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03rd July 2006

Yapp Brothers’ new French wines cause sensation in Soho!

In a room overlooking the old graveyard of St Anne’s Church, which before it was bombed in WW2 occupied the space between Soho’s Wardour and Dean streets (just off Shaftesbury Avenue), Mr Jason Yapp, son of Yapp Brothers founder Robin Yapp, presented this June a fascinating selection from six of his key French wine producers. But first, as always, I spent a few moments in meditation in the now grassed over graveyard, studying the memorial stone to William Hazlitt, one of this nation’s greatest critical geniuses whom I first read as a teenager and felt the earth move (I was on an 86 bus at the time and I think it went over a pothole). Hazlitt coughed his last in 1830, of stomach cancer (living, and dying, in straightened circumstances in Soho’s Frith Street). His essays made me aware of polemical style and the dangers (evils) of ambition, power and false belief.

Perfect ideas, I would say, to sharpen the early morning mind, and so I was able to bring an unusually critical brain to the tasting the most sensational representatives of which I detail below.

Yapp Brothers can be found at Mere, Wiltshire, BA12 6DY, Tel. 01747 860423, Email: sales@yapp.co.uk and don't forget our superdeal on six similarly sensational wines, click here

J. Dumangin fils, Champagne.

Brut Grande Reserve n.v. £19.50. 16.5 points.

This exquisite bubbly unites elegance, character, subtlety and texture. It demonstrates, effortlessly, why a small producer like Dumangin can, for the right money, create a sparkling wine which is so much more layered and convincing on the palate than certain so-called grandes marques at twice the price.

By Malcom Gluck