1. The Society’s Corbières, France 2022
£8.95, The Wine Society
A lot of wine drinkers like rosé very much and in the right mood and weather, I would count myself among them. Still, exceptional exceptions aside, I find it hard to get excited about the sea of pink wines on offer in the UK today: the bottles may be kitschily individualistic, but there’s little to choose between their largely ordinary, pastel-shaded contents. With a heavy heart I’ve watched on as some of my favourite French red wine regions have been reserving more and more of their grapes for rosé. Since 2016, the proportion of reds sold from the Languedoc-Roussillon, for example, has fallen from 53% to 40% while rosé has jumped from 25% to 33% – a trend that’s hard to grasp when you come across spicy, gutsy bargain reds as The Wine Society’s own-label Corbières.
2. Mas Bruguière l’Arbouse, Pic St-Loup, France 2022
£23.25, Yapp Brothers
Corbières was one of a quartet of south of France reds at a Wine Society tasting that made a concise argument for the region’s red wine pedigree. While much in the Midi is bottled under the region-wide Pays d’Oc label, this foursome represented smaller appellations, each with its own variation on blends based on grenache, syrah, carignan, mourvèdre and a few other grapes. These Society wines included the herb-scented, deep but bright Château de Caraguilhes Les Gourgoules 2023 (£14.50, thewinesociety.com), a brambly juicy Domaine Raynier St-Chinian 2024 (£8.75) and the polished Château de Valflaunès Espérance 2022 from Pic-St-Loup, the latter also responsible for the blackberry, aniseed and rosemary of Mas Broguière’s expressive bottling at Yapp Bros.
3. Château Massiac Sentinelle, Minervois, France 2023
£14.99, Haynes Hanson & Clark
Another beautiful wine from Pic-St-Loup was a star in a superb case of Languedoc-Roussillon bottles sent to me by Haynes Hanson & Clark, a reliable London-based independent merchant. The Pic-St-Loup in question, Château Lancyre Clos des Combes 2023 (£16.35, hhanc.co.uk), is a fluent, almost racy expression of this very special place, with its 660m high limestone (‘pic’), cliffs and plateaus, where grapes seem to retain aromatic prettiness more easily than other parts of the Languedoc. Not that other parts can’t produce finely balanced bottles: there is a similar feel of sinuous succulence in another of HH&C’s Languedoc selection, Château Massiac’s Sentinelle, a wine which, with its effortless thyme-inflected blackberry, shows how much is possible for red wine in the oft-underrated Minervois appellation.