Independent bargains from the Languedoc

In the UK there is a real wind of change blowing through the wine retail scene. Small independent merchants are becoming more and more important while the range and quality of wines on offer from the supermarket megaliths who dominate the market quantitatively seems less and less attractive relative to the dynamism in the independent sector.

Everyone remarked about the recent London Wine Trade Fair, moved at last from sterile Excel exhibition centre in Docklands to the familiarity of Olympia, that the most visited and most exciting section of it was called Esoterica, a range of really interesting wines available...