Wine of the week: a mind-blowing rosé

published 1 May 2020

2018 Château d’Esclans, Les Clans, Côtes de Provence, France

£56.20, hedonism.co.uk; £44.95, finewinedirect.co.uk; £54.95, secretbottleshop.co.uk; £65.85, amazon.co.uk; £59.99, thewinereserve.co.uk; £54.95, slurp.co.uk.

The top-flight 2018 releases from Sacha Lichine’s temple to elite rosé have just arrived in the UK. While a few merchants stock my featured Les Clans, the pinnacle wine, Garrus, is available from just one! I have tasted every single wine from this estate since Sacha dared to dream that he could turn the wine world on its head fifteen years ago.

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As if to underline his success, a few months ago Bernard Arnault’s LVMH group bought a majority stake in this stellar brand. While the most famous Provence rosé on the planet is Esclans’ very own Whispering Angel, it is the two estate wines that I completely adore.

Every single time I open these wines my guests go suitably gaga! They are so sophisticated it is amazing. Les Clans is simply stunning in 2018 with ethereal grenache flesh punctured by a spear of freshness, coming from the careful addition of the rolle grape. This high-tensile silver thread of cool minerality counterpoints the lusty red grape’s stunning virility. There are discreet peach and raspberry notes softening the flavour attack throughout, and these act as highlights in the performance. This is what mind-blowing rosé is all about.

2018 Garrus (£94.95, finewinedirect.co.uk) is Les Clans with the volume knob turned up, ripped off and thrown over the garden

hedge. Sensational, bombastic, imposing, impossibly grand and, for once, relatively forward.

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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.