We’re Sainsbury’s people at Miss Bouquet HQ. I thought it was a Southern thing but Mr Bouquet (who proudly hails from the North) is a devout follower as well. Protest as much as you like but we all know that Waitrose is for special occasions and for one-day-when-we’re-rich. Tesco on the other hand is a funny one because try as we might it’s just never done it for us. You either like it or you don’t. Looking at their twitter feed the other day it’s clear that there are in fact a LOT of people that are in the latter camp because either it’s a magnet for freebie chasers or @Tesco is a feeding ground for all those trolls we hear about and by ‘eck they don’t shy away from saying what they’ve got wrong!
Which is one reason we wanted to give a big shout out to the Tesco Finest wine bar pop-up for actually getting something right. They trialled a supermarket first: creating a cool space to taste their wines in without feeling like a cheapskate (let’s not forget it’s a supermarket own brand) or a wine snob (but it is still wine..).
So we marched into Wardour street on the pop-up’s penultimate day of opening and were greeted with another first: free antipasti and an eclectic flight of whites and left with a warm and fuzzy friday glow, an extremely reasonable bill and a money off voucher at the end of it. It doesn’t get much finer than that. The bad news is that the pop-up is now closed. Booooo. The good news is they are planning to do it again and of course (most of ) the wines that we tasted are available in store. Hurrah!
We had the flight of crisp, zingy whites. Tesco Finest Soave (£7) was rich and creamy so rather mismatched to the genre but a great match to the manchego. The Tesco Finest Torrontes was textbook: tinned lychees in a glass, which is nicer than it might sound but no longer available on the Tesco website! The Albariño (£7) was the least fine: blowsy and floral, which is just as it should be but just like Tesco may not be everybody’s favourite.
