Wine of the week: a textbook Tuscan beauty

published 29 November 2019

2016 Chianti Classico, Casaloste, Tuscany, Italy

£18.95, reduced to £14.95, Jeroboams, 020-7288 8888, jeroboams.co.uk

About a month ago the Christmas wine samples started to flood in. Waves and waves of cases of wines, with around the usual percentage hope of finding bottles worth mentioning. I figure that of the tens of thousands of wines I taste every year, only 2% are of a sufficiently high standard to warrant a mention in any one of my regular columns.

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Jeroboams sent me just four bottles they know me and they do not muck around. All four were delicious and these are the two that absolutely shone. Firstly, my featured Chianti, a wine so succulent and profound I had to do a double-take when I saw the price!

This is a textbook Tuscan beauty with an abundance of unexpected flavour dimensions, all drenched in flair and succulence. It is, in layman's terms, a no-brainer. In vinous folklore, this might be the most shockingly good Chianti I have never heard of. Buy it now.

In addition to that heady red, here is a white Burgundy that completely floored me with its dramatic stance and its devastating flair: 2017 Meursault, Domaine Michelot (£38.95, reduced to £31.95). It is a global chardonnay bargain and I say that because there is a very high hurdle to leap when you are searching for this grape at this level of delivery, and this wine is at least 20 quid cheaper than you'd expect! This is another Jeros wine that you cannot live without.

Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year (matthewjukes.com).

Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’. He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner.

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy. His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.