The British wine trade is deeply jealous of Majestic Wine Warehouses. They keep on making more and more money without antagonising their customers. They insist on selling a minimum of a dozen assorted bottles at a time and yet, while the supermarkets scrap over who has the best special offer on £3.99 bottles, they manage to squeeze a substantial three figure sum out of every single customer. They have also, since the change in ownership at Oddbins, taken over the mantle of the UK’s specialist chain of most interest to wine lovers.
I tasted a wide range of wines from Majestic the other day and saw so signs of their sitting on their laurels. They are offering some interesting new producers from France as well as from the New World at the top end, but my wine of the week is quite ridiculously cheap. It is a distress parcel of the sort that Majestic has always been rather good at picking up. (It presumably helps to have both flexibility and cash.) Remember those bargain bordeaux from the Swedish monopoly’s over-stocked cellars?
California is the source of this latest clutch of bargains. A four year old Sonoma Country Chardonnay at £3.99 sounds pretty ridiculous, does it not? Well, you can choose. You could pay the full price of £7.99 a bottle for Sonoma Creek Chardonnay 2001 Sonoma County, but that would automatically qualify you for their special offer of £3.99 if you buy any two Sonoma Creek wines, so unless you really, really only want one bottle from this wonderfully forgettably-named producer, you will end up paying £7.98 for two instead of £7.99 for one. (Are you with me?)
Sonoma Creek is the name of a ‘family-operated’ (according to the defunct website) winery that was based in Carneros, had some vines but I think also bottled a lot of bought-in fruit. I’m told their winemaker also worked for Catena in Argentina. According to Majestic, Sonoma Creek has gone belly-up and the stock has been taken over by another winery. (I assume this is Ironstone as the bottling address on later bottlings is Murphys where Ironstone is the biggest winery.) The amazing thing is that this well-balanced wine really does taste as though it is made from Carneros Chardonnay. It’s very slightly sulphidey/mineral on the nose and has quite decent fruit on the palate. It has absolutely nowhere to go and needs drinking, but £3.99 for a perfectly respectable Sonoma Chardonnay that is absolutely nothing like one of those horribly sweet, overblown AVA California branded blends strikes me as quite a bargain. (For those of you planning a party, the package looks much more expensive than £3.99 too.)
Majestic is also offering a Sonoma Creek Merlot 2000 California at the same price (£7.99 aka £3.99) that is perfectly serviceable – quite delicate and fragrant in fact. Light, easy and definitely Merlot. At £9.99 aka £4.99 are Sonoma Creek Merlot 2000 Sonoma County and Sonoma Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2001 Sonoma County which hardly seem worth the extra money to me. Go for those really cheap wines! (I have not tasted the Sonoma Creek Zinfandel 2000.)
Apologies to everyone based outside the UK re this week’s choice. I tried finding a Sonoma Creek wine on winesearcher.com but of course there were dozens of references, none of them from Sonoma Creek but Something Creek of Sonoma.