Wine of the Week

(by peter & susie)

We’d like to commend to you the Piggy Bank range, produced by the fine people at Guy Anderson Wines, which has just launched in Waitrose (as well as Ocado and one wine in Tesco.com in September).

It’s a great concept.

For every bottle you buy (at the eminently reasonable price of £7.99), 50p gets set aside for charity.

When the piggy bank is full (ie at £10,000), the funds get split between three charities. The fund currently stands at £4,766.*

And that’s where the fun bit comes in. You can vote for your choice of charity either on your mobile or on their Facebook page. By logging on, you can also find out more about the wines and winemakers – who include Giorgio Flessati (Chile), Norrel Robertson MW (Spain) and Theirry Boudinaud (France).

The bottles all have QR codes on them, together with minimalist design. The labels thus act more like a portal, or an invitation, than a spade full of spurious information with which wine lovers’ heads are all too often battered.

The three charieites are Back Up (helping people after spinal chord injury), JDRF (funding research to find a cure for Type 1 diabetes) and Tusk (conservation and community development in Africa).

All of this seems like a very imaginative, not to mention altruistic, way of harnessing the power of social media – which has many potential applications for wine, but which hasn’t really yet come into its own.

As for the wines, in our view the Chilean range is the most successful, together with a very gluggable (and grown up) southern French rosé. Our favourite was the following:

Piggy Bank Sauvignon Blanc 2011, Elqui, 13.5% (£7.99, Waitrose, Ocado) – punchy, tangy, invigorating style of Sauvignon. Mouth-watering flavours of ripe citrus, tinned peas and tomato leaf. Zesty, crunchy and with a touch of spice. Works well with food – it went down very well with our spicy salmon-and-pepper couscous. 6/10

*Postscript (21 Aug 12): we’ve just learnt that the first Piggy Bank has been filled, with JDRF getting £5,076, Back-up £4490 and Tusk £434. Three new charities are now up on the Facebook page. Go Piggy Bank!