I tried 52 Lidl wines. These are the best bottles to buy this summer
Lidl's wine range consists of a permanent core offering of some 150 different wines, layered with a carousel of Wine Tour wines that change each month. Typically, each Wine Tour will consist of around 16 different wines although not all of these are ranged to every store.
If you are pitching up to a Lidl branch (which number over 980) with no recommendations or personal favourites to hand, my advice is to head straight for the Wine Tour bottles.
The set arriving in store this month (late June) is relatively weak (sod's law, just as I write about them), but I usually find these offer a higher hit rate than the core range. Naturally there are exceptions, but wines in the core range are often quite sweet, and/or subjected to an oak treatment (sometimes from chips or staves – the narrow planks of wood used to construct barrels – I'd guess, from tasting them) that gives them a gloopy, confected vanilla taste. However, the Wine Tour range usually have more varietal personality and taste, well, more like true wines.
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Lidl's best core wines – sparkling
Lidl's best core wines – rosés
Lidl's best core wines – whites
Lidl's best core wines – reds
Lidl's best Wine Tour wines
How I tasted
Why you can trust us
Another tip is to look for the scores given by Master of Wine Richard Bampfield who works for Lidl as a consultant. You can see some of these in store and some online. Bampfield gave good scores to two of the incoming (from June 26) Wine Tour wines that were not available for me to taste when I wrote this: the Cuvée de Brieu Sauvignon Blanc (£8.49) and the Cuvée de Brieu Syrah (also £8.49). I have been tasting Lidl's wines and looking at Richard Bampfield's scores and listening to his recommendations from the range for years, and have come to view him as a principled guide whose judgment can be trusted. 'Richard is a safeguard for us,' according to Lidl's PR Hannah Steel. 'He scores wines and if they are not performing well we might go back to the supplier.' Bampfield says Lidl put him under no pressure to give good scores; note that if a wine scores poorly, the score is not used.
Lidl's budget rival Aldi has a couple of wines that have achieved cult status amongst middle-class shoppers (the Crémant du Jura and the Veuve Monsigny Champagne). Lidl doesn't quite have any equivalents, although its Comte de Senneval Champagne (£13.99) does, deservedly, have a strong following.
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