Writing about the wines of Piemonte, Italy and France
The wines of Chablis, northern France
Alex Maltman, Vineyards, Rocks, and Soils. the wine lover’s guide to geology, Oxford, 2018. My question is: can this book begin to clear up the mineral muddle that wine commentators have got into? In John Szabo MS’ otherwise excellent book, Volcanic Wines (2016), there is a particularly alarming example of poor logic. It comes when
In November 2007 Janet and I set up Andover Wine Friends with our very first public tasting at The Lights, Andover. Five years on we had a happy party at which members all brought a bottle to share. For our tenth, we held a dinner for 26 in our house and a tasting on the
Andover Wine Friends 10th anniversary tasting and dinner Read More »
Wine writers and drinkers have been exercised by what is referred to as premature oxidation in white Burgundy since the 1996 vintage. This is a slightly vague condition in which high quality wines from top village, Premier Cru and Grand Cru sites fail to live up to their promise, being either obviously oxidised or just
How does white Burgundy age? Read More »
Thanks to the generosity of Maison Albert Bichot, Beaune, a group of wine students have the chance to taste several flights of white Burgundy. What is special about the range of wine is that the producer is the same and within the two main flights the wines are from the same vintages. So we have
Albert Bichot’s white Burgundy Read More »
Andover Wine Friends’ fine wine supper for February 2014 set itself a modest challenge. When trios of related wines are tasted without knowing their identities, can a mixed group of tasters tell which is the best quality? and, further, did the group know what the wines were? The answers were, on the whole, encouraging! What
Rising to the quality challenge Read More »
It’s tough being Chardonnay – on the one hand, you are so popular that you have become a girl’s name; on the other hand, people have tired of you and have moved on to Pinot Grigio and even Moscato. But once you get into quality wines, the real appeal of the grape to the drinker
Chameleon Chardonnay Read More »
Our regular blind tasting group teetered between concentrated attention on some fine, puzzling wines and outright hilarity. Prizes for the best sayings of the evening must go to Rob who described typical north European Rieslings as having ‘psychopathic flintiness’ and to Stafford who, among the reportable bot mots, claimed that a pint of real ale
Blind tasting – a laugh a minute? Read More »
Caviste’s summer wines have been shown at a number of tastings, most memorably in the presence of a crested eagle – a Bateleur no less – at the Hawk Conservancy. The star of the show had to be woken for his early evening snooze in order to make his celebrity appearance but when he did
Nobody would now be surprised if you drank Australian Riesling with Thai food or a robust southern French red with Bolognese sauce. But what about Chablis with its cool climate imprint and association with fine French cuisine? I can well remember a casual conversation with a wine merchant complaining about the latest in a long
Fish and chips … and a glass of Chablis? Read More »
The Bring a Bottle Club was in a rather different format for its late January tasting, or rather a refinement of its format. We already have ‘BBC1’ which is ‘bring an interesting/good bottle of any sort’, while ‘BBC2’ has a theme, on this occasion, white Burgundy. The refinement was that one of our number offered