Recently, I spent a couple of days in Bordeaux in the company of my friend and colleague, Wink Lorch, along with 30 other wine educators. It was an honour to have Wink with us as she is not the world’s greatest fan of Bordeaux wines, and she had promised herself months of abstaining from trips […]
At last! An airline which caters for the wine lover – Monarch will be flying from Birmingham directly to Bordeaux from May. This is probably not earth-shattering news to many of you, but for this particular wine writer (who happens to be a Bordeaux specialist) it means a very great deal. No more stressful drives […]
What do you call a Super Tuscan-type wine from Bordeaux? Occasionally a producer may prefer to label his wine as AOC Bordeaux Blanc rather than, say, Entre-Deux-Mers but to fly so majestically in the face of the AOC hierarchy and classification systems of Bordeaux as Dourthe is doing with its wine, Essence, deserves a moniker […]
Sometimes the wine world is sceptical and cynical, distrustful and suspicious; it whinges about the climate, the press, the supermarkets, the promotions, other wine producers/appellations /regions/countries/bloggers/writers and sometimes even the consumers, the very people who allow it to make a living from wine. But to be fair it is rare and most of the time […]
In retrospect, we didn’t pick the ideal time of year to hold an English Wine Tasting. The second day of spring seemed perfect back in September when we planned it – new life, new hope springing eternal? Sadly not. As it turned out, it was a freezing evening complete with a flurry of snow, depicting […]
I’m posting these tasting notes of a Château Musar vertical I was lucky enough to be part of four years ago because of some twitter chat with some terribly geeky wine people. I suspect we were all wearing our anoraks with pride. For those unfamiliar with Château Musar, it is the most famous wine of […]
Yealands Estate in Marlborough, New Zealand is a recent producer of wine. Grapes they’ve been doing for years but would sell them to other people to make the wine. That was up until 2008 when they made their very first vintage in their brand new, and first of its kind, CarboNZeroCERT™ winery. For anyone who […]
It’s not every day you taste 100% Cabernet Franc. It’s not every day you taste 100% Cabernet Franc from three different soil types. Nor is it every day you do exactly the same with Merlot and with the wines coming from the Premier Grand Cru Classé A St Emilion, Château Cheval Blanc. It is in […]
When was the last time you bought a bottle of Sherry? Last Christmas? Christmas 1983? Never? Well, let me tell you, Sherry is back, buzzing and all the rage. It is hip and trendy and you do not need to be over 70 or a member of the WI to feel it is ok to […]
As a member of a book club which would not demean itself, publicly at least, to read and discuss the current bestsellers, we would, even so, not consider ourselves to be particularly intellectual. We discuss our books over a glass or two of bubbly for a considerably shorter amount of time than we do our […]