WELCOME TO WINE TERROIRS & TALES

Christmas, or whatever the festive end of year season is allowed to be called these days. An excuse to dig out some nice bottles, though not when there are too many thirsty family members around, well, not at today’s wine prices at any rate. When I look at the cellar, there’s an embarrassing amount of Burgundy, an increasing love affair with all that is Italian, a rapidly diminishing and not replenished stock of Bordeaux and a rather meagre selection of Rhones. I suppose our

Autumnal vine leaves The Langhe in Piedmont, a region of rolling hills topped with ancient villages and interspersed with valleys; a patchwork quilt of vineyards and mini forests growing on a base of limestone. It’s less than a couple of hours from Turin or Milan and at this time of the year the winding roads can be busy, the restaurants aromatic and stuffed full of people. Of course, the region is synonymous with Barolo, the town, the wine region and the wine itself, a comp

The hilltop La Morra under MonViso and the Alps at sunset, seen from Monforte d'Alba It was back in 2007 that three men from the hamlet of Berri, located up the La Morra slopes in Barolo, came together to form a new winery: Trediberri. Vladimiro provides the financial acumen, and the Oberto’s father and son team Federico and Nicola, the winemaking. Their first wine appeared only a decade ago, and yet they now adorn wine magazines and critics ‘must have lists’ as one of the ho

The world seems to be ever more full of mega-egos, just look at our politicians. Social media undoubtedly facilitates the trait and I see regular posts on Instagram of hyper expensive bottles with almost no comment, so I rather wonder what the point of posting was other than to say ‘look at me’. Which is why when I do have the odd superstar label which was bought at a price from another, sadly past, world, I prefer to do it discretely. But sometimes you think a wine has som

Chateau Lynch Bages 1995 - classic, lovely 1995 1995. Life was not so much rosier back then. The US was rocked by domestic terrorism in Oklahoma and Japan was horrified by sarin nerve gas attacks on the underground railway. The Bosnian war ground on and Nigeria was kicked out of the Commonwealth for human rights abuse. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minster, was fatally shot, and the US suffered a heatwave over 100 degrees. And just to add something new, the US governme

Sadly, I have never had the chance to meet these two stars of the Burgundian firmament. I have met the son of the first, and have a CD sent to me by the second, plus, happily, a few bottles of his lesser wines, but that’s it. And whilst Frederic Mugnier is very much still with us and producing ethereal wines, Becky Wasserman has just passed away, and the world of Burgundy is in mourning. She arrived in Burgundy with her then husband Wasserman in 1968, but as he was prone to

Burgundy. The blessed slope with more history, vaunted terroir, heritage, pricing and words than any other wine district on earth. And as any self-respecting Burgundian will tell you, of course it all began with the medieval monks. Ironically everywhere my wife and I went this summer on holiday, we seemed to be unwittingly on one or other of the pilgrim roads of St Jean of Compostella, and Burgundy has more than its share of ancient churches, abbeys and religious sites. The m

I don’t usually write about wines we’ve drunk here unless there’s a theme or a purpose. There needs to be a story, or something of interest. Otherwise it smacks too much of ‘look at what we are drinking’ and an impression that my tasting comments must be pearls of wisdom. Not so. But we have some serious wine loving friends who are Norwegian and Swedish and with the pandemic and chaotically disco-ordinated governmental travel bans, it’s been a long time… So when Andre phoned

I have noticed on Instagram that there is almost an obsession with ancient bottles with crumbling corks and rotting labels. Time and again I see big labels from the 80s with the comment ‘still too young, try again in a decade.’ The experts also seem to decant them for hours. I am not sure whether it’s some form of inverse snobbery (after all, how many people have wines in their cellar that are thirty, forty, fifty years old?) or some visionary truth that the great wines seem

