Refreshing summery red wines

Terrazze della Luna Teroldego Rotaliano, Trentino, Italy 2018 (from £7.49, allaboutwine.co.uk; kwoff.co.uk; greatgrog.co.uk) During the summer – or any time I’m in the mood for fresher reds that I can chill down a bit – I tend to go for my favourite wines of this genre: Beaujolais and the crunchy cabernet francs of the Loire. As delicious as these wines are, it always feel a bit unimaginative not to broaden my horizons a bit, shake off the habitual and remind myself that there are very many other styles and places that are producing reds that work when the mercury is rising. Alpine northern Italy is full of wines that fit this bill. The Alto-Adige has a surprisingly nice line in pinot noir (pinot nero), and the local darkly berried lagrien (look out for examples of both from Hofstätter and Elena Walch). But for an out-and-out lipsmacking, tomato pasta-matching, summer-drinking bargain, it’s hard to look further than the snappy berry succulence of Trentino co-op Cavit’s take on local variety teroldego rotaliano.

Pittnauer St Laurent Dorflagen, Burgenland, Austria 2016 (£18.95, philglas-swiggot.com) Neighbouring Austria is perhaps still best known for its scintillating whites from riesling and grüner veltliner. But the country’s reds can be no less impressive – and no less suited to sipping on a balmy evening. Local grape variety zweigelt is behind a lot of my favourite Austrian summer reds: a wine such as Feiler-Artinger Zweigelt Kalssik, Burgenland 2017 (£17.50, bottleapostle.com) has an unhibited just-picked cherry-berry sappy-juiciness with just the slightest touch of peppery spice and is so fresh, light (12.5% abv), almost racy. Ideally I’d have it with a plate of smoked Austrian sausage, but it’s the kind of thing you can drink, chilled down, for refreshment purposes alone. So too is another fine Burgenland red, this time made from another local variety, st laurent, by biodynamic winemakers Gerhard and Brigitte Pittnauer, filled with tangy raspberry and redcurrant and a little seasoning of saltiness that hits all kinds of spots.

Peixe da Estrada, Galicia, Spain 2017 (£20, noblegreenwines.co.uk) There’s an increasingly exciting source of refreshing reds to be found in Spain, too, not least in the country’s Atlantic-cooled (and watered) far northwestern corner, in the province of Galicia. Mencía is the variety responsible for many of these arrestingly distinctive wines, with particularly exciting results emerging from the spectacular, rugged Ribeira Sacra region, home of graceful wines such as Silice Viticultores Mencía 2018 (£19, thewinesociety.com), a 12.5% bottle with the stylish, slinky texture of good pinot noir, but with its own distinctive red-berried prettiness. No less impressive – and, by all accounts (I’ve never been) from no less impressive or spectacular vineyards at between 650m and 800m above sea-level – is Peixes da Estrada. A blend of at least eight local varieties both red (mencía among them) and white, it has a kind of high-pitched clarity, is full of energy, and tastes of blackcurrant and redcurrant compote with a tartly refreshing snap on the finish.

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