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…
A Leaf-Kicking Wine
What’s the best way to describe a wine?
It seems there are now two schools of thought. Read More…
Where Every Grape Is Sacred
They don’t put out spittoons at the end of the tour of the Opus One winery in California. When you are presented with a glass of the latest vintage, maybe the assumption is that, if you’ve paid $40 for the privilege, you won’t want to waste a drop of this cult wine.
Wild About Barrel-Fermented Sauvignon
In a nation awash with Oyster Bay, I find it hard to get excited by Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc anymore.
Unless it has been fermented in oak and sat on its lees (the dead yeast deposits from fermentation). Read More…