WELCOME TO WINE TERROIRS & TALES

Novello Every time we drive back from Italy, we snake up the motorway through the narrow Val d’Aosta to the Mont Blanc tunnel, and admire...

‘La France va mal’. Having lived here for 30 years it’s a perennial cry. France is sick! Looking across the Channel at the ongoing...

The age-old rivalry. No, not the French and the English, but the Bordelais and the Bourguignon. Bordeaux versus Burgundy, the gently...

I last visited the royal town of Pau and the next-door wine town of Jurancon twenty-five years ago, and a lot has changed since. First of...

Occasionally a kind and vinously very well-connected friend invites me to a tasting with one of the grands. I don’t usually post...

Soil in Les Clos, Grand Cru, Chablis I have written before of the link between a village on the south coast of Dorset in England called...

I am not a great believer in these huge comparative tastings when people proudly show off the thirty (or more) bottles that they’ve just...

A few 2000 grand crus Who remembers Y2K? It was I guess the beginnings of the tech obsession, but back then in 1999 everyone was apparently terrified that when the clock struck midnight not only would Cinderella’s glass slippers turn to rags, but the whole computer and time infrastructure would somehow collapse. And so, we all spent silly amounts having Y2K experts and consultants help us fix something that was never broken. 9 months later and the hype about the new millenni

Standing on top of the fifteenth century Tower of Belem looking out over the Tagus River towards the Atlantic, it is difficult to imagine winching down the sails 550 years ago with the next uncharted landfall being the Americas. Nothing but you, the ocean, the wind, a creaky wooden boat, storms, diseases and pirates. Amazing bravery. But I fully admit to having rather forgotten Portugal, one of the smaller and poorer member countries of the EU. The last time I drank its mos

My affection for Argentina dates back to the late 90s. The people, the culture, the grandiose scenery, the fishing (of course) in...

Paris on Sunday. It was an extraordinary match, an extraordinary atmosphere and an extraordinary achievement. The pavements were packed outside every bar in the rain, large screens blazing out the titanic almost biblical duel between the old and the new, the master and the pupil, the next generation of genius. The screams, the cheers and then the groans echoed around the city as exhausted, emotional supporters yelled themselves hoarse. And eventually, almost impossibly in

Living in France is wonderful if you want to pop down the autoroute to Burgundy or the Loire, to eat and of course to drink, but there...

This is not really focussed on wine, so please forgive me, or just skip to the end where I will get back on track I promise. But tumbling temperatures, fluttering golden leaves and the return of rain usually makes wine and food lovers think of things Italian, porcini mushrooms and tartuffi white truffles. The gold is either white or black, depending whether your dog is sniffing under Alba hazel trees or Perigord oaks (though these days the largest source of tuber melansporu

I don’t usually like to post about a single bottle as it invariable means some ego-boosting label that nobody else can afford, so what’s the interest other than so called ‘wine porn’? But I thought the Antarctic chardonnay was a remarkable story, and here I have another bottle that gave considerable pause for thought. Chateauneuf du Pape (CNP). It makes you think of the hot south and those galets , flat round stones that cover the vineyards and act as storage heaters during

Otronia under snow from their website Patagonia Extrema. I recently wrote about the new wave of wineries springing up in the province of Chubut in Argentine Patagonia, but the one I visited, Casa Yague, sits in the ‘north westerly’ Andean part, and the newest star is from even further down, almost into the province of Santa Cruz. It’s called Otronia, from Sarmiento in the deep deep south. The first vines were only planted in 2010 and the inaugural chardonnay vintage was 20

It’s been a while since I posted anything, and the endless summer has finally ended. Gone the baking dry sunshine, the ever-ripening tomatoes, the desertification of what once masqueraded as a lawn. The hydrangeas don’t need watering every day to stay alive and across France the grapes have been picked, sorted, crushed and vinified, now slumbering in cask. It was an early vintage, as normal these days, but the grapes were in the main healthy and the plaudits for 2022 are alre

The world is descending into a hideous spiral; vile invasions, endless covid, 40 degree heat in England(!), supply chain disruptions, lack of workers, airport chaos, not to mention the execrable quality of the seemingly non-stop supply of populist egomaniac politicians. Which is why it is such a pleasure to live just three and a half hours drive from Beaune. Hop onto the A6 (if you can avoid the morning rush hour) and before you know it the road curves and descends through th

Looking to Montalcino As one slides, (gently and willingly I trust), into retirement, I’ve noticed that one’s wine buying priorities can change. For starters, laying down those big reds that require 20 years plus of cellar time becomes either a hedge against inheritance tax or an altruistic gift to your kids. Personally, I also find that big and heavy becomes more and more tiring, and elegant and refined more and more delightful. And, a subject of increasing importance as pr

Season of fancy and of hope, Permit not for one hour, A blossom from thy crown to drop, Nor add to it a flower ! Keep, lovely May, as if by touch Of self restraining art, This modest charm of not too much, Part seen, imagined part! William Wordsworth It is difficult not to love the month of May, Maia the goddess of springtime and growth. The clocks are back and the days noticeably longer and warmer. The garden is a riot of colour and all those lazy summer days are still an en

It has been a long time since my last post, and that was a rather depressing one on the problems of dead white burgundies, so with spring upon us with all its glorious riot of colour, blossom and fragrance, I thought it time to be more upbeat, helped by the fact that we’ve enjoyed an unusually fresh and lovely series of chardonnays, all in the pink flush of health. It all started down in deepest Argentine Patagonia, on an enormous cattle ranch where I was, after 2 years of co