6 bottles of affordable luxury red wines that are perfect for winter

The Honest Grapes red luxury case is a box of delights. Let’s start with the Castello Romitorio chianti Colli Senesi 2019. Produced from 100 per cent sangiovese grapes grown on the hills surrounding Siena (the Colli Senesi), it has that inimitable and effusive mouthfeel of ripe red fruits and berries along with a subtle earthiness and notes of spice and herbs.

Ageing in oak for only 10 months also gives it a brightness and a freshness that’s immediately apparent. Let’s leave the last word to the 17th -century Italian biologist and poet Francesco Redi who said a good chianti, which this is, “enlivens the heart and frees it painlessly from all fatigue and sadness”.

Also from Italy – this time from the northeast – comes a wine with a heritage that’s said to date back to the Ancient Greeks.

The La Giaretta amarone della valpolicella classico 2017 is the product of a historic system that sees the best grapes of each harvest picked and then left to dry over the autumn and early winter months before being pressed in January.

Aged in small oak barrels and subsequently in the bottle, you’re left with a wine with inbuilt lushness and concentrated black-fruit aromas. Intense doesn’t quite cover it. To enjoy it fully, make sure the bottle’s opened some hours before you intend to sample it.

There’s no need to cry over the Mazzola sangvineto lacrima di Morro d’Alba superiore DOC 2016. The lacrima (Italian for tears) grape with its lachrymose-like droplets had almost disappeared before its rediscovery some years back.

Now produced almost entirely in the Morro d’Alba commune in Marche, using a lengthy and complex fermentation method, this is a wine that is different from any other Italian wine you’ve tasted.

The first thing that hits you is the aroma, deep and powerful, followed by a cascade of fresh and fervent fruit flavours and an inherent minerality that lift this wine into the ‘something special’ category.

A word of warning – if you’re looking for an everyday tipple or something simple to have with your supper, this wine isn’t for you. However, if it’s a special occasion, a birthday, an anniversary or a time when you really want to push the boat out, the 2019 Clos I Terrasses laurel will fit the bill nicely.

With critical ratings for the 2018 vintage going through the roof, this Spanish red is a rather serious and special wine that shouldn’t disappoint – and it doesn’t. It hits you with huge, rich and complex dark and hedgerow fruit flavours allied to supple tannins and hints of spice.

Persuasive and distinguished, with a 15 per cent alcohol rating that doesn’t intrude, it’s the wine that will make a special day even more memorable.

Melbourne-born but French-based Jane Eyre-Renard has been impressing those in the know since the late 1990s, earning the title of winemaker of the year along the way. Her 2020 Jane Eyre côtes de nuits villages shows why she is held in such acclaim.

A product of one of the world’s finest vineyard regions, this smooth pinot noir from two parcels of land in Comblanchien at the southern end of the region is graceful and refined with beautifully textured notes of cassis and cherry, subtle tannins and hints of spice and pepper.

The Botteotto cabernet sauvignon 2019 is a product of the Valle Reale vineyards nestled between the mountains in the Italian region of Abruzzo, where three national parks intersect. It’s a region that’s also home to the Italian wolf, the Apennine brown bear and the chamois.

Wildlife aside, the Pizzolo family have produced a lively and vibrant wine that’s equally at home in the wilds as it is at the dinner table. Ruby red and superbly balanced, it has oodles of character, with brash and buoyant forest-fruit flavours allied to hints of smoke and pepper and muted tannins. If you want brightness, this has it in spades.