If This Film Were A Wine 2012
Last year, I had a bit of fun matching wine to films during the BAFTAs and then again for the Oscars. As it turns out, these were two of my more popular posts of the entire year.
So, with the 2012 BAFTA film awards almost upon us here are my recommendations of what wine to drink with each movie nominated for Best Film and Outstanding British Film. Read More…
Malbec and Me
I don’t believe in detoxing. There I’ve said it. Unless your religion dictates it, what’s the point of giving up something for a month, only to go back to business as usual at the end of it? Especially when it is cold, dark and miserable outside.
So, while magazines are full of soups, salads and “light food”, I’m going to buck the trend and write about Kinky Friedman-style big, hairy steaks matched with ballsy red wine. Argentinian Malbec to be precise. Read More…
Franciacorta’s Coming To Town
It’s a crisp October night and I’m on a coach hurtling through the industrial hinterland of Brescia. The destination: dinner at a winery. None of us coach passengers know which one. That’s part of the surprise. All we do know is that the winery makes Franciacorta, the local sparkling wine. Read More…
Something Old, Something New…
Newsflash! Oddbins is back!
I don’t mean that 37 of its stores were saved from administration. That’s, like, old news innit. Read More…
Wine Every Mountain
Gewürztraminer can be a pungent, viscous and overbearing beast. At the hands of Cantina Tramin’s winemaker and technical director Willi Stürz though, it is a different animal altogether. Aromatic, yes. But with a purity and comparative lightness that belies its high alcohol level. The 2010 Nussbaumer – its flagship Gewürztraminer line – has an intense aroma of rambutan, the less floral relative of the lychee, with clean blossom and tropical fruit flavours. It is utterly delicious. Read More…
Let Me Tell You A Wine Story
Behind every wine is a story – even the cheapest, nastiest white Zinfandel. The stories aren’t always that interesting, of course. Fortunately, though, many are captivating – from a simple vision to triumph over adversity. That’s what fascinates me, and clearly many of the other participants at this year’s European Wine Bloggers Conference (EWBC) where the theme was “storytelling”. Read More…
Kings Of The Carso
In the Carso, you’ve really, really got to want to make wine, because producing just a single bottle takes patience, tenacity and an enormous amount of effort. This rocky corner of Friuli, by the Gulf of Trieste, is riddled with collapsed underground grottos and very little topsoil in which to plant vines. Read More…
Take It To The Ridge
Thirty-five years ago it used to really matter that your wine tasted French, even if it had been made thousands of miles away. Like in California.
This point was proved in the so-called Judgement of Paris in 1976, when – in a blind wine tasting – a Californian red and white beat two top French wines: a Château Mouton-Rothschild Pauillac and a Domaine Roulot Meursault Charmes.
“Last week in Paris… the unthinkable happened: California defeated all Gaul,” wrote Time journalist George Taber. Just those few words, in a four-paragraph scoop, shook the wine world to its core. Read More…
Russian River Wine Roaming
We had it all planned out. A day touring vineyards in the Russian River Valley in Sonoma, where I think some of California’s loveliest wines come from. But a client’s mini-crisis, the promise of a scorching day and an *ahem* late night at the Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg conspired against us. We left late and the siren call of a cooling pool was too loud to ignore. Read More…
Sonoma: A Wine Odyssey
Restrained. Not a word you’d usually associate with Californian wine. And yet, here we were, drinking a succession of decidedly unshowy whites at the Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg, Sonoma.
This is not the first time we’ve been here and - given its distance from grey old London – we always splash out on the tasting menu with wines. It’s one of Mr. SipSwoosh’s favourite things to do in one of his favourite places in the world.
However, I don’t remember the white wines being quite this reined in when we were last here, three years ago. Read More…