Italian wine

Champagne scholarship 2013

I am delighted and rather surprised to be awarded the WSET/Champagne Board’s 2013 Champagne scholarship as part of my WSET Diploma studies.  Part of the surprise was that I did not know that the Wine and Spirit Education Trust gave scholarships, so I was a long way back when the scholarship secretary rang me to

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Acid and balance

Guestblogger: Rob The final BBC1 of the year gave us some good wines and some interesting wines, and an interesting study in the importance of balance and the role played by acidity. Strangely no one spotted the first white. Attractive pale gold colour, strong yeasty, wet wool and lanolin nose, which carried through to a

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Classic, regional, new world?

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).  

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Tim Atkin: on Toscana’s Sangiovese

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

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Savoury Sangiovese

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:

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Entry level grand cru?

The term ‘entry level’ is a very useful marketing and quality phrase, indicating some real quality, affordable price (a relative term itself) and the enticement of something outstanding at a much higher price.  It gets around the problem neatly which you have in Italian where the normal term for entry level wine is ‘base’ wine

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Mission impossible

One of the quirky charms of Overton’s ‘Bring a Bottle Club’ is the practice – usually followed by one of the regular members – of bringing a joker bottle to be tasted blind, like all the wine.  There are not many other places where you could taste a 10-year old English rosé, a Maltese red

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Two Chianti Rufina estates

Since a visit to Chianti Rufina last summer, I miss no chance to taste or talk about these wines.  I was therefore delighted that the Wine Society offered a mixed tasting case which was the perfect starting point for a Fine Wine supper.  The wines were from two socially contrasting estates, the workmanlike Grati (also

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