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
Following last month’s highly successful tasting on Bordeaux varieties in search of sunshine, this month’s fine wine supper focused on the Rhône varieties. In fact, this turned out to be too big a subject matter, but we had such great wines from the northern Rhône that it became a matter of ‘home and away’. The
Rhône varieties – home and away Read More »
Some wine regions or countries seem to breed complexity. Italy for non-specialists is somewhat forbidding once you get beyond Prosecco, Soave, Chianti and Barolo; modern Spain is getting more complicated as ever more new areas come to international attention. Most of us don’t try very hard with Eastern Europe or Greece. But of the major
Triumphant Portugal Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »