Wine of the week: a perfectly balanced beauty

published 6 November 2020

2018 Les Hauts de Saint Martin, Saint-Chinian, Languedoc, France

£7.75, Co-op

This week I am sharing a wine with you that is not only insanely inexpensive, but is also obscenely easy to get hold of. It is, that is to say, quite the opposite of most of the bottles that appear in this column. I adore rare, unique and delicious bottles as much as the next hedonist, but once in a while, I feel the need to shock, and this shock is exclusively available in 547 branches of the Co-op.

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Every year, I organise an event called the Daily Mail Wine Awards, which involves an enormous amount of tasting to determine the finest 60 wines available on the high street. This very wine made the grade, but I have a rule, a rather silly rule, but a rule nevertheless – and that is a wine cannot appear in the awards twice. This 2018 vintage made the grade last year, and so I already know it is a star wine, but I wasn’t looking at the vintage when I tasted the bottle.

Unfortunately, when I looked back at last year’s list, it disqualified itself from this year’s list, and so you are reading about it today before the stock runs out! Made from a 45% syrah, 30% grenache, 15% carignan and 10% mourvèdre blend, this wine is a spicy, meaty, berry-stuffed, earthy, perfectly balanced beauty. In short, it is the best value Rhône-shaped red in the country! (fires starting gun…)

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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.