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| Christmas is coming…… but no one knows yet exactly what it will be like this year – whether we’ll be celebrating in solitary households, in bubbles, or with a broader gathering. However things pan out, we hope that you’ll consider imbibing some locally-sourced English and Welsh wine over the festive period. We’ve carefully curated three cases for Christmas Day drinking, the Select (£90), Premium (£145, pictured above) and Deluxe (£450) cases, and of course, there are over 200 wines, plus several spirits, beers and ciders on our website for you to pick and choose from.As a reminder, we’ve teamed up with the wonderful Cambridge Cheese Company to offer a fabulously flexible wine and cheese gift option. With wax wrapped cheese that guarantees freshness and longevity, you can choose either a vintage Cheddar truckle or a Lancashire bomb, or both, paired with any wine from our shop (although we list our recommended pairings for your consideration). If your purchase is a gift, we can include a message in the parcel – simply add the message into the Order Notes section at checkout. We continue to taste many new wines each month as part of our commitment to you to keep our range of English and Welsh wines the broadest and best that you will find anywhere. This month we have an eclectic selection of newcomers, including a complex white with several years bottle ageing, a top-drawer English Sparkling Wine from one of our favourite vineyards, the country’s best Bacchus (if competition awards are anything to go by), and an absolutely miraculous mead (OK, we know it’s not a wine, but it’s too special not to feature here) – read more about them below. If you’re yet to decide on the replacement for the traditional Christmas party, or are still searching for gifts for staff or customers, Grape Britannia can produce bespoke online tasting or gifting packages for you – find out more below. If you’re buying for others, or yourself, we hope that you enjoy browsing our selection of exceptional English and Welsh wines to find the perfect bottle or bottles. Best wishes Matt Co-Founder, Grape Britannia NEW WINES (AND A MEAD!)  Litmus Wines Element 20 2014 (£18.99) The 2014 growing season was sensational. Perfect flowering conditions followed by August rains and a warm September led to early ripening of a good crop in the coolness of early October. The 2014 Element 20 consists of 35% Chardonnay, 35% Pinot Gris and 30% Pinot Blanc. Fermented separately in one to five-year-old French oak barriques the wine was left on full lees for eleven months before bottling. Complex, mature, elegant and stylish, this silky, rich, full bodied wine has a balancing acidity that will ensure that even further complexity is achieved in years to follow, if you can bear to leave the bottle undrunk. John Worontschak is the chief wine maker, who has developed the Litmus wines range; he has been making English wine since 1988. The Litmus range is a culmination of his experience and the wines are designed to highlight the very best of cool climate English style wines, promoting balance, complexity and length of flavour. Buy here »  Woodchester Valley Reserve Cuvée NV (£29.99) A glorious sparkling wine with a classical composition of 49% Pinot Noir, 36% Chardonnay and 15% Pinot Meunier – the proportions favoured by some of the greatest names in champagne. Extremely elegant and fine, aging on lees for over two years has given a profound depth and intensity, yet it’s also deliciously appealing and very, very sippable. The nose is alive with buttery biscuits, honeysuckle and citrus fruit while the palate is gloriously rich and pure with toasty croissant, honey and nuts. As it unfolds in the mouth, hints of smoke, rhubarb and orange zest emerge along with delightfully complex notes of fig and toffee apple. Creamy textured and absolutely seamless with a zesty freshness leading to a long, mouthwatering finish. Wonderful on its own and also a brilliant match for a wide range of foods, try it with a crumbly farmhouse cheese, chicken mousse or… our favourite match, Fish & Chips!Buy here »  Chapel Down Kit’s Coty Bacchus 2018 (£25.00) Chapel Down make five different wines from the Bacchus grape (it used to be six – still bugging them to bring back the Orange Bacchus!), and Kit’s Coty Bacchus is the top of the range. This very ripe style of Bacchus has lychee, peach, and ripe melon aromas with background oak influence. The palate is rich and generous with more tropical fruit flavours and a long, crisp finish. Kit’s Coty vineyard is a 95 acre vineyard on the North Downs of Kent. The southerly aspect ensures the vines capture the sunshine all year long while the warm, free draining chalk soils provide the perfect terroir for producing well balanced, intensely flavoured fruit. Buy here » Gosnells Lee Bridge Road Mead (£24.99) As you might have guessed, when it comes to alcoholic beverages, wine is first and foremost in our thoughts. That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy a cracking G&T, a complex Belgian-style beer, or… the finest fermented honey products. Gosnells are reinventing the mead category and we were blown away by this particular bottle. It’s a limited edition mead from North London which has floral and complex aromas with rounded sweet Williams pear flavours and a developed tannin structure. One of the lightest meads we have tried, and fruitiest, but wonderfully complex and very moreish.Buy here »ENTERTAINING & GIFTS FOR STAFF & CUSTOMERS  The normal staff Christmas parties are probably off the cards this year. If you are still casting around for ways to entertain your team (or would like to present your boss with an ace idea!), a hosted online English wine tasting could be the perfect solution. And if you are looking for Christmas gifts for staff or customers, we can provide bespoke packages. Our online tastings are typically three bottle affairs, but we are very flexible as to the line-up and if you want more, we can of course provide it! Most Thursdays and Fridays in December are now booked, but Monday to Wednesday slots still have decent availability. Just drop us an email – matt@grapebritannia.co.uk – to find out what we can do for you. |