Membership of our Wine Club is open to all members and friends of Holy Name, as well as their guests. You will be most welcome to join us.
Wine Tastings take place in the Church hall on Towers Avenue usually on a Friday evening at 7pm.
Our next tasting will be on Friday 27 November 2026.
You must book a place if you wish to attend. There is a charge of £10 per person and members take their own food/accompaniments to pair with the selected wines – examples are shared before the tasting so that you know what to choose. Usually there is a raffle for charity.
If you would like to reserve a ticket for any tasting when advertised in the Newsletter, please contact Barbara Cooper at the parish office or by email: welcome@holynamejesmond.co.uk before making payment.
The Best Wines to Drink with Spicy Food – Jane MacQuitty in The Times, 23 October
Finding wines to match spicy food and curries takes some thought — but it’s not impossible. For starters, the heat of chilli doesn’t affect the flavour of a wine served with it and garlic, onion and ginger are way more wine-friendly than you’d suppose. Things get trickier when dishes include the core Indian spices of cumin, coriander and turmeric, which pack such a powerful earthy punch, but as a rough rule, a good, off-dry, aromatic white wine works well with everything from mildly warming dishes to the fieriest curries.
Two wonderful and wonderfully cheap white wines to try include the 2025 Pierre Jaurent French Viognier (Aldi, £5.29), made exclusively from viognier and, although only a French table wine, delivering the lively, fresh yellow peach fruit you’d expect from a much fancier appellation. The other cheap-as-chips white is New Zealand’s non-vintage Kakapo (Asda, £6.50), a canny, mostly riesling-sauvignon blanc blend with a dash each of pinot noir, chardonnay, pinot gris and semillon, bursting with big, bold, spicy, exotic passionfruit pizzazz. If you’re navigating an assault course of strong, spicy flavours, there’s really no point in serving your best bottles and for me anything priced much above £12 is a waste of money.
No need to avoid red wines, though, provided they’re not oak-aged, full-bodied reds that can taste coarse and tannic with spicy food. Instead serve light, soft, fruit-forward unoaked reds, of which beaujolais is the bottle to buy. Plump for the juicy black and red gamay fruit of Maison Riveraine’s 2025 Beaujolais, yours for a tenner at Marks & Spencer. The other red grape that works with spicy fare is the Loire’s dusky cabernet franc — nab the lively, ripe, summer pudding fruit of Tesco’s 2025 Les Terrasses Saint Nicolas de Bourgueil Cabernet Franc, a £12.50 gem. Also recommended are:
2025 Beaujolais-Villages, Combe aux Jacques, Louis Jadot, France – 12.5 per cent, Asda, £10.50 down from £12.70 – A favourite, fruity beaujolais from a tip-top burgundy merchant, with masses of red and black cherry charm.
2025 Loved & Found Nero di Troia Rosé, Italy 12 per cent, Waitrose, £9.50 – Puglia’s ancient nero di troia grape has made a hot curry-loving, scrumptious, sweet, rose petal-scented pink.
2025 Specially Selected Pinot Grigio delle Venezie, Italy 11 per cent, Aldi, £6.99
Cool your throat and tongue down with this easy-drinking, pear skin-perfumed pinot grigio from Veneto.
2025 Cave de Turckheim Alsace Gewurztraminer, France 13.5 per cent, Tesco, £12 – Cave de Turckheim makes gorgeous, luscious, creamy, crystallised lychee gewurz just like this one.
Top Chablis Swaps: the best affordable alternatives
Jane McQuitty in The Times, 11 September 2026
Attention chablis drinkers. Now that even supermarket premier cru chablis is £25 a bottle and top-dog grand cru chablis at least twice that, where are you going to get your dry, crisp, steely, preserved lemon fix from? Surprisingly, the answer is from lots of different places. In a backlash from luscious, peaches and cream chardonnays and their ilk, producers are toning down the oak, alcohol and sugar to create streamlined, limpid, linear chablis taste-alikes, with elegance and attitude. Cool-climate, maritime-influenced New Zealand has long produced some wonderfully expressive, concentrated grand cru chablis-like gems. My vote goes to the award-winning Rapaura Springs Rohe Chardonnay, with its 2024 vintage a bold, verdant, hazelnut-scented, sea-breezy Awatere Valley wallop, and just 20 per cent of the blend aged in new oak. At £22.50 from Majestic, it’s a fraction of what you’d pay for a big name grand cru chablis.
If it’s the steely, lemon citrus and leafy, green apple flavour of a straight chablis that you’re after, France is the country to stick with. Tongue-tingly, lemon twist muscadet is gratifyingly close in style to chablis and less of a paint stripper experience, thank the Lord, than it was a decade ago. Time to trade up to the sixth-generation vigneron Julien Braud and an organic muscadet from his own estate, complete with its distinctive, steely-stony mineral-rich finish (see star buys).
Picpoul de Pinet, made from the ancient piquepoul blanc grape and dubbed “lip stinger” due to its mouthwateringly tart style, is the muscadet of the Midi, grown close to the Mediterranean around the Bassin de Thau lagoon. Like muscadet, picpoul is perfect with oysters and a seafood platter, but while Domaine Gaujal’s is still sea-breezy, it’s more crowd-pleasing and less bracing than muscadet (see star buys).
