We work with a number of wine suppliers within the industry and we spoke to Tarquin de Burgh, from de Burgh Wine Merchants. We have a great working relationship with de Burgh and they have a good understanding of how things work here at The Torridon. We wanted to hear about one of their wine selections.

“We are often asked ‘how do we find our wines for our portfolio?’ A lot of the time, it is simply luck, the wine finds us more often than not.

The romantic and preferred way is to go to the region of origin and spend a week immersing oneself in their food, culture and wine in order to meet and get under the skin of the wine makers and really understand who’s making interesting things to drink. On these occasions we tell our wives it’s a tough existence, extremely hard work and incredibly important!

The less elegant way is to request samples to be sent direct to us for tasting at the office. Very un-romantic but super cost effective. Very occasionally a few bottles arrive at the office, out of the blue, with a note, saying please try me. When this happens and the wine is a hit, it really is a super moment.

Other times however, we find a wine by complete fluke, which conveniently brings me to our lovely albarino, made by terra asorei.

I stumbled across these wines purely by accident during a stop over on our way to holiday in France.

We had flown into Barcelona and decided to stay in Begur at the rather unusual Hotel Aiguaclara for some tapas before we hopped over to France.

Dinner was in full flow, and in typical wine merchant style, my wife and I (both wine merchants) were faffing over the choice on offer in the wine list. We noticed our neighbours had a particularly attractive looking bottle on ice at their table and requested similar. Job done! The Albarino was so delicious that…

We phoned the resort the following morning, asked if we could become their UK agent and here we are!

Rich, juicy, fresh apricots in a glass. The fact that the Rias Baixas is totally on the opposite side of Spain and Rioja Blanco is normally the white tipple of choice in Begur is neither here or there! We believe to this day this wine found us.”

Luck indeed!

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