There's a wintry chill in the air in the Cape, and winemakers are taking a well-earned break, hoping to reap the rewards of their hard work during previous vintages at the many competitions underway, both locally and abroad.
Read more...A few years ago, writers commenting on Australian wine always referred to the largest producers - such as Hardys, Rosemount and Penfold's - when discussing the country's export marketing strategy.
Read more...Real food and fine wines' may be the boast of gastropubs up and down the land, but few will deliver as fully on the promise as The House.
Read more...You will recall what happened, that final twist in the porcine tail, in Orwell's Animal Farm? The pigs ended up becoming the spitting image of the oppressive humans the rest of the animals sacrificed everything to resist. A similar irony is at work in the New World of wine.
Read more...I read with great interest your excellent supplement on New Zealand; it is always good to have a critical view from abroad. I would, however, like to take issue with Stephen Skelton MW in his article An English MW in New Zealand' (p.14), which lays several claims that are essentially incorrect.
I've just about finished reading the new wine books that filled my Christmas stocking, but once again it was a funny little book already in my possession, first published in 1954, that afforded me the most amusement over the holidays.
In his foreword to this, the third (1966) edition of C de Bosdari's Wines of the Cape, PO Sauer describes it as the first book on South African wines which will help our wine-drinkers to understand what they are drinking, how it is made and why it is good'. (It is also good for us, claims the author: Wine-drinkers, as a rule, are very healthy people, the sort of people who shamelessly turn up to bury their teetotal friends')
French producers are not happy about the preliminary agreement just reached between the EU and the Americans concerning wine labelling.
The fact that the Wine Institute in California likes it should certainly suggest that the EU has reached an unequal compromise on the subject of the use of appellation names
by the Americans.
John Hoskins MW is the MW student's MW, thanks to his ability as a communicator and taster. The admonishment is less stinging, and the encouragement more uplifting, because of his evident integrity, informed opinion and passion, and sound priorities. The same qualities shine through in his list at The Old Bridge Hotel in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire (where he also
has three inns), making him the wine lover's restaurateur as well.
Just when you thought it was safe to open a magazine without coming across yet another bloody list of the greatest whatevers of all-time, ever, I'd like to introduce you to the fourth Langton's Classification of Australian Wine.
Read more...It was only yesterday, it seems, that Super-Tuscans were flying high, write Nicolas Belfrage MW and Franco Ziliani. They were the rebel wines, the ones that broke the rules and whirled Tuscany into the vinous stratosphere of the planet, notching up pundit points higher than all but the best Burgundies and commanding prices that would not have made a second-growth claret producer blush. They were the breath of fresh air in the musty dankness of Tuscan tradition.
Read more...A billionaire Belgian who built his family's scrap metal business into an empire encompassing the media, utilities and oil has set the world's private equity groups and drinks businesses scurrying for their calculators.
Read more...It's high summer in California, which means coastal fog moves inland sometime after midnight and hangs around in canyons and along rivers until past noon.
Read more...As the crisis' in Italian wine sales deepens, the number of ideas about what should be done continues to grow.
Read more...
New from Click Wine Group, High Note is a classic Argentinean Malbec, smooth and velvety, distinctive and modern, from the Uco Valley in Mendoza, the location of the world's finest Malbec vineyards.
Read more...
