Feeling thirsty? Help is at hand. On Monday, March 26th Lidl’s Spring Wine Tour will hit the shelves. Good wines, great prices and a few that particularly caught my eye…… Champagne Bissinger Brut Rosé – £14.99 – Relatively dry for a rosé, well balanced and surprisingly complex – clearly some development in bottle. I’ll […]
Dispelling a few myths…. Argentina is and always has been a red wine country, yes? Wrong. As recently as the 1980’s, 90% of the country’s wine was white. Argentina is all about Malbec, of course…… Wrong. Under 20% of the country’s current grape plantings are Malbec. Argentina is a hot country so […]
Here’s a handy (virtual) booklet of great value wines as selected by members of the Association of Wine Educators (AWE) – wines they use in their classes and tastings as well as buy to drink and enjoy themselves at home. I’m a long-standing member and current Honorary Secretary of AWE and this li’l brochure is […]
This was a tasting to live long in the memory. All the wines were tasted blind and included in each flight a wine from 1982, 1985, 1988 and 1989 though not necessarily in that order. The Grand Cru Classé wines certainly stood out, and generally the better the cru, the better the wine, which really […]
A recent family holiday to Crete provided a perfect opportunity to improve my knowledge of a part of the wine world that was totally new to me. Apparently phylloxera only reached Crete in the 1970’s so there has been considerable replanting since, much of it with international grapes. Not to put too fine a point […]
The annual VDP* Grosses Gewäches** tasting in Wiesbaden is a remarkable event – an unrivalled opportunity to try the latest vintage of Germany’s top dry wines, accompanied by levels of organisation and service that could probably only be encountered in Germany. This year, we were tasting whites from the 2016 vintage and reds from 2015 […]
Viña Sol Torres 2016 Sainsbury’s £6.00 (from £7) widely available. A firm favourite of mine and many others over the summer months. It’s a blend of Spanish grapes, Parellada and Garnacha Blanca grown in Catalunya in the north east around Barcelona, and available all over Spain and much of the UK, too. Once upon a […]
The next Lidl Wine Cellar will be instore from Thursday, July 27th. All the Hungarian wines are worth trying, of course, which you can check out here but these are a few of my top suggestions: Dry Whites Pouilly-Fumé Les Grandes Chaumes – £9.99 – This well-known Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire is normally much more […]
WM Morrisons Pinot Gris 2013 Morrisons £8.25 Pinot Grigio with attitude! The bottle might suggest this is German but actually it’s from Alsace in northern France. They do Pinot Gris really well there. Made by one of France’s most respected co-operatives, Cave de Turckheim, this has enticing honeysuckle aromas, hints of honey, too. It’s […]
This week’s recommendations come from Tesco where there’s a very useful 25% off when you buy 6 bottles. Always a good time to buy to pop a few in the cellar/larder/garage for later. These wines suit sunny weather, though are just delicious and necessary when it’s not so favourable, and one in particular should definitely […]