WELCOME TO WINE TERROIRS & TALES

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

Expensive cooking wine As most of my Burgundy allocations finally get delivered towards year end, I always look forward to December, an excuse to spend time in the cellar clearing space for the new vintage and taking out the goodies we plan to drink over the coming year. Pleasure stored up and then, finally, hopefully, enjoyed. But there is always a slightly bitter edge, all those bottles that were affordable back then, but are now far out of reach. And, of course, just ho

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