I’ve come away, briefly and unexpectedly, from the Italy-Spain wine exploration mission, and Tesco is entirely to blame. In a previous post, I made reference to the cunning ruse employed by supermarkets to put wines out at an inflated price and then draw in the unwitting punters to an alleged half-price bargain. There are so many of these now, flagged up by little yellow stickers, that actual bargains on plain labels prompt a genuine moment of eye-rubbing, stop-in-the-aisle, am-I-going-mad? evaluation. Seeing a bottle of wine at £2.50 should probably garner surprise whatever the setting, but this was Tesco, and a seemingly quality product. My curiosity won out over my pricing guilt, and so now the wine and I are sat in front of the suspended Ukraine-France match, which is only adding to the sense that this is one bizarre Friday.
The Ananuca Chardonnay (2010) is a golden green, coating the glass in small bubbles of youth. The nose is rather flat, with slight peach being the only note to standout in any way from a generic white smell. The taste gives plenty of fruit, with smooth papaya and apricot but little of the pineapple kick of many New World Chardonnays. Given the two year age of the wine (the grapes are first harvested in April), it is pleasantly surprising to still find so much fruit. This wine certainly punches above £2.50, but not much above the £5 mark.
The wine is named after a Chilean fable of a girl who died of a broken heart, and is produced by one Alejandro Galaz, who is in charge of white wine production for Vina Ventisquero. This young company holds three main wine brands –Ventisquero, the widely known Yali and Ramirana – over a fair spread of vineyards in Chile, and they may well be a team worth watching as they build on their first decade’s work.
But £2.50? I can only guess that there was a mispricing…. if only to alleviate my guilt.
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