There’s an appalling lot of nonsense written about wine. I thought I’d found another prime example of this recently when I read an article on an American wine website called Snooth about the sweet wines of Bordeaux. Wine makers are trying to cope with poor sales by rebranding their sweet wines as ‘Golden Bordeaux’ and the suggestion by Snooth was that sweet Bordeaux wines go well with any food, except perhaps sweet desserts. What were they thinking of, I wondered, when almost everyone calls these ‘dessert wines’? Continue reading Golden Bordeaux→
I’ve written before about Champagne and how annoyingly dominating it is in the sparkling wine market. My main point is that, when good, it’s so much better than any other sparkling wine that its reputation is high and, on a special occasion, anything else seems mean. This reputation allows an appalling amount of poor champagne to slip in on the coat tails of the good stuff, to be sold at high prices. Continue reading Don’t Think Champagne – Think Cava→
Summer is special for us all. For some it’s the outdoor life, for others it’s the Tour de France, but for wine lovers there’s the publication of the Decanter World Wine Awards! 275 international judges taste 17,000 wines blind and make their awards accordingly. Almost all the wines are available to us, either online or in the shops. If you subscribe to Decanter (“the world’s best wine magazine”) you get the printed report free. If you don’t you can view it free online at awards.decanter.com. Never again need you be disconcerted by the huge array of wines offered to you in a supermarket, a wine merchant or online. Continue reading Wine, Judges and Medals→
I’ve been chuntering on in this column for years about how important it is to think about the wine you are drinking, either putting into words how it tastes or thinking about where it comes from and how it’s made. Otherwise you are just knocking it back, maybe enjoying it, maybe not, without learning anything that can inform your enjoyment of the next bottle you open. Continue reading Thinking While Drinking→
I have a friend who says he won’t pay more than £6 for a bottle of wine. I tell him he’s barmy. Wine making is a slow, difficult, and expensive business. It’s true that wine does come cheaper than £6 but it’s an industrial product, without individuality or character. If you do find one with flavour it’s probably come from oak chippings suspended in the wine like teabags. But, my friend persists, what’s so expensive about making wine? Continue reading Why does good wine cost so much?→
Everything you ever wanted to know about life in Brighton (OK, and Hove)
The Whistler 