"Wine only comes into its own when there is company"

Wine is all about shared experiences and camaraderie, writes Raymond Blake, as he recalls the wonderful wines he enjoyed this year

- Raymond Blake

For me, wine is about conviviality and good fellowship. It is about sharing and enjoying communal pleasure. A glass drunk alone can be enjoyable but the pleasure is one-dimensional. Wine only comes into its own when there is company. Then the enjoyment and satisfaction is fully threedimensional, adding conversation and kinship to the restricted joy of solitary consumption. Wine’s great gift to mankind is the ability to bring people of widely differing backgrounds and beliefs together in harmony. And, because its production tells a story of people and place and time, I believe it sits above all other alcoholic beverages in this respect. I count myself lucky to have shared the wines below with generous, like-minded friends over the course of the last 12 months or so.

I often play a little game, asking well-versed wine lovers to rattle off the names of the world’s great wine styles, a request that always prompts a roll call of the ‘usual suspects’: Red Bordeaux, Mosel Riesling, Burgundy of both colours, Barolo,

Napa Valley Cabernet, Sauternes, Northern Rhône Syrah in the shape of Hermitage and Côte Rôtie… Seldom, if ever, is dry white Bordeaux mentioned. Yet, when prompted, everybody readily agrees that it is worthy of the highest approbation, which leads me to label it as the wine world’s most overlooked, though not underrated, style. Why this should be so, years after I first posited this paradox, remains a mystery to me. Baldly stated, there can be no arguing that at their best the dry white wines of the Graves region, specifically Pessac-Léognan, compare with the world’s best.