Haut Brion. It is perhaps the wine I most love to hate or is it I most hate to love? For me it encapsulates everything that is best about Bordeaux, and, yes, everything I dislike the most, the ultimate vinous paradox. The chateau has such a long and fabulous history that perhaps we should start there. I am not going to delve into detail as there are many books that do it better and you are not looking for a lengthy history lesson from me. But what other wine domaine has such

Lockdowns, travel bans, R numbers, partial deconfinement, vaccine passports. Time to let the windmills of your mind turn and take your thoughts elsewhere, somewhere happier, sunnier and altogether more upbeat. Panzano. It’s one of the communes of Chianti: old fortress, rolling slopes of serried vines framed by the spear-shaped leaves of olive trees flickering silver-green in the breeze. Atop sharp ridges regimented lines of cypress trees stand guard. The smell of baked earth

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750) It must have been a decade ago that our Norwegian friend Andre suggested that I accompany him down to Chablis where for years he had been a client of none other than Domaine Francois Raveneau, along with Dauvissat the most reputed winery in Chablis and the

When I arrived in France in 1991, visitors to my Paris apartment joked that the furniture was mainly made up of wooden wine cases. They were nearly all Bordeaux. It was easy to find, easy to afford and, with the 1855 classification, easy to understand. Of the famous communes, I always had a bit of a soft spot for Saint Estephe, the most northerly. It had no premier crus and was less expensive than its southern neighbours; it was a bit less pompous and formal, and with its som

In the last decade, demand for top wines has skyrocketed and so, inevitably, have prices. We have seen the emergence of cult domaines where just the name on the label guarantees a stratospheric price regardless of the actual contents of the bottle. And nowhere is this sad trend more prevalent than in Burgundy. The Cote d’Or was named for its eastern (orient) facing slopes and not the more obvious d’Or ‘of gold’ but these days it is more than living up to its misnomer. Big tim

It was about 25 years ago that I finally began to appreciate the beauty of Burgundian chardonnay, and it started in Meursault. At the wonderful Vin sur Vin restaurant (sadly now retired), Patrice Vidal used to serve me the simple Bourgogne from Roulot. From there of course I moved up to the village wines and I recall a free tasting at Caves Taillevent (yes, those were the days, the wine merchant of the 3 Michelin starred restaurant in Paris used to hold amazing tastings which

I don’t ‘do’ scores and I don’t usually like to post about a single bottle I’ve drunk, as it seems to lack enough reader interest and smacks of rather too much ego (look at what I have tasted, and enjoy my learned opinion). No, a wine needs to create emotion and carry a story, and then it’s worth picking up the pen (well, keyboard). And this bottle has a few chapters to tell, so why not let it speak? Barbaresco Bruno Giacosa passed away three years ago aged 88, the undisputed

1976. I was a school kid in England, and I can still remember the cricket pitch going from lush green to a faded fatigue to frazzled earth colour to dust. It was the big heatwave and drought long before we’d ever nightmared over global warming. The wines were thick skinned, often over-ripe, cooked and confit, with the acidity of a raisin. Generally overlooked, though years later I tasted some top Pauillac and Burgundies all of which were wonderful aged 30-40. Not intuitive,

Como It is definitely the season to be fed up. The days are short, dark, cold and miserable; the politics is a mess of strutting egos; the virus does what it likes and we are all locked up to one extent or another. The simple pleasures of sharing a good glass, a laugh and some food with friends seem to belong to distant nostalgia. And, to add to the melancholy, wine prices seem like tech shares, on an inexorable, idiotic ascent into the unaffordable. So why not sit down in fr

What was it, the third Thursday of November? Some stupid day like that. I’d get off the commuter train in the morning in London and...

Patagonia, the Andes When I first flew down to Buenos Aires, on business, in the late 90’s it was a very different world. The peso was still pegged to the US$ and, wow, who can remember, I guess it was Aussie shiraz or was it Chilean ‘merlot’ (carmenere?) that was all the rage from the ‘New World’. Few Europeans had heard of Argentine malbec. I remember sitting on the plane being served a glass of red. I was tired and not paying much notice when it was poured, but when I tast