Raise a glass in parting to three great winemakers

Breaky Bottom Cuvée Marraine Pooks Traditional Method Brut, England 2016 (£48, Corney & Barrow)

I loved this magnificent, rapier-fine English sparkling wine the moment I first tried it, at a tasting put on by the six members of the Bunch, a loose association of amiably old-school wine merchants, in London last month. But in the two weeks between tasting the 100% seyval blanc and putting fingers to keyboard to write about it, my scribbled tasting note from the event had taken on a poignant quality. The wine is the work of the late Peter Hall, who died aged 82 on 2 October at his home on the South Downs. Hall, as the reams of posthumous tributes online have made gratifyingly clear, was a decidedly quirky but much-loved figure who was one of the first – if not the first – to make genuinely world-beating English wine. ‘Thrilling,’ my note said, ‘better than ever.’

Ruinart Blanc de Blancs, Champagne, France NV (£80, Berry Bros & Rudd)

If you want to know more about the delightfully eccentric Peter Hall and his long-running love affair with, among other things, jazz and seyval blanc, I’d recommend looking up online his interview with Margaret Rand on World of Fine Wine, and his Q&A with Graham Holter on Wine Merchant Mag. Hall’s long-lived wines will be with us for some time to come, of course, as will those of another widely admired figure from the sparkling wine world, Champagne Ruinart cellar master Frédéric Panaïotis, who died in a diving accident earlier this year. As with Hall’s wine, drinking Panaïotis’s immaculate, supremely stylish 100% chardonnay fizz is a bittersweet experience for those of us who met this charismatic man. But it is also perhaps the best way of paying him tribute.

Bourgueil Pied de la Butte, Jacky Blot, Loire, France 2024 (£14.99, The Wine Society)

I sometimes wonder if wine’s vintage-to-vintage rhythms and its obsession with ageing and maturity (of vines and bottles) makes it a good vehicle for coming to terms with mortality and the passing of time. There is always a kind of emotional charge that comes with drinking an old wine, especially if that wine was one that you’d put aside yourself years or decades ago. Most winemakers I know are a little obsessed with legacy, too, not just of the wines they make, but the fate of their vineyards when they’re no longer around. Not all will have a trusted next generation to take over, but the great Loire winemaker Jacky Blot most certainly did. Under his son Jean-Phillipe the wines, which include this unoaked, chalk-textured, pure-red-fruited cabernet franc red, have kept their place among the Loire’s finest.