Don’t forget the refreshing, zippy albariño grape from northwest Spain’s Atlantic ocean-battered Galicia either. It’s riper and a tad fuller than muscadet or picpoul, with more stone fruit in the mix, but good bottles like Asda’s sparky, apricot and citrus pith-packed 2025 Exceptional Albariño (£11.75) give you a lot of bang for your buck. Of late, Italy’s contemporary, cracking whites also have chablis in their sights with their dry, herby style. Try Morrison’s 2025 The Best Verdicchio (£8.75), with its dry, punchy, saline herbaceous fruit. Or lap up the light, leafy Alpine 2024 Piccozza Alto Adige Pinot Bianco (Tesco, £12.75), aged on its yeasty lees, or sediment, like chablis and with a lovely lemon zest finish.
2025 Historoots Assyrtiko, Greece
12.5 per cent, Asda, £10.42
Crowd-pleasing yet elegant saline, samphire and lime peel-scented assyrtiko from the Peloponnese.
2024 La Val Albariño, Spain
12 per cent, Waitrose, £14, down from £18
Dive into La Val’s tasty, crowd-pleasing, preserved lemon Atlantic coast albariño from damp, green Galicia.
Quality Wines From £15 by Jane McQuitty in The Times 24 July 2026
Enjoying good, ordinary wine is one of summer’s greatest pleasures, but sometimes you want to splash out on something special. Perhaps there’s a graduation to celebrate or a stonking set of exam results. Maybe you’re about to go on holiday — or you’ve just got back and need cheering up. The good news is that you can treat yourself without spending a fortune. I’ve found some cracking supermarket steals here:
2025 Queen Côtes de Provence, France, 13 per cent, Sainsbury’s, £15, down from £18 to Aug 11
Very occasionally a celebrity rosé crops up that is worth the money and Roger Taylor, Queen’s drummer, working with the Provençal winery Les Caves du Commandeur, has made one of them. It’s a thirst-quenching, bold, ripe, red berry-licked grenache-led pink, topped up with cinsault.
2023 Catena Appellation Agrelo Cabernet Sauvignon, Argentina, 13.5 per cent, Tesco, £16
Agrelo is one of the Mendoza sub region Lujan de Cuyo’s top spots and the extra polish from the site, plus part fermentation and ageing in French oak barrels, makes for a magical cabernet sauvignon. With fine tannins and stylishly integrated oak, it’s a juicy, spiced red plum mouthful.
2022 Exceptional Côte de Beaune Villages, France 13 per cent, Asda, £18
Asda is the last place you’d expect to find a tip-top red burgundy that put the other £18 offerings here to shame. Anyone tucking into this handsome, bright, leafy, gamey pinot noir with lovely balance and vibrant fruit will have a wonderful time.
2024 Nanny Goat Pinot Noir, New Zealand, 13.5 per cent, Waitrose, £17, down from £20 until Aug 18
Remote and achingly beautiful Central Otago way down south in New Zealand’s south island is one of the world’s top spots for the pinot noir grape. See for yourself with this small French oak barrel aged and fermented, smoky, tangy, cranberry-fruited 2024.
2023 Josh Cellars Merlot, US, 13.5 per cent, Majestic, £17.50 or 6 for £14.50 each
The film Sideways gave plump, plummy, easy-drinking merlot a bad name. Too bad because Josh Cellars’ ripe, juicy, damson plum-packed edition, finished off with almost two years in French oak, is proof positive that California merlot can and does make a wonderfully summery swig.
Here are some recommendations from Will Lyons in The Times for Summer 2026 drinking :
Not every wine has to blast us with fruit. These are wines that drink best in partnership with food. Their ability to sit quietly alongside an honest bowl of pasta or a spring salad, and not overwhelm the simple flavours of the dish, shouldn’t be dismissed. This goes to the heart of Italian white wine. As we slip into summer, these subtle, delicious wines, with their pale colour, citrus kick and beautifully dry finish, are just the thing for our fridge doors. ~ James Lyons in The Times and here are three of his recommendations –
2025 Taste the Difference Pinot Grigio Trentino (12%) Sainsbury’s, £8.75 – Whistle-clean and dry, this has crisp acidity and pure notes of white apple flesh and stone fruit.
2024 Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi (12%) Waitrose, £10 – Produced on the east coast of Italy in the Marche, this is fresh and zesty, with floral aromas —a great choice for aperitifs.
2024 Exceptional Gavi di Gavi (12%) Asda, £12 – A white that’s chablis-like in style and packed with crisp, tangy flavours, this has a weighty, peachy flavour on the finish.
Love it or loathe it, New Zealand sauvignon blanc has become as much a part of our gastronomic life as takeaway lattes and chicken tikka masala. Since it burst onto our wine aisles more than 40 years ago, this pungent, grassy, springlike white has consistently topped the charts and shows no sign of abating. Last year we drank nearly 100 million bottles, more than enough for every Briton. Ask any supermarket wine buyer what their bestselling wine is and, almost ashamedly, they will invariably reply: “Still sauvignon.” I’ve never understood the embarrassment over this style because, at its best, it is zesty and vibrant with a scent of the season we’re in — ripe green fruit, cut grass and sliced green pepper. While its most famous estate, Cloudy Bay, tops £30 a bottle at Majestic, it is remarkable how many good examples can still be found at a fifth of the price. (Will Lyons, The Times). Here are two of his recommendations:
2025 Fern Bay (11%) Tesco, £5.95 – A great price for this easy-drinking sauvignon, which has springlike aromas of cut grass, gooseberry and an enjoyable lemony tang.
2024 Stich Jackson Estate (13.5%) Waitrose, £11 (down from £15) – This is a steal, with plenty of gooseberry and lime, juicy stone fruit and a crisp, satisfying saline finish.