When I consider all the feedback I’ve received since chairing the Wine Working Group, ninety percent of it has concerned the price of wine in the Club – the repeated message being that it’s expensive. The other ten percent, in sharp contrast, has been a call for more fine French wines on the list.

For the focus of this article, I’d like to concentrate on the former – the issue of cost.

The first point I’d like to make is that I do not set the margins applied by the Club on the drinks it sells. And neither do I get involved in price negotiations with suppliers – the job of buying falls to our excellent F&B Team, while the margins are set by those in finance. The Wine Working Group’s role is to select the best possible wines for the members – which we do by ‘blind-tasting’ samples, sent to us, at no cost to the Club, by its suppliers.

When it comes to the efforts of the Wine Working Group, time and emphasis is greatest on the entry-point of our offer – the cheapest and best-selling wines at the Club.

With that in mind, the first tasting of 2024 was a review of our least expensive white and red to see if we could find something better at the price. And I’m satisfied to say that after an extensive tasting, we found that the best drops were our existing wines – proving that we had done a good job of choosing them in the first place. This means, and I hope it’s welcome news, that we will continue with Les Mougeottes – a Sauvignon-dominant blend from Gascony – as our unofficial ‘Club White’, and Terra Maison Sinnae – a Grenache-Carignan-Syrah mix from the southern Rhône – as the ‘Club Red’.

Called Le Tuffeau, our new bargain pink is a poached salmon coloured Grenache-Syrah from the Languedoc

Where there will be change is with our entry-level rosé – called La Lande. This was not chosen by the Wine Working Group and, I’m pleased to report, will be changed for a similarly inexpensive but – in my view – superior pink wine. Called Le Tuffeau, our new bargain pink is a poached salmon-coloured Grenache-Syrah from the Languedoc. So, it benefits from the same grape varieties and Mediterranean climate as neighbouring Provence – if not the cachet. It’s made by a first-rate winemaking cooperative called Les Vignobles Foncalieu, and I hope you like it.

Aside from announcing this mix of continuity and change, I want to use this month’s report to stress that the Wine Working Group is not spending its time tasting rarefied, fine wines. Rather, our focus is on making sure the fast-moving and most affordable wines at Hurlingham are as good as possible – and the best of their types. I would also like to emphasise that I’m sympathetic to those who would like to see the cost of drinking at the Club come down, but while I can work on improving the quality of what we serve, how it’s priced is not within my control. And if it were, I’m afraid to say that if I dropped the margins on booze, the cost of something else would go up – most probably subscriptions!

PATRICK SCHMITT, CHAIR, WINE WORKING GROUP