Marks & Spencer Found Alicante Bouschet, Alentejo, Portugal 2021 (£8, Marks & Spencer) There is no end in sight to food and drink inflation, which means the destabilising, stressful feeling of never knowing the price of something from one week to the next is also here to stay. And when it comes to wine, it’s only going to get worse once the new duty rates kick in in August. A lot of people I talk to in the wine trade are to the say least pessimistic about how retailers will go about meeting the sort of price points shoppers have got used to, which will come down to a choice between cutting their margin or cutting corners on quality to absorb the 44p per bottle hike. In that context, regions with the knack for wines with a high quality-to-price ratio are going to be all the more popular, which is why so many retailers seem to be building up their Portuguese ranges at the moment, with wines such as M&S’s brambly, barbecue-friendly Alicante Bouschet.
Waitrose Loved & Found Trincadeira, Alentejo, Portugal 2021 (£8.99, Waitrose) The southern region of Alentejo is one of the best sources in the world for good-value, robust, richly flavoured reds. Waitrose’s offering from the region is a well-made example of the finicky trincadeira grape variety, which, going by its other name of tinta amarela, is one of the grapes used to make port further north in the Douro Valley. In this case it has a lovely ripe blackberry compote character with a subtle softening oak sheen. (It’s also, incidentally, one of a handful of Waitrose wines being bottled without a bottle-top sleeve over the cork, a move which, as well as saving an estimated half-a-tonne of waste per year, will also presumably help keep the packaging costs, and retail price, down). Staying in the Alentejo, Esporão Colheita Red 2021 (£11.50, hic-winemerchants.com) is a super-vibrant blend of five grape varieties with a really juicy herb-inflected red-and-black-fruited style that scores very high on any bang-for-buck index.
