The best of the new Blind Spot wines from The Wine Society

The Wine Society has had a range of exclusive Australian wines called Blind Spot which are made for them by winemaker Mac Forbes for a while.

The idea originally was to offer a range that sat somewhere between the cheap and cheerful wines you found in a supermarket and the country’s more expensive top end wines. They were perfectly decent but not wildly exciting.

The current Australia buyer Freddy Bulmer has introduced four new wines however that are really interesting, although one, the Garganega which is made from the same variety that goes into Soave, seems a bit pricey at £11.95. I’d be happy to pay that for the cheerful brambly Dolcetto, the only 2020 of the line-up, which comes from the Adelaide HIlls and which I think would make the perfect wine for a Friday night pizza but it’s the other two wines that really rock my boat.

The Blind Spot syrah which is very much a syrah rather than a shiraz comes from vineyards in the Grampians that are owned by the Chapoutier family and is just deliciously spicy and peppery. Bulmer believes it’s got ageing potential but I doubt you could hold onto it long enough to verify that.

And my top choice is the simply sensational Pinot Meunier, a grape that is generally used to make champagne but here makes a deeply aromatic wine which it’s hard to decide whether it’s a light red or a rosé. It would be good as an aperitif, as Freddy suggests, but I love the thought of drinking it with mezze or right through a middle eastern meal. A rosé for winter drinking basically and all the more welcome for that.

Both the syrah and the pinot meunier are £12.95 and I suspect will sell fast.