Central London has been fortunate with new wine-related venues recently. Alongside the tremendous success of Terroirs, near Charing Cross, Bocca di lupo, a splendid restaurant with excellent Italian food and wine, is to be found in a side street near Piccadilly Circus. With both venues booking is pretty much essential – which tells you how
Bocca di lupo – a friendly wolf Read More »
Tasting in situ is a dangerous business. Wines can taste so much better when you are in the winery, the sun is shining or if the proprietor is particularly persuasive. So, it is good to have the chance to re-taste wines in a more neutral setting, with a bit of distance and with the comparison
Campania in the glass in England Read More »
Nicholas Belfrage MW, The Finest Wines of Tuscany and Central Italy. A regional and village guide to the best wines and their producers, Fine Wine Editions, Aurum Press, London, 2009 Nicholas Belfrage is a well-known figure on the English wine scene, a wine trader and author of the best general introduction to Italian wine. An
Wine, people, place: Nicholas Belfrage’s and Jon Wyand’s Tuscany Read More »
These few pictures are some highlights from a visit in August 2007 with the British Institute’s Tuscan summer school. It was a great day out! Thank you to Margaret Leon, an American living in Umbria, for the photos. More information: on Serraiola, see the full write up on the page on the Tuscan Maremma. on
Serraiola – picture essay Read More »
Taking a break from writing the pages for my website on the Tuscan Maremma, it’s time to feature two Maremman wines, available in the UK and models of good (drinking) practice. The first is Podere 414’s Morellino di Scansano 2007 (Wine Society, £11.50). A little translation is required here: Podere is simply a farm or
Old style Chianti probably conjures up wicker baskets (in Italian – fiasco, which seems a little harsh) and thin, sharp wines. In truth much of the cheap, commercial wines of previous decades was pretty awful. Today’s wines are vastly better – quality wine making, vibrant if still sharp fruit, well judged use of oak-ageing in the
Being an orderly sort of soul, in general, I much prefer to go to a themed tasting, rather than a broad sweep across regions. Comparison is a very powerful tool but I would rather limit the field and try to learn a bit more about an area or grower in depth. Occasionally you get the
Zind-Humbrecht at Coe Vintners Read More »
After Brunello with Banfi, Barbaresco and much more with Angelo Gaja … where does one start? This was simply one of the greatest experiences you can have in Italian or world wine, laid on by Decanter magazine as part of its Fine Wine Encounter. But it was really two related experiences, with an underlying connection:
As you drive from the south towards the high plateau on which the hill town of Montalcino sits in Southern Tuscany, you can’t really miss the presence of Banfi. In a mixed landscape of farming, woods, hunting land and of course, vineyards, once you cross the River Orcia you see first an enormous factory of
Castello Banfi – a modern Brunello Read More »
Can we talk in a meaningful way about the difference in taste between wines which cost €70 and €35? And why are there differences in taste? The previous post (Talking about wine) throws some light on the general problem of communicating about tastes. In this one, let’s focus on two types of speech about wine.
Two types of wine talk and two Super Tuscans Read More »
