What the wine trade could learn from natural wines
August 29, 2012
“Wine’s not my kind of thing… it’s a bit, well, posh.” “It’s too complicated, I don’t understand all that stuff about tannin.” “I’ll probably get into it when I’m older.” I hear similar things all the time when I put on tastings. These perceptions act as major barriers stopping people getting into wine. It’s nothing new; it was the same when I was first exploring wine. Yes, things are improving.…
St Emilion: Liquid Luxury
August 14, 2012
St Emilion, in a nutshell: first published in Living France magazine, but this is longer. For many, the word ‘Bordeaux’ conjures the image of the classic fairytale château in beautiful gardens. But the majority of these are only found in one half of the Bordeaux region: the Left Bank, aka the Médoc. The Right Bank, however, with St Emilion at its heart, has a very different aesthetic. Here the…
Pierre Mansour: Wine Society Selector
August 1, 2012
It does not sell Armand de Brignac ‘Ace of Spades’ Champagne, nor does it sponsor the drinks at footballers’ weddings. The Wine Society…
Wine Sampling Session: Internet Face Off
July 19, 2012
If you buy the weekend newspapers you’re bound to see promotions from time to time for cases of wine from mail order or internet wine companies. The discounts are eye-catching: 50%, 60%, 70% off… But the wines they sell are often exclusive to them so you can’t compare prices – and you can’t try before you buy. So how do you know if you should get involved? I organised a tasting last week for 20…
Naked Wines – should you redeem that voucher?
July 5, 2012
Everyone loves a bargain. And there’s one little offer that keeps catching my eye – a voucher for Naked Wines. Sometimes for £20, sometimes for £30, sometimes for £40 off… or even more. And it’s not just me – every other week I get a text from a friend asking me if they should redeem it. Naked Wines operate a bit differently to other wine companies. This is one reason, no doubt, they get your…
Slovenia: Cracking wines
June 21, 2012
Driving across Slovenia doesn’t take long. About three hours from one corner to the other; it’s about the size of Wales, or slightly smaller than New Jersey. It’s a picturesque journey – from the palm trees of the western coast, past pine-covered, snow-capped mountains, arriving finally at the rolling hills of the eastern border with Croatia. If you don’t know where in Europe it is exactly, you’d…
How to organise a wine tasting
May 25, 2012
When you arrange to meet your mates for an evening down the pub, no-one calls it a ‘beer tasting’, do they? Well if a ‘wine tasting’ is done right, it’s pretty much the same as a night in the pub, but with lots of different interesting wines to try instead of the same old lager all night. And with a decent bottle of wine from a shop costing the same as 3 pints in a pub, it needn’t be any more…
Sherry: Collision Course
May 8, 2012
Last week I posted a crash course on sherry. Sherry is a relic, a throwback from an earlier age of winemaking. No-one would set out to make a wine in the way that sherry is made; but it is precisely this process that gives it its unique properties. If you value intensity, complexity and length of flavour in a wine, few can match it. And with food, it works better than any other style. So explore…
See you later Prometheus, here’s the trailer to Drink Me!
May 4, 2012
A couple of weeks ago we filmed a trailer for my new book, Drink Me. The idea behind it is to give people who are considering buying a copy online a quick (three and a half minute) intro into the kind of stuff the book covers and whether it might be what they are looking for. Not so easy to flick through a copy if it's just on a screen, after all. This is the final edit. …
Sherry: Crash Course
April 30, 2012
Who knew squid testicles could be so delicious? More to the point, which lunatic tried cooking with them in the first place? I only felt mildly grossed out once I’d got back to England. At the time, sitting in a tapas bar in southwest Spain, they proved a tasty morsel, albeit rather rubbery. This isn’t the first time the Andalusians have developed something strange but delicious in the realm of…