Jefford on Monday

The more vineyards you visit, the more quickly you become inured to their attractions. Yes, that summer lunch under the old cedar was lovely, but the cold of winter is a different matter.

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What’s a decade? One-fifth of a working lifetime, in most cases: a significant span. I’m now home after the tenth year of sitting in judgment as a panel chair for the Decanter World Wine Awards – for Regional France on this occasion. What have I learned?

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It was gold in colour, though a little deeper than usual: the colour of my grandmother’s wedding ring. The aromas rolled out like a slow wave at the end of a great ocean: sinuous, seamless, grand. There was wax, incense, menthol, crushed walnut, cheese nestled in straw; there were summer fruits left out on an old stone wall until they had very nearly dried rigid, with just a little acid-spangled fructose left in them. The wine was banquet-like, but not a waterfall of flavour, as Montrachet is. This was, more literally, a knife-and-fork enterprise; the tannins fell softly, like wet snow. It was chewy but gentle, weighty yet lifted, gristly, quietly garrulous.

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I live in the Languedoc, but I try not to write about it too often: I don’t want to bore you all. It’s been just six weeks since the last home post, but a vertical tasting has left me enraptured, and I can’t contain myself. Sorry.

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Empty bottles lined the windows, greening the grey Tbilisi afternoon; I sat next to Metropolitan Davit of Alaverdi in the gathering gloom. We stared together at a deeply coloured white wine in our glasses. It had been made at his monastery.

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