Andover Wine Friends’ November tasting had a mainly Californian theme. It was supposed to be an entirely Californian evening but, like a proper road trip, there was a bit of a diversion, of which more shortly. The aims were simply: to illustrate the main styles of this state which accounts for 90% of the wine
California road trip Read More »
November’s Bring a Bottle Club was a somewhat random affair – two French classics (Sancerre and a Loire Cabernet Franc), some good regionally important wines (Friulano from Friuli, Grenache from Roussillon, Treixadura from Ribeiro, a Xarel-lo/ Riesling blend from Penedes) and a brace of New World wines (Californian Merlot, White Bordeaux blend from the Cape).
Classic, regional, new world? Read More »
What happens when you start with a classic Bordeaux red wine, deconstruct its component grape varieties via new world examples and then put them all back together again? That was the idea which underlay November’s Fine Wine Supper. Take a fine Claret and use it as a benchmark, taste wine made mainly from single varietals
Bordeaux grapes in search of sunshine Read More »
Gussalli Beretta, based in the northern Italian city of Brescia, is a name much better known to collectors of high quality firearms than to wine lovers. But that may be about to change. Under the name of Gussalli Beretta family wineries and distributed in the UK by Antonio Tomassini from Wine and Food Promotions, they
Gussalli Beretta: from guns to wine Read More »
The blind tasting Bring a Bottle Club has had one successful evening of Alsatian wines this year already and many us had also been to a Josmeyer tasting of great quality. So it was perhaps tempting fate to have a third go at this subject – and so it proved. While it was, as usual,
Taste, suffer, triumph Read More »
Martin Hudson MW’s presentation of fortified wines, some of them sweet, was organised by pairings – two Sherry styles, two Madeiras, two Ports, two Vin Doux Naturels and a lonely Rutherglen Muscat at the end. In this way, with some elegant economy, he was able to illustrate the remarkable diversity of the world of fortified
Fortified wines: two by two Read More »
October’s BBC (Bring a Bottle Club) was a straightforward delight – a series of pretty much consistently good to very good wines, some teasers when tasted blind, but an excellent general standard. And not too many complete jokers … Not many thought this sparkling wine was Champagne but plumped for a bottle-fermented sparkling wine perhaps
October excellence Read More »
Tim Atkin MW’s theme at Vini Italiani’s Sangiovese evening was ‘embrace the diversity, even the difficulty of Italian wine’. The list of indigenous varieties might seem endless, the DOCs may be ever-expanding, the rules complex and seeming designed to provoke rebellion in a naturally individualistic people, but it’s worth it. Rather like the temperamental Sangiovese
Tim Atkin: on Toscana’s Sangiovese Read More »
Saturday’s fine wine supper featured Staete Landt, the high-quality Marlborough, New Zealand, estate, run by a Dutch couple, Ruud Maasdam and Dorien Vermaas. The name is the one given to this land by the Dutch explorer Tasman in 1642 – though apparently he did not actually land on it and it was Dutch geographers who
Staete Landt–European style in NZ? Read More »
September’s BBC2 was a postponed celebration of a birthday – and the custom is that the birthday girl gets to choose the theme which in this case was Sangiovese. The likelihood, therefore, was there would be quite a lot of Tuscan, or at least, central Italian wines. The questions for a blind tasting might be:
Savoury Sangiovese Read More »