WELCOME TO WINE TERROIRS & TALES

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

It was in the twelfth century that the Ricasoli family took over the castle in Gaiole in Chianti. It has weathered the centuries of attacks from outside (the Spanish) and inside as the Sienese battled with the Florentines (Brolio being geographically closer to the former but politically allied to the latter). The current edifice, a rather massive pinkish stone caste with crenelated battlements and various different towers, stands in lovely gardens surrounded by vines and oliv

It’s not often that we talk about art in the wine world unless it be the art of the winemaker, or the various domaines that hire an artist every year for their label, headed by Mouton-Rothschild. Willi’s Wine Bar in Paris is probably the high church of bottle art. But in Barolo? There are few more picturesque places than the valleys of Barolo on a blue skied, sunny autumn afternoon, with the slanting rays setting over the first Alpine snows and illuminating the jewel-like sca

Castelnuovo Beradegna. It sits perched on top of a hill, the last outpost of Chianti on the southern border looking towards Siena and the Colli Senesi. In the distance looms Monte Amiata towering over Montalcino. As you head past the huge black cockerel which reminds you that you are still, just, in Chianti Classico, you see a line of cypress trees standing like soldiers at attention, heading to a car park where you slide your vehicle in between olive trees. In front of you

Not just any Bourgogne Rouge You can forget the hyberbole, this is a literal use of words. This wine really is unique. It only happened once and will not be repeated. The name Lalou Bize-Leroy never creates indifference in Burgundy. Her tasting abilities are legendary, the prices she demands for her wines stratospheric, her biodynamic convictions messianic. She pushes up land prices and her vines look a mess as she leaves the ‘apex’ (top bud and the tops of the vines) untrimm

It’s pouring with rain, a howling gale, branches down everywhere, bins blown over and anyway if you go out you get arrested, fined or virused. Time to sit in front of the fire and dream of summers past and, hopefully, future. And where better than Tuscany, rolling hillsides of vineyards and sparkling olive groves, elegant avenues of cypress trees smartly at attention. A place of wild boars, porcini and beef, of Chianti and Brunello, of virgin oil and culture, and, gran Dio, w

It is, covid apart, the festive season, time to be merry, drink well and eat luxuriantly. In France it’s black truffle season and of course in Italy they go one better. In late autumn the first snows grace the Alps, MonViso looking like a white topped Fuji, the vineyards are a patchwork quilt of gold and scarlet as the Nebbiolo, barbera and dolcetto leaves turn into jewels, and dogs search under the holm oak and hazel trees for the priciest jewel of all, magnatum pico, the Al

The alarm seemed painfully loud, but by the time I had dragged myself out to the car, in the pitch dark wetness of a December morning, I was fully legal, by half an hour. The French government released lockdown and after six the curfew was off (for 14 hours anyway). The A6 is a nightmare when it is two lane, with endless trucks throwing out blinding spray in the still black morning, but I had to be in Meursault at 10,30 and this was the only way to do it. 300kms and three hou

Wines so often come with a story and a history. In 2016 we were staying in Ireland with my wife’s family and on the way back we stopped off at Balymaloe House, where our daughter was doing a morning’s cookery class and we were having the Sunday buffet dinner served by the Allen family (tv chefs, cookbook authors and renowned food purveyors). As we checked in, the young sommelier asked if we’d like to see the cellar. Why not? It was not very large, but I spotted a single bottl