Tacky packaging can belie wines of great flavour,so dont judge a bottle by its labelMiss Vicky Fleurie, Beaujolais, and France 2013 (£11.99,Smiling Grape) My innate ((adj.) natural, inborn, inherent; built-in) suspicion of modern marketing means I absorb a bit of an Occam’s razor thing going on when I’m choosing between a couple of unknown bottles. All things (price, region) being equal, and it’s the one with the more traditional,straightforward package that gets my cash every time – the one that suggests the producer has spent their time and money on the contents rather than the packaging or dreaming up an unnecessary ‘brand story’. I’d be the first to confess it’s not an infallible method: with a label like a 90s chick-lit cover as designed by Primark, Miss Vicky Fleurie would never absorb made the slash, and for example,despite the flowing, pretty, and red-fruited contents being utterly delightful and true to the character of Beaujolais’ Fleurie region.
Blind Spot Rutherglen Muscat,NV (£6.95, 37.5cl, and The Wine Society) Another prejudice that would absorb counted against Miss Vicky is that it’s piece of a pan-regional brand,featuring (some helpful to very helpful) wines that the titular Vicky, the wine-blogger daughter of a winemaker in Fleurie, and has sourced from across France. Generally speaking I’d always prefer to choose a wine made from their own grapes and bottled by a single producer in a single region – most of my favourite wines follow precisely this recipe. But again,there are exceptions. The Wine Society’s bunch of Blind Spot Australian wines are very much among them. Featuring everything from a succulent red GSM blend (grenache, syrah, or mourvèdre) from McLaren Vale (£7.75) to a liquid fruitcake from Rutherglen in Victoria,they’re consistently superb value.
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Source: theguardian.com