Latest news with #WineTour
Telegraph
25-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
I tried 52 Lidl wines. These are the best bottles to buy this summer
Lidl's wine range consists of a permanent core offering of some 150 different wines, layered with a carousel of Wine Tour wines that change each month. Typically, each Wine Tour will consist of around 16 different wines although not all of these are ranged to every store. If you are pitching up to a Lidl branch (which number over 980) with no recommendations or personal favourites to hand, my advice is to head straight for the Wine Tour bottles. The set arriving in store this month (late June) is relatively weak (sod's law, just as I write about them), but I usually find these offer a higher hit rate than the core range. Naturally there are exceptions, but wines in the core range are often quite sweet, and/or subjected to an oak treatment (sometimes from chips or staves – the narrow planks of wood used to construct barrels – I'd guess, from tasting them) that gives them a gloopy, confected vanilla taste. However, the Wine Tour range usually have more varietal personality and taste, well, more like true wines. Skip to: Lidl's best core wines – sparkling Lidl's best core wines – rosés Lidl's best core wines – whites Lidl's best core wines – reds Lidl's best Wine Tour wines How I tasted Why you can trust us Another tip is to look for the scores given by Master of Wine Richard Bampfield who works for Lidl as a consultant. You can see some of these in store and some online. Bampfield gave good scores to two of the incoming (from June 26) Wine Tour wines that were not available for me to taste when I wrote this: the Cuvée de Brieu Sauvignon Blanc (£8.49) and the Cuvée de Brieu Syrah (also £8.49). I have been tasting Lidl's wines and looking at Richard Bampfield's scores and listening to his recommendations from the range for years, and have come to view him as a principled guide whose judgment can be trusted. 'Richard is a safeguard for us,' according to Lidl's PR Hannah Steel. 'He scores wines and if they are not performing well we might go back to the supplier.' Bampfield says Lidl put him under no pressure to give good scores; note that if a wine scores poorly, the score is not used. Lidl's budget rival Aldi has a couple of wines that have achieved cult status amongst middle-class shoppers (the Crémant du Jura and the Veuve Monsigny Champagne). Lidl doesn't quite have any equivalents, although its Comte de Senneval Champagne (£13.99) does, deservedly, have a strong following.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Gary Barlow reveals surprise link to Andi Peters
It turns out that Gary Barlow and Andi Peters go way back. On Friday, 11 April's edition of Lorraine, the award-winning musician joined presenter Ria Hebden for a quick chat about the new series of Wine Tour, which whisked him off Down Under this time around. It was during their conversation that Barlow revealed Peters, who accompanied him in Australia, was one of his "oldest friends." Barlow told Hebden: "Us Brits love Australia, but I think to get one level beneath the sort of tourism and get into the wine that country makes, it's off the scale." "I imagine when you're going through your black book picking people to be in the show, I bet everybody wants to be a part of it," pointed out the Lorraine star. "So we've got Sophie Ellis-Bextor; our own Andi Peters is in this as well! How did he wangle that?" Read more: Robbie Williams admits new film Better Man 'throws people under the bus' Robbie Williams 'knew' Gary Barlow 'didn't like or trust' him Gary Barlow admits he's still angry about his daughter's death That's when guest Barlow called back to a period of struggle for his boyband Take That, which was originally made up of himself, Robbie Williams, Mark Owen, Howard Donald and Jason Orange. "D'ya know, Andi's one of my oldest friends," he said. "When no-one else would put us on TV, this is like 1990, Andi would make any excuse to have us in The Broom Cupboard." Other celebrity guests set to appear on Wine Tour include Dannii Minogue, Tim Minchin and Ronan Keating. Launched in 1985 with Phillip Schofield as host, The Broom Cupboard was a CBBC programme where its stars would introduce segments from a tiny control desk dubbed the 'Broom Cupboard'. Four years into the show's run, Peters and Zoe Ball replaced Schofield and Andy Crane. His time in the studio also saw him working alongside iconic puppets Edd the Duck and Gordon the Gopher. Peters left in 1993, and once spoke about some of the bold wardrobe choices he made on there. "I always thought Andy Crane dressed badly, and Phillip too, so I thought I'd try some different combinations. I wore waistcoats a lot, and lots of tartan. And I was one of the people who originated wearing a short sleeve T-shirt over a long sleeve one," he claimed. "It kind of became a trademark. Some days I even wore a tie! I quite enjoyed changing things and making it different." Lorraine airs weekdays at 9am on ITV1 and ITVX, while Gary Barlow's Wine Tour: Australia premieres today at 2pm on the same channel.
