Wine - Roger Scruton wonders if NS readers are allowed to drink wine

This column introduces the new patron of our Wine Club - the old City merchant Corney & Barrow, whose head office you will find in the former rectory of St Luke's on Old Street. In this quiet, comfortable Georgian interior, I was asked to taste 20 wines, in order to select six that might be suitable for the New Statesman reader. Here, I must make a confession. While recognising the universal power of wine to bring peace and conciliation, I have long ago drawn the conclusion that a measure of fellow feeling is also needed if the great god Bacchus is to do his irenic best. Hence, although I have got drunk with farmers, lorry drivers, dustmen and dukes, with poets, musicians, painters and priests, with readers of Playboy, Leather and Working Terrier, I cannot say I have got drunk with many readers of the New Statesman. Do they see wine as a gift of the gods, as a global threat to British drinking, as an upper-class conspiracy, as the best way to spend an evening on one's own, as the right way to celebrate with friends?

After pondering those questions over 20 bottles, I came to the conclusion - which was not so much the last step of a reasoned argument as the one thought remaining - that I must recommend to the readers what I would recommend to myself. And although my memory of the event is not as clear as I would like it to be, I confidently recall picking out six wines that would persuade people like me to place an order with Corney & Barrow. The idea that I hit on - though maybe it was suggested by the extremely pleasant, well-dressed, well-spoken and rather angelic figures, male and female, who were falling over themselves to cater for my every oenological need on that memorable day, so many details of which I seem nevertheless to have forgotten - was to choose three whites and three reds, from the bottom, middle and top of my price range (which I impertinently assume to be your price range, too), and fill up a column - half of which I have already managed - with a recommendation that will not sink to the level of winespeak. So here goes.

My first recommendation is a general one. C & B is a small, independent firm, part of no global conglomerate, indifferent to fashion, rooted in the tradition of a trade that has kept so many of our greatest writers, from Chaucer to Ruskin, in both spirits and money. Its aim is to reconcile proficiency and profit, and half its customers are private individuals like you and me. Sure, it has gone into the wine bar business. But the wine bar to which I was carried after the tasting was the only island of conversation in the inhuman landscape of the Barbican, and the people who fled there from their glass and concrete tombs shone with relief as they made it through the doorway.

But to the point. Bergerac is an under-rated appellation lying to the east of Entre-Deux-Mers. Here, the grapes and methods of the Bordelais are used to produce wines that sell for two-thirds of Bordeaux prices. C & B's white from La Combe de Grinou has a rich, spicy aroma that made it difficult (in fact, impossible) to spit the stuff out as I was told. Ditto for the Chateau de Sours Blanc 1999 - a Bordeaux for which I have a soft spot, since it is owned by Esme Johnstone, the founder of Majestic Wine. This straw-coloured wine, 60 per cent Semillon and aged in oak, has a ripe, rounded flavour that in no way detracts from its dryness. And as for the Premier Cru Rully, it fully justifies the view that Rully is the poor man's Chassagne Montrachet.

Of the red "vin de pays" from the Languedoc, I will say only: buy Languedoc now, before the appellation controlee police catch up with it. This is a craftsman's wine at a navvy's price. The Fongaban 1997 from the Cotes de Castillon is a mature claret, with a sweet aroma and a real taste of limestone, as though it had bubbled forth from a Bernini fountain. As for the agate-coloured Grand Cru St Emilion - words fail, and, to my great relief, I have run out of them.

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