sulphur content – this is the total of both harmless ‘bound sulphur’ AND ‘free sulphur’ – of less than 100 parts per million. Many are below 50 ppm – that’s 85% less sulphur than a branded wine! The problem is the amount of sulphur content is not stated on the label.

So, how do you find low sulphite wines?

The best place to find these wines is www.goodwineonline.co.uk a website devoted to top quality, award winning, low sulphite wines, bringing together the best wines from different countries around the world. Virtually every one of their 400 plus wines is hand made by small family wineries, with real pride in producing the best wine possible from their natural ingredients with a firm focus on quality. Sounds expensive? Well, no it’s not. Good wines cannot be produced at artificially low supermarket prices, but they don’t have to cost the earth either. Sadly with the weak pound and ill thought out duty schedule on alcohol, a decent bottle of wine has shifted from £6 to £10, and a really good bottle from £15 upwards.  To ensure you get good value try www.goodwineonline.co.uk ,they’re also the cheapest prices in the UK for virtually every wine they sell. Every wine on their site has been tasted by them. They write their own genuine tasting notes (not some ‘gooseberry and raspberry’ nonsense off the back label). And it’s ALL good wine. If the wine isn’t good enough for them to drink personally, it doesn’t get listed on the site. Jane is intolerant to sulphites so she tests the wines and rates them on sulphite content herself – a hard job she says, but someone has to do it! All wines are kept in stock ready for next working day delivery. There’s no minimum order and you can mix and match any quantity of any wines you like.

If you want to drink wine low in sulphites this is THE place to buy them www.goodwineonline.co.uk

Well good news on this front. My brother, Dave Lang, started his own brewery - The Forge, 18 months ago in Hartland (Devon) unsurprisingly in an old forge.  His beer has just been awarded Society of Independent Brewers Gold Medal and overall Champion Beer of the Competition for the South West 2010. He also took two Bronze Medals for two of his other beers. A truly remarkable achievement when Dave only started brewing 18 months ago.

He designed and built The Forge Brewery from scratch using a limited amount of  second hand equipment, but a great deal of it he actually engineered himself in the workshop, building his own cooling system and cask washer system. He works harder than anybody I know, as his brewery was at full capacity within months of going live. Somehow Dave manages to put in the equivalent of 9 days a week when I thought I was busy working  only 7!

It’s great for the Forge Brewery to get this recognition but sadly it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to buy his beer in your local pub. There was already a waiting list before the awards, there’s certainly going to be even more demand now. Dave won the Champion Beer Award for his Lighthouse Ale which is fantastic. I arrived there about 6 months ago and pulled up by the storage shed. I’d drunk 10 pints before I even got as far as the house, then we went to the local pub where we polished off another half a dozen. And the hangover? What hangover? I woke up fresh as a daisy because, like our wine, Dave’s beer is made naturally without the use of artificial preservatives. I was ready for another 10!

You may be lucky enough to try a pint in the Sportsman’s at  Newtown though, where Dave has a good working relationship with Pam Honeyman from Monty’s Brewery – another runaway success story in the world of brewing. Pam’s only been brewing a few months longer but has already won Champion Beer of Wales for her stout – Monty’s Midnight, plus other awards, and has been featured in various press articles as her beer is fed locally to ‘Wagyu’ cattle to produce the world’s most expensive beef! She also supplies her beer to the House of Commons where our beloved MPs can enjoy a well earned pint – although it’s you and me who’ve earned it, and are paying for it, but it’s our MPs who are drinking it!

Finally, if you live in North Wales, you may be lucky enough to find a good pub with some Forge beer over the summer months. Dave will be sending some up to be distributed by Quick Keg along the coast.

Ok, some of the big ones like Laithwaites really do travel looking for - shall we say to be kind - the most economical wines. But we also note on many of the smaller retail sites they use phrases like ‘from the vineyard direct’ to imply that they’re out there calling at tiny vineyards to source wines just for you. They’re not! Take a look at the products they stock and you’ll see the same products on other websites. Is there a constant stream of little old fellows in tweed jackets popping into each vineyard in the Mclaren Vale and picking up half a dozen cases each? Of course not.

To ship one pallet of wine to the UK from the southern hemisphere costs about £800 – more than £1 per bottle. However to ship a container with 12 pallets will only cost £3000, or £250 per pallet. To ship individual cases is simply cost prohibitive. Then of course there’s the EU wall of beaurocracy to get past. The producers have to label the back of the bottles with EU compliant labels before they can be admitted. These labels are ludicrously beaurocratic but are a legal requirement. So this notion of the traditional British wine merchant driving round, tasting wines in the vineyard and picking up a few cases just for you is complete nonsense, but then there’s an awful lot of nonsense and cloak and dagger work going on in the UK wine trade that these wine merchants don’t want you to know about.

Some wine merchants do buy direct and have arrangements with specific vineyards, but the majority of wines are imported by agencies who build a portfolio and then take samples out to the independent merchants. It’s basically economy of scale. But for these wines to be commercially viable the vineyards pressurise the agencies to take bigger quantities. The agencies then negotiate over price then take a slice of every bottle they import. The system works well and means that a small merchant can offer a wide variety of wines from different countries without having to buy container loads from each winery. And we’re all delighted about that. But I don’t think any of us are particularly happy being patronised by a smarmy wine merchant claiming to have imported that bottle just for you, especially when we could have bought the same wine for less simply by taking a few seconds to Google it!

