In these straitened times, you don’t have to spend a fortune on filling your wine rack for the Easter weekend. If it’s a verdant, sweet passion fruit-licked Marlborough sauvignon blanc you want, there’s a sparky cut-price bottle for £4.99 from Aldi. Or if smoked salmon is on the menu, trade up to a floral, lemony 2022 Finest Chablis Premier Cru (Tesco, £24).
Waitrose’s tender, melt-in-the-mouth Beaujolais-Villages is the perfect match for Easter Sunday’s rosy-pink roast lamb, yours for just £11. You need to pay at least £30 for a really decent Easter champagne but the absolutely delicious, superior Jean de Foigny Premier Cru Champagne from The Wine Society drops down from £24.31 to £21.83 a pop if you buy six. If that’s beyond your budget Tesco’s Crémant de Bourgogne, from the awesome Cave de Lugny, hits the spot at £15. Happy Easter.
The best fizz
Chapel Down Brut, Kent, England
12 per cent, Booths, £22, down from £30
Brilliant British bubbly at a keen price and one of my favourite home-grown champagne-method sparklers made at Chapel Down’s Tenterden GHQ. Aged on its enriching yeasty lees for two years, it’s a fruity, easy-swigging citrussy chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier citrussy sip.
Jean de Foigny Premier Cru Champagne, France
12.5 per cent, thewinesociety.com, £24.31, or 6 for £21.83 each
Don’t waste your money on cut-price supermarket champagne, buy this classy, superior premier cru instead. The latest edition is a crisp, elegant, nutty brioche and zingy lemon zest, chardonnay-led mouthful, also given a long quality-enhancing stint on its yeasty lees.
2023 Prosecco Superiore Valdobbiadene, Italy
11 per cent, Lidl , £7.49
Prosecco’s not my thing but if it’s yours, snap up this better Valdobbiadene version with a bit more fruity oomph. Serve this sweet, easy-drinking, lower-alcohol, frothy, green apple fizz ice cold to knock back some of the sugar.
Crémant de Bourgogne, Cave de Lugny, France
11.5 per cent, Tesco, £15
This bright, bouncy, black grape-dominant, champagne-method quince-tangy fizz from Burgundy gives you a lot of champagne’s charm for a lot less money. A hand-harvested blend of mostly pinot noir, with a third chardonnay and a good dollop of gamay.
The best white wines
2023 Makaraka Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, New Zealand
12 per cent, Aldi, £4.99
Tuck in this Easter weekend to the bargain Kiwi Savvy of the season. It’s a light yet verdant passion fruit-licked, traditional Marlborough sip, with the sort of sweet, sparky, grapey fruit that sauvignon blanc fans just cannot get enough of.
2024 Côté Mas Rosorange, Sud de France
13 per cent, Waitrose, £10
Just landed at Waitrose, this nifty skin and pip-fermented orange wine is just what adventurous Easter chefs need in their fridge. Apart from its pretty amber colour, Côté Mas’s orange peel and tea leaf fruit will be a whizz with everything from a spicy vegetarian dish to a punchy curry.
2023 Esprit de Crès Ricards Viognier, Pays d’Oc, France
13.5 per cent, ocado.com, £14
Midi maestro Jean-Claude Mas makes lovely viognier and this surprisingly delicate ’23, made from 22-year-old vines and aged for four months in oak barrels, is the perfect Easter aperitif. It’s a fragrant, exotic yet restrained dried peach and apricot mouthful, with a spark of spice.
2022 Finest Chablis Premier Cru, France
12.5 per cent, Tesco, £24
Push the boat out with this smoked salmon and fish pie-loving chablis. From the awesome La Chablisienne co-operative, here is a buttercup gold superior chablis that has been partially oaked, and is all limpid, floral, lemony elegance, plus a fine dusting of oak.
The best red wines
2024 Specially Selected Estevez Chilean Pinot Noir
13.5 per cent, Aldi, £6.99
Aldi’s wine buyer believes this sub-£7 pinot noir just cannot be beaten. And given this Casablanca Valley’s bright, beautiful, juicy red berry and red plum fruit, it would be hard to disagree. It’s equally happy with Easter roast lamb as it is with a lunchtime ploughman’s.
2023 No 1 Beaujolais-Villages Mommessin, France
13 per cent, Waitrose, £14
Tender, melt-in-the-mouth beaujolais is just what rosy-pink new season’s lamb needs and this is the bottle to buy. With delicious silky raspberry and red cherry fruit, it’s Beaujolais’ gamay grape, grown on pink granite soil, at its best. Vegetarian and vegan-friendly.
2017 Château Dutruch Grand Poujeaux, France
13.5 per cent, thewinesociety.com, £21
Nowt but a good claret will do for traditional Easter tastes and to find a mature, seductive, beefy cabernet sauvignon-led Moulis-en-Médoc at this price is a steal. Enjoy its lovely aged scented leather and cedar charm with beef or lamb for an April treat.
2022 Catena Alta Historic Rows Malbec, Argentina
13.5 per cent, Majestic, £37, 6 for £25 each
A tip-top malbec, made from five different plots of 70-year-old vines, by the talented and pioneering Catena family, who arrived here in 1902. With utterly delicious inky, earthy, aromatic sweet tobacco and black plum fruit, it’s an Easter treat.
