An excellent value for money Bordeaux: Nick’s Wednesday Night Sausage Wine

“On a recent trip to Porto, I was reminded how much I dislike airports. They really can be grim soulless places. Once you’ve negotiated the countless mini roundabouts on the way to the long stay car park and then paid a fortune to park there, you have the joy of taking your belt off, your shoes off, making sure your liquids are in the right size bag, trying to keep your trousers up and then getting your belt and shoes back on before the competitive yet mind-numbing wait at the gate. As a consequence, I’ve begun to set my travel horizons much closer to home. So it was, with this in mind, I began idly flicking through The Pig Hotel book for some inspiration. The Pig Hotels are an attractive small collection of smart hotels in the south of England founded by Robin Hutson, the chap who co-founded the inspirational Hotel du Vin chain along with the late, great Gerard Basset MW.

During the course of my research, I came across a section of the book that had food and wine matches with one of the dishes being sausages and mash and the pairing wine being a claret. A-ha! I thought, here we have someone who is a Wednesday Night Sausage Wine disciple. Sadly, Robin missed the point in rather spectacular style. The claret he had was a 1970 Chateau Latour provided by a pal of his (now that really is a friend!). This wine is worth arguably around £500 per bottle compared to our sausage wine guiding price of under fifteen pounds. Talk about a north-south divide! The “levelling-up” strategy clearly has a fair bit to go. His principle though is sound and so our Wednesday night Sausage Wine this week is also a claret, albeit from a less stratospheric price bracket; Chateau Beaubourg from the Cotes du Bourg in Bordeaux weighing in at just £10.99.

A good everyday drinking claret is a useful wine to have and should become a staple of your wine cellar, however, the wines of Bordeaux can cost the earth as we saw above. The famous names of the “Left bank” such as Latour, Margaux, Lafite etc. and those of the “Right bank” such as Petrus, Le Pin and Angelus can command astronomical sums and are highly sought after. In recent years though there has been a marked improvement in the quality of wines from less publicised areas that don’t have the same superstar status as the glamorous areas such as St. Emilion, the Haut Medoc and Pomerol. One such area is the Cotes du Bourg. Bourg is quietly located 12 miles north west of Bordeaux city on the Dordogne river where it meets the Garonne river and combines to become the mighty Gironde estuary from which we derive the “Left bank” and “Right bank” soubriquets. The soil in the Cotes du Bourg is rich and diverse and wine has been made here for a long time, the Romans planted vines as early as the 2nd century AD. The huge improvements in wine making of the past decade or so though arguably make the recent wines of this area the best in its long history.

Chateau Beaubourg is a lovely, easy drinking medium bodied wine with warm blackberry, vanilla and cinnamon notes. The grape varieties are classic Bordeaux; Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and a touch of Malbec all working together in attractive harmony to produce a really satisfying good value wine. Naturally enough we paired our wine with sausages. We had the excellent Farnsworth Pork sausages with mash and a rich red onion gravy – delicious and a good combo with the Chateau Beaubourg.

Sometimes we can be a bit dazzled by the glamour of the big-name wines and there is no doubt they can be truly special wines, but they can carry truly special price tags as well. To speculate on pound for pound value is ultimately impossible to do as there can be so many different aspects brought to bear on this but what we can say is that Chateau Beaubourg at just £10.99 is excellent value for money.  We can also say that Robin Hutson was spot on with his food pairing – now if we can get him to set his sights just a touch lower on the wine front, we may have a convert to the Wednesday Night Sausage Wine Club!”

Santé

Nick