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Telegraph
10-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
I tasted 70 wines from Sainsbury's – here are the best (and worst)
Sainsbury's own-label Taste the Difference (TTD) range has long formed the most interesting part of the supermarket's wine aisles, regularly turning out some star buys. This season, the TTD selection has been expanded to 141 wines, a 6 per cent increase on last year, according to the retailer. Within this set sits the Discovery Collection – wines 'designed to encourage customers to try something different from their usual choices'. In other words, expect lesser-known grapes and/or surprising bottles from regions more associated with other styles. They are limited-edition releases so when they're gone, they're gone. Six new TTD Discovery Collection bottles launch on May 18 and include an Argentine fizz and a New Zealand albariño, plus two of my recommended buys (see below). Good for Sainsbury's for pushing new styles (as, admittedly, most of the other major retailers are also doing). Its spring/summer press tasting got off to an impressive start with a particularly appealing set of light whites (as well as those tipped below, the Italian whites and French sauvignon blancs were almost all winners). I wasn't keen on many of the New World whites, with notable exceptions, and found the fizz, rosé and European reds rather hit and miss too. The New World reds fared better with a flurry of excellent bottles from Chile, Australia and South Africa and there was a decent showing of Portuguese reds. Do watch out for the sporadic '25 per cent off six or more bottles' offers which pop up with little notice throughout the year, so you can pounce on your favourites as soon as they land. How we tested Susy Atkins tasted 70 Sainsbury's own-label and branded wines, including some new wines, at the retailer's spring/summer press tasting in late April 2025. Why you can trust us Susy is an award-winning wine and drinks writer, presenter and broadcaster who started her career at the Which? Wine Guide. She is a long-standing correspondent for The Telegraph. When not writing, she is an experienced judge and panel chair at UK wine competitions. The best wines to try Sparkling
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Unearthing some special wines at Aldi
Unearthed Gemischter Satz, Niederösterreich, Austria 2024 (£8.99, Aldi) With changes in duty adding an extra uncomfortable squeeze to the inflationary pressures that have affected all grocery products, wine retailers are finding it ever more difficult to source good wine at affordable prices. Rare is the wine of character and taste at less than £8, or even £10, these days, and I can count the number of genuinely appealing £5 bottles I've tasted in the past year on one hand. Retailers are trying to get around this issue by trawling away from classic, established areas and presenting whatever random assortment of cheaper offbeat wines they have found on the bulk market as 'hidden gems': hence the proliferation of own-labels with names on a theme of Found (Waitrose) Loved & Found (M&S) and Discovery Collection (Sainsbury's). Despite the 'virtue of necessity' feel, the wines are frequently among the more interesting supermarket bottles, none more so than Aldi's latest find in its 'Unearthed' line: a racy, tangy, springtime-floral aromatic Austrian white that punches some way above its £8.99 price tag. Buenas Vides Argentinian Organic Malbec, Uco Valley, Argentina 2024 (£7.99, Aldi) Austria was also the source for one of my favourite new Aldi red wines, a satisfyingly spicy, blackberry-juicy, refreshing and chillable red Specially Selected Austrian Zweigelt, Niederösterreich 2024 (£8.99). It was all the more appealing for being properly dry – as is so often the case when I taste supermarket wine ranges these days, far too many reds at Aldi's recent tasting came with an unwelcome dose of sugar. Red wines that avoided the sweetness trap and that offer the same kind of bargain hunter's buzz I feel when I buy a jar of Aldi's palm oil-free peanut butter included what I think is Aldi's best-value wine: the authentically savoury, supple Chassaux et Fils Côtes du Rhône 2023 (£5.29); and a pair of malbecs from Argentina's Uco Valley: both the Buenas Vides Uco Valley Malbec 2024 (£6.29) and Buenes Vides Organic are worth the price of admission, although the extra violet-aromatic lift and succulent plum and cherry of the Organic really stand out when you taste them back to back. Castellore Organico Prosecco, Veneto, Italy NV (£6.99, Aldi) On the white side of the Aldi wine aisle, I thought Baron Amarillo Rueda Verdejo 2024 (£5.99) was a nicely tropical-tangy, bright and limey example of the verdejo variety from the Rueda region in Castilla y León, which is typically, punchily aromatic in a way that will appeal to drinkers of the passion-fruit-and-guava end of the New Zealand sauvignon blanc spectrum. I also liked Specially Selected Costières de Nîmes Blanc 2024 (£8.99), a languid fleshy peachy take on the classic white Rhône Valley blend. Perhaps Aldi's strongest suit, however, is fizz: the retailer has a knack of finding good-value sparklig bottles in a variety of styles, with highlights right now ranging from the reliably biscuity flavours of bestseller Veuve Monsigny Champagne Brut NV (£14.99) to the invigorating apple crisp Specially Selected Crémant de Loire NV (£8.99) and the pristine, gently pear-scented Organico Prosecco.
Telegraph
19-03-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Stuck in a wine rut? These are the best new grapes to try
Do you ever stretch the comfort zone of your regular wine choices with a stroll into the wilds of say, white wine from Uruguay, or lambrusco – the sparkling wine of Emilia-Romagna? It used to be up to sommeliers and supermarkets to coax us out of our wine ruts. Sommeliers combine a deep knowledge of their list with individualised recommendations that might go something like this: 'You mentioned that you like dry whites, have you ever tried Ribolla Gialla? It's a grape found in the mountains of north-east Italy and over the border in Slovenia and it's very fresh, often with a faint tinge of pithy bitterness and tannin.' Then you could try Borgo Conventi Ribolla Gialla 2023 Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy (12%, Booths, £14.25), which tastes of lemon curd, pears and hay. Supermarkets, meanwhile, use ranging to confer trust. Back in the dark ages of 2009, or thereabouts, Tesco put a grape called Piquepoul into its finest livery in the hope of encouraging shoppers to switch from pinot grigio, a move so successful it transformed the fortunes of the small, southern French region in which it's grown and turned the grape into a staple. More recently, ranges like M&S Found, Sainsbury's Discovery Collection and Waitrose Loved & Found have turned obscure grapes into heroes. In 2025, of course, we live in the era of the algorithm and 'an increasing desire for personalisation,' as Wine Society CEO Steve Finlan puts it. We want to know not just that Bulgarian pinot noir is a winner, but that it's right for us. And we act on those algorithmic nudges. When personalised recommendations, derived from AI data-mining, were added to The Wine Society's website, there was a 'double digit increase in click-throughs.' Such methods create a more nuanced recommendation landscape than averaged star ratings. 'Some wines can be quite polarising,' says Matt Smith, buying director of Naked Wines, which has been using personalised recommendations based mainly on customer ratings, for some time. 'For instance, dry sherry scores very low with some customers but very high with others and that group also has a high repurchase rate. I like to keep wines like that in the range, it's part of the rich tapestry.' An interesting feature of the Naked algorithm is that it takes into account categories wine buyers have assigned to each wine, such as Smooth Red or Crisp White. Taking the taste of the wine into account in this way brings the system closer to acting like a sommelier. The US-based company Preferabli says it can push this all the way, with software that uses AI to act 'like a human expert'. Last summer I attended an AI conference at which its CEO Pam Dillon explained that tasting experts codify up to 800 different characteristics of a drink to build its profile in the software. She told the somewhat divided room: 'Our goal was nothing less than to taste through the entire world of wine and spirits one bottle at a time.' A system designed by Preferabli has just gone into use at M&S, online and in 20 food halls.
