October was a strange month because I managed a bout of Covid, which sort of curtailed my drinking for part of the month. Thankfully I recovered in time for a trip to Nepal but it does mean you will be a little short-changed in the Recent Wines department with just seven bottles in one part. Just as well you don’t pay for this! Anyway, we still have seven great wines here from the usual diversity of locations.

I’m very happy to start off with an Australian Cabernet Franc, as I am managing to source fewer Aussie natural wines these days. We follow this with a very interesting Swiss Chasselas, a Moravian Malvasia from Czechia, a first appearance of an excellent Armenian red, a regular appearance of a Bugey-Cerdon (giving me yet another opportunity to bang on a can for Bugey), a Torrette from Aosta and, bringing up the rear, an Ortega from Kent. Only seven wines, but seven different countries.

Cabernet Franc 2021, Tom Shobbrook (Flaxman Valley, South Australia)

If I’m drinking at Winemakers Club in London I will always leave with a bottle or two, and quite frequently I will grab a bottle of Tom’s wine when there’s some on the shelf. This now well-established natural wine maker used to farm at Seppeltsfield, but he has now downsized to just a couple of hectares in the Flaxman Valley (technically within the Eden Valley region) with further land planted to fruit and nut trees. The vines are at 540 masl on sandy loam over yellow/orange clay with rose quartz.

Flaxman, and Eden Valley in general, are at higher altitude than the Barossa and a touch wetter, cooler and greener, producing wines with perhaps greater finesse than the Barossa stereotype. This 2021 is the second release of the Shobbrook Flaxman Cabernet Franc.

This vintage yielded tiny berries of concentrated fruit. Both viticulture and vinification were “natural” with no-intervention, including no added sulphites. The result is nothing if not inky red, a dark and concentrated bramble-fruited wine, super-vibrant and still showing a tiny bit of tannin to add texture. Maybe I should mention the bouquet? The wine’s floral fragrance is simply off the scale. Superb. I cannot get enough of Tom’s wines and I’ve drunk this particular cuvée three times this year, either on Farringdon Street or in this case at home.

If Winemakers Club still has some it will retail just over £30, but you may be out of luck until they get some more. The photo might be a teaser for my next article.

L’Arène 2022, Matthias Orsett (Valais, Switzerland)

Matthias Orsett is an exciting young vigneron based in Fully, and with more vines at Bex, in the extreme west of the Valais, close to the border with Vaud, and not far from where the Rhône enters Lac Léman. His vines, currently a mere single hectare, are on slopes situated between 450 and 880 masl. Matthias is very particular as to how he works, so everything is done by hand, with zero interventions in the vines or in the cellar (including no added sulphites, indigenous yeasts for fermentation and very evidently no fining, nor filtration).

I’d never come across Matthias before, but he trained with Emmanuelle Houillon and Piere Overnoy in Pupillin no less, before starting out on his own in 2021. He makes six different wines from individual plots, all with a single varietal focus, and this skin-contact Chasselas comes from vines on gneiss at 760 masl at Fully. The fruit was macerated for six days without stems in fibreglass. You probably realise like me that a skin-contact Chasselas is quite unusual.

The result is a lovely wine, delicate, soft and fresh but low in acids. It has a very appealing gentle texture and mouthfeel, but it’s worth standing the bottle for a day (or more) because the sediment is plentiful. The fruit tends towards soft dessert apple. A good word to describe this is “nuanced”. Matthias’s sense of adventure, treating Chasselas differently to the Swiss norm, has definitely yielded a good result.

Imported by Ancestral Wines, I picked this up in Spry Wine in Central Edinburgh. If you are in Switzerland, you might bag one for around €24.

Malvasia 2019, Dva Duby (Moravia, Czechia)

Jiri Sebela grows grapes on rather special volcanic soils underpinned by granodiorite at Dolní Kounice in Moravia. The vines are mature at over 40 years old, and they produce a range of very clearly terroir wines of increasingly high quality.

Malvasia here is actually a synonym for Frühroter Veltliner, a variety which does especially well on this volcanic terroir. Jiri suggests that it does even better if not treated with synthetic chemicals, and Dva Duby is very much part of the exciting Czech natural wine movement.

We have a very fresh bouquet, a mix of floral with a little spice. The palate has breadth. It’s not a wine to over chill. Apple and lemon flavours are to the fore, with secondary savoury ginger, aniseed and fennel. These are all wrapped up in a nice salinity. It’s drinking superbly right now, benefitting from some bottle age at five years old. That savoury quality with its saltiness lingers long on the palate making it very food-friendly (we drank it with Indian food, though not too spicy so it didn’t overpower the wine).

Another excellent bottle from Basket Press Wines for £27.

Karasi Areni Noir 2021, Zorah Wines (Vayotz Dzor, Armenia)

A bit of a fanfare please, this is my first wine from Armenia. Vayotz Dzor is that country’s most prestigious wine region. Armenia is situated between Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran and has a small population of around three million people. Although it has a developing wine industry and a little over 17,000 hectares under vine, it certainly has the history to back it up with claims to being the cradle of viticulture. The Areni Cave is one of the oldest sources for evidence of winemaking in the world.

Zorah Estate is at the forefront of the revival of Armenian wine. It is described as an Italian-Armenian venture, established in the hills in Southeast Armenia, and they claim to be the first to demonstrate the high potential of the autochthonous Areni Noir variety. This is to be applauded because not only does Areni Noir have potential, but many of the other new producers in the country are favouring the same old international varieties. Like Georgia, whose successes Armenia would clearly like to emulate, I would suggest that autocthones are the way to go..

