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Three tasty blended white wines | David Williams
A top-notch still white from Kent, plus two other blended wines from France and South Africa
Balfour Hush Heath Estate, This Septered Isle, Kent, England 2018 (£40, Hush Heath) English sparkling wine long ago reached the point where merchants could charge £40 a bottle. It’s considered a worthy challenger to Champagne, and that kind of price is where many of the smarter French fizz houses start selling. But English still wine is another matter. It doesn’t yet have the reputation or the consistency to be seen as an Anglo-Burgundy. Which is why the latest still dry white release from the respected Hush Heath Estate in Kent is so audacious. An unusual blend of the seven (hence sept-ered) grape varieties used to make champagne (petit meslier, pinot gris, arbanne, pinot blanc, pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay), its easily the best English white wine I’ve ever tasted – luminous, succulent, elegant and resonant.
Domaine Gayda Figure Libre Freestyle Blanc, IGP Pays d’Oc, France 2017 (£14.99, Cambridge Wine) Although many of my favourite whites are made from just a single variety – and although there is a certain pleasure in knowing that a wine is 100% chardonnay or riesling – tasting the Balfour Septered Isle made me think of how many great blends there are. There are certainly advantages to blending: in any given vintage, some varieties will perform better than others. And some will always have complementary strengths and weaknesses: one may provide body, another aroma and so on, which makes them greater than the sum of their parts. That’s the case with Domaine Gayda’s superb white blend, a combination of grenache blanc, grenache gris, maccabeu, marsanne and roussanne that offers a mix of yellow plum, peach, citrus and saline zip.