Bordeaux

The wines of Bordeaux

Birthday dark party

Big birthday dinner

Big birthday dinner, an English evening outside  Just occasionally the English weather plays a hugely positive role in a special celebration.  For the last few weeks, we have been enjoying a warm, even hot, summer and the evening of my birthday was the last moment of this hot spell.  We planned to have the first

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Ch. Cantin

Ch. Cantin, St-Emilion

What can one expect of a bottle of Saint-Emilion Grand Cru?   Due to the rules of the appellation,  expectations should be limited as 50% of the wine is deemed to be Grand Cru.  (If you want the really classy stuff the label needs to read Premier Grand Cru Classé – or of course you need

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Two titans

Wine study has many benefits.  It leads to an accumulation of a great deal of knowledge, hopefully, accompanied by insight and understanding.  It certainly gets you to amazing places, whether we are talking about grand, architect-designed wineries or the small shed from which the precious bottles emerge. But most of all it leads to great

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IMW Claret tasting

Pouring first growths

Sometimes a picture (or two) are worth a thousand words.  At the recent Institute of Masters of Wine annual Claret tasting the ‘helpers’ all got a turn to pour on the First Growths table. In a vintage like 2009 this was a straightforward pleasure. Although massively concentrated and youthful, this year produced wines with so

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More than a hint of greatness?

The idea of the ‘second wine of an estate appears to have started in Bordeaux with its large estates and volumes of wine.  The very best grapes (hopefully from a good majority of the estate’s vineyards) will go into the grand vin leaving the producer with a problem with the remnant.  If this was put

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Blind tasting masochism?

Andover Wine Friends unusually had a fine wine supper in August … and also, atypically, indulged in a bit of blind tasting masochism.  Speaking for myself I normally enjoy the considerable challenge of blind tasting, even though it is a very artificial exercise.  This is not just for the rare moments of triumph when you

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Monte Velho

Unknown knowns

Perhaps not surprisingly in mid-August, we had a rather reduced BBC 1 – just seven wines to try to identify and, more importantly, to enjoy.  Looking back over the wines, of these seven only three were ‘should have got that’ wines. The others were impossibly difficult or just a bit odd as was one of

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Champagne

Chardonnay and Chinon … twice?

If seven people were independently to choose a bottle of quality wine from their own collections and bring them to a blind tasting what is the chance of them bringing similar wines?  That two people brought Chardonnay was perhaps not surprising, even if both examples were from the new world. But in the same tasting,

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No name, no idea?

The Overton-based blind tasting group took a new step into the dark last Tuesday.  I encouraged it to break the remaining link which can give you some clue as to the identity of the wine – the person who brought it. In the past this has led to some useful clues and some wrong deductions:

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