Six hectares of vines were planted by Zorik Gharibian in the Yeghegnadzor Valley in 2006. Zorik made his millions with a successful fashion business in Italy, after having been sent to school there to escape the Iranian Revolution. They are ungrafted (on their own, not American, rootstocks) and grown at an altitude of 1,370 masl, which gives very cool nights leading to an extended growing season. Harvest is usually at the end of October.

The Italian part of the partnership comes in the form of well-known consultant Alberto Antonini, overseeing winemaking, who, because of the conditions (dry, sunny, low vigour stony soils) says it is one of the most exciting projects he’s been involved with.

The wine is made in karasi, the Armenian word for amphora. The result here is very distinctive with both red and dark fruits to the fore on nose and palate. The grapes have fairly thick skins and so you get good extraction as they macerate in the clay. Another facet of the winemaking is the real freshness which is a highlight, and in this case, elegance, which balances this 14% abv wine. I think it shows great promise for the grape variety, and so much more interesting than yet another Cabernet Sauvignon. More honest to its roots and culture too.

This bottle was brought back for me by a friend who is involved in a university project in Armenia, but it can be found in several wine shops in the UK, including Cambridge Wine Merchants, Hay Wines, Highbury Vintners and Hedonism (to mention just four). Price varies from £30 to £36. Well worth seeking out.

Bugey Cerdon NV, Domaine Philippe Balivet (Bugey, France)

After the long entry above I shall keep this one short, because any regular reader will be fed up with how often I mention this gently sparkling, low alcohol (7% abv), semi-sweet wine, and if you are a first-time visitor, you can easily search this site for more background information.

Philippe Balivet probably did more than anyone to keep Cerdon, a sub-appellation of Bugey and old Ancestral Method wine, alive and kicking. Cécile and Vincent Balivet now head up the domaine at Mérignat in Bugey’s northern sector, close to the Lyon-to-Geneva Autoroute.

Cerdon should appeal to the eye as well as nose and palate. It’s a beautiful shade of deep pink, frothy, and with a bouquet that lifts the spirit with sweet, fragrant floral and strawberry fruit. The sweetness of the unfermented sugars is very much balanced by the vibrant fruit acidity, and if anything, this is extremely refreshing. You really do feel that it would be little effort to drink a whole bottle, though it’s more fun to share.

Whilst some Cerdon once contained a little Poulsard, this is sadly becoming a thing of the past, and this version is indeed 100% Gamay. On Beaujolais Nouveau Day, much as I like to indulge, I cannot think of a better wine to fulfil the joyous function that rendition of Gamay is intended to afford. You’d have to be a serious wine snob to turn your nose up at this. It’s one of the most regular sparkling wines we open at home, especially as it is relatively inexpensive at around £24.

Vine Trail imports. This bottle was from Cork & Cask (Edinburgh).

Torrette 2020, Lo Triolet (Valle D’Aosta, Italy)

Back in July I included another Torrette, from Elio Ottin. This one is made by Mario Martin at Introd in the western part of the valley. Torrette is an expression of the Petit Rouge variety, and whilst that name might not inspire confidence, such negative suppositions would be misplaced. In the hands of a good winemaker, it can be well worth exploring.

Mario farms five hectares on the south side of the river which forms the valley in Italy’s smallest and most northerly wine region, namely the Dora Baltea. These are real mountain vineyards, up the slopes towards the Gran Paradiso National Park, and, at up to 800 masl, high above the pollution of the A5 Autostrada which exits the Mont Blanc Tunnel just a few kilometres to the west.

This has a bouquet of plums and dark fruit with ripe but grainy tannins, giving a bit of bite, crunch and texture. It weighs in at 14% alcohol, though that’s deceptive as it doesn’t seem at all heavy. That said, the whole package is made for warming winter food, including those dishes with a bit of a kick.

Personally, with no disrespect to the Ottin wine mentioned above, this is the one I’d go for (just my subjective taste). I’m a fan of Aosta wine. The only reason we don’t see many Aostan wines in the UK is simply because production is so small and little is exported anywhere. This is especially good value and a great opportunity to try one.

Imported by Boutinot, so probably quite well distributed, my bottle cost a reasonable £23.50 from Solent Cellar (delivered). I see that Londoners can also get it from Theatre of Wine.

Note that I have used the Italian DOC name, Val D’Aosta, but in a region where the French language has equal footing, many producers choose to use the permitted alternative, Vallée D’Aoste.

Ortega 2023, Westwell Wines (Kent, England)

Here is a simple, uncomplicated classic from one of my favourite three or four English producers. However, by “simple” and “uncomplicated” I am not doing down the wine, because the essence of this wine is purity, and its purpose, to provide joy, is well met.

Westwell sits beneath the Pilgrim’s Way on the North Downs. Free-draining flinty chalk soils provide excellent terroir which gives all of the Westwell wines a lovely salinity and minerality. Adrian Pike makes beautiful, expressive, natural wines here, with truly beautiful labels designed and drawn by his very talented wife, Galia.

This is the wine known as “Ortega Classic” (there’s also a skin contact version). It is fermented in stainless steel at low temperature, the result having a strongly mineral bouquet with peach and floral notes rising above. The flavour I get on the palate is mandarin orange with hints of pink grapefruit contrasting with, at the other end of the spectrum, a little bit of honey.

This is a light wine coming in at 10.5% abv, and it’s almost dainty, by which I mean that its lightness is very much an asset. It also has a dainty price, £19.95. From Cork & Cask (Edinburgh) via Westwell’s agent, Uncharted Wines.