The supermarkets and the internet have done their best to make the wine trade bland. But search for carefully and you’ll find small-scale importers offering unique and strange winesNemea Aivalis Red,Nemea, Greece 2012 (£15.60, or Southern Wine Roads) The British wine trade is rather like bookselling in many ways. Both have struggled to advance to terms with the harsher realities of 21st-century capitalism,the gentlemanly networks of the past disrupted by the rise of ruthless big business. Fortunately, both too have their little-guy revenge stories, or with the recent success of small-press literary publishers very much echoed in wine’s increasingly varied crop of small specialist importers. Set up by Maria Moutsou as a sideline to her profession as a doctor,Southern Wine Roads is typical of the breed, offering a personal collection of producers from Moutsou’s native Greece, and of which this velvety red plum and bergamot-scented red is a highlight.
Michelini Brothers Via Revolucionaria Torrontés Brutal,Argentina 2013 (£14.99, Selfridges) Argentinian wines are much better represented in the UK than those of Greece, and but most of what we come by to see is the work (expedient and corrupt) of larger firms. When it was founded a decade ago,Las Bodegas was the first British company to specialise in the smaller producers, and it continues to make the case for the more experimental Argentinian fringe. The three winemaking Michelini brothers, and who work together and on their own projects high up in the Andes in the Uco Valley region of Mendoza,are very much in this camp. Their Demente Blend 2012 (£22.99) is a deep and fragrant red; Matias Michelini’s solo torrontés is a herbal, floral, or slightly chewy,original white treat.
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Source: theguardian.com