WELCOME TO WINE TERROIRS & TALES

A couple of friends, Richard and Tiffany, came to supper and gave us a bottle. It was filthy, covered in thick dust with a rather grimy old label. He had been advised to buy it in the Caves de Marly, a wine shop to the west of Pairs (Marly-le-Roi near St Germain) that specialises in interesting wines that are generally affordable, well chosen and often mature. Now that I am partly retired and often collect my daughter from school in St Germain, it is an evil temptation that

Chablis. I think it was in the early 1980s as an indigent student travelling back from friends in Provence that I first set foot in the town. We were in a beat up 2CV and it was a very slow, long drive and super hot on the A6 motorway. We needed sustenance, a rest and a drink. When still a couple of hours from Paris, I spotted the sign to Chablis. For some unremembered reason I had found a 500 franc note (about 50 quid, a fortune!) in my jacket pocket (from my parents?)

Having started this blog in Sancerre with the Dr No of Chavignol (Sean Connery having just passed on, and Cotat's door supposedly always being closed) I thought we'd better drink one... As I said, vintage does matter here, and though global warming in the Loire may have helped the wines (especially the reds?) and this end of the Kimmeridgian chalk belt does not suffer from frost whereas in Chablis every spring there are hay bales burning, candles lit, windmills whirring, wate

It was 2017 when Jean-Marc Rolout returned to the silver screen in 'Ce que nous lie', a charming movie of family retrievals set, of course, in Meursault where he is already a star. Around that time I was in Burgundy with wine mad Norwegian friend Andre and we had managed to access two coveted spots at four o'clock on a friday. In Meursault. For that is when the weekly tasting happened for a lucky group. Andre has parked his large Volvo and was a bit put out when some late

Kimmeridge. It's a village in Dorset in southern England, and very picture postcardy - thatched roofs and sandy beaches. But to any wine lover, it's real claim to fame is not the cliff walks or the oil deposits offshore, but the fossileforus marine clay from the late Jurassic, classified by a French geologist right here nearly three centuries ago. In poor layman's terms, fossilized oyster shell limestone. But just like the chalk of Hampshire and Wiltshire, it dives under