Drink - Victoria Moore is transported to an Italian villa in Shepherd's Bush
What modern trends in wine drinking have most cruelly deprived us of is eccentricity. All that those overstyled blondes with their gym memberships and knock-off Prada handbags, and the exuberant IT recruitment experts with their DVD players and expense account brothels, want from a wine is for it to be slurpy and for it to have the consistency of flavour of a Bacardi Breezer.
There are plenty of stalwarts who still bang on about terroir and are vehemently set against homogenisation, but the shelves are so full of both good and bad examples of obvious wines (and I include in this category not just New World varietals, but also things such as Rioja and Chianti) that it is easy to get into a rut.
Recently, I've been drinking heaps of Italian wines and I have been completely entranced by their individuality. People say that because wines in Italy, even more than elsewhere, are made to be drunk alongside the local food, they can be hard to appreciate out of context. Often, they are also quite subtle.
I find sometimes, with Italian wines, that you have to remind your taste buds that the tastes might be a bit left-field - or you run the risk of missing the point. That's what happens when your taste buds are trained to go out and seek certain flavours, like dogs collecting a favourite stick, and are blind to anything else. I suppose that makes me just as bad as the girls who refresh their lipstick at the dinner table and on the bus.
Still, of the dozen or so wines I have picked up at various wine merchants and drunk at dinner over the past couple of weeks, there are two that I have absolutely fallen for. The first came in a batch of cheapy reds my cousin and I bought at Oddbins; we've been working our way through them with plates of pasta dripping with sage fried in butter, and bresaola topped with parmesan and rocket. It was Remole, Frescobaldi 2000 (Oddbins, £5.49), made with Sangiovese. When I sipped it, I had an Alice Through the Looking Glass moment: I actually began to feel as though I were somewhere else. On my tongue were bitter cherries and wild herbs. In my head was an Italian formal garden, with closely clipped hedges shadowed by taller trees and thyme growing in the hard mud underfoot. Something pretty strange must have happened to my cousin as well, because she started chanting hypnotically about eating alfresco in the grounds of a grand villa - until my other cousin, her brother, screamed at her to stop, because coming down and finding ourselves back in a terrace house in Shepherd's Bush on a Tuesday night in early March was starting to feel like an impossibly grim prospect.
And then what did we do but open another divine wine. For dessert, we had tiny purplish figs from Berwick Street market, raspberries a couple of summers old but none the worse for it, and a creamy cheese called Crescenza Vacchali, made from uncooked cow's milk. We opened a bottle of Anselmi San Vincenzo 2000 (Roberson, £8.50 - though it had a £2 discount when I bought it). This was, I have to say, amazing, and it would have been just as delicious with a Roquefort and pear salad.
Technically speaking, this wine is a blend of Chardonnay (just 15 per cent), Garganega and Trebbiano di Soave. It's not far off being a Soave, but has been deliberately declassified to IGT status so that the winemaker can do with it what he wants. It tastes at once delicate and rich, and very nutty. It caused Claire to resume her chanting and, transported, we all listened to her:
"I've had lunch and I've eaten just a bit too much because it was all so delicious so I've left the dinner table and gone upstairs with a glass of wine in my hand. I've got that lovely feeling of the sun being still warm on my skin and I can hear the voices of people still at the dinner table drifting up through the hall." (We're back in our Italian villa, I think.)
"I've gone upstairs to lie drowsily on the big, old wooden bed and there are crisp, white linen sheets . . ."
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