It’s five o’clock somewhere, and that somewhere is Eastnor Castle’s wine cellar. We’re poking around the cases of wines, pulling out bottles and blowing dust off the labels. With us is Paul Heading of Tanners Wine Merchants, here to select a few bottles to bring up to the Gothic Drawing Room.
‘The best place to drink the best champagne is Eastnor Castle,’ says Paul, pulling out a bottle of bubbles and adding it to our selection.
For more than 30 years, Eastnor has worked with Tanners to curate its fine wine lists. Founded in 1872 – just 50 years after Eastnor was built – the Shrewsbury-based merchant remains family-run and proudly local. Its head office is still in the same town – ‘a lovely, black-and-white, half-timbered building’, as Paul describes it. Like Eastnor, it is a heritage family business built on long-held relationships and impeccable taste.
‘We have some of the finest wines that you can get your hands on,’ says Paul. ‘Some of these are very rare wines. They're often only open to allocation, which means only certain people can buy them – you can't just buy them off shelves in regular shops.’
Through Tanners’ reputation with leading domaines and châteaux, we’re able to offer overnight guests at Eastnor access to these hard-to-source bottles. The current wine list reads like a rollcall of French greats – champagne, bordeaux, burgundy.
‘We've got a lovely Château Batailley at the moment from Pauillac,’ says Paul. ‘And we have a volnay premier cru, which is rather nice with game dishes.’
They’re wines that fit the setting: sipping screw-top rosé wouldn’t feel right beneath Pugin’s gilded ceiling.
‘Fine wines really lend themselves to being drunk in a place like this,’ says Paul, gesturing around at the tapestries and velvet in the Gothic Drawing Room. ‘The architecture, silverware and paintings all call for the finest food, finest service – and therefore, the finest wines.’
After all, every historic house party deserves a few legendary bottles.