For example if you go to a website called Bin ends London, they claim:  ‘At Bin Ends we pride ourselves on selling not only great wine, but also the cheapest wine that you will find on the web. Yes, you read right, the CHEAPEST wine that you will find on the web’.

Yet they sell Bosan Ripasso 2006 for a horrendous £22.99 when you can clearly buy Bosan Ripasso 2006 from www.goodwineonline.co.uk for £14.10. This isn’t simply because someone’s discounting it in a sale, this is a permanent price. It’s also not a matter of a difference of  a few pence which can be overlooked - this wine is a whopping 50% more expensive, a staggering £8.89 per bottle! This is daylight robbery – literally. Then take a look at the difference on Cesari Il Bosco Amarone 2001. It’s not just one wine they’re out on!

But the frustrating thing is there’s virtually nothing we can do about it. The Advertising Standards Agency makes it pretty difficult to lodge a complaint, preferring businesses to sort these things out amicably between themselves - something which is likely to happen just after pigs learn to fly. So the consumer really has no protection from these scamsters. These best price guarantees really aren’t worth the pixels it takes to write them! I strongly advise all consumers to shop around on Google for the best deal.

It’s not just a few dodgy independent retailers either, often it’s brand names we trust. For example the much sought after Boekenhoutskloof The Chocolate Block 2008 is retailing at Oddbins at £21.99 or again at www.goodwineonline.co.uk for a realistic £16.49! Do you want to pay Oddbins an extra £66 per case for exactly the same wine? I recommend ‘voting with your feet’ in these cases.

Just a quick word of caution about price comparison sites too. Most of them charge companies to have their products listed, such as wine-searcher.co.uk or supermarketwine.com. Most companies don’t subscribe to them so they only offer a comparison of a small number of suppliers. The vast majority of times you’re likely to find the wine cheaper yourself just by ‘googling’ it. 

So if you want to make sure you’re not being ripped off, do a little research. It only takes a a few seconds to type the wine into Google and hit the ’shopping’ tab. If you want to check further just search ‘pages from the uk’ and compare a few prices. As we can see from the example above there are plenty of unscrupulous people with flashy websites queing up to fleece the unwary winelover!

We’ve all had a Chenin Blanc of course but they also produce some stunning Chardonnays - and Sauvignon Blancs to rival the very best from Marlborough. The biggest suprise to me was just how good the sparkling Pongracz Desiderius 2002 from JC Leroux was. This is their flagship wine, packaged to look like Louis Roederer Crystal? And rightly so as it’s the best sparkling wine I’ve ever tried, including many vintages of Dom Perignon!

For too long we’ve been inundated with inferior, artificial, manufactured plonk at the cheap end of the market and this has tainted the reputation of the South African wine industry in the UK. However the good producers are now fighting back to restore South Africa’s image, quite rightfully as one of the world’s leading wine producing regions, making wines of exceptional quality – and at exceptional value prices too.

The Cape Winemaker’s Guild is an elite group of 28 independent wine makers who have got together to put South Africa firmly on the map as a top quality producer. Membership is by invitation only. Their top wines are made with real passion to showcase what the region can produce, often made in tiny quantities. Refreshingly it’s not about churning out vast quantities for profit, it’s all about the art of winemaking, striving to make the best wine possible from the raw ingredients. They get great reviews from John Platter who is South Africa’s foremost expert wine reviewer, and a trusted source for genuine reviews.

Fortunately some of these wines are now finding their way over to the UK. One or two enterprising companies like www.goodwineonline.co.uk are working with these top producers to bring their top wines to the UK wine lover.

South Africa  has historically been famous for Chenin Blanc and Pinotage (a hybrid of Pinot Noir and Hermitage). If you’ve had a cheap version of either of these wines it could well have put you off for life! Have a good one however, and you will be trying some stunning wines, with a character and flavour not found anywhere else . Of particular note and producing some of the very best wines to come from the Cape, are two relatively new wineries – Jean Daneel and Cape Point Vineyards. Interestingly both are based outside the traditional wine producing regions toward the most southerly point on the tip of Africa – a new boutique region in the making perhaps? Jean Daneel needs no introduction having been winemaker for several big companies like Constantia for whom he won Diner’s Club ‘Winemaker of the Year’ 1992. However he started making his own wines in 1997 and subsequently set up his new ‘micro’ winery in 2006 with just him and his eldest son. He’s already famous for his Chenin Blanc for which he has a string of medals and trophies, and for his stunning red blends which I think are truly world class. These wines are severely limited though as they only make a few pallets per year!

Cape Point Vineyards on the other hand was established in 1996 focusing predominantly on white wines. They only produce about 9000 cases in total. Their Sauvignons are world class – John Platter 5 stars! As are their Chardonnays and white blends. I’m very much looking forward to trying their reds as I’m planning a trip out there in the near future.

If you’re planning on heading out there for the football world cup, there’s a vast array of quality wine to try, and plenty of well geared wineries offering tastings, restaurants and accomodation. You’re likely to return with a whole new perception of South African wine. If like me you’re not a football fan, or just not in the fortunate position to visit the Cape, visit www.goodwineonline.co.uk for a fantastic selection of the very best of South African wines. For their superior quality and great value for money I predict they’re going to be the next big thing in the wine world!