I’ve been going on for years in this column about how enjoying wine is more than a question of how it looks and tastes. Find out something about where it comes from, how it’s made and by whom, and you add an extra dimension of enjoyment and understanding. So far, however, I’ve avoided the question of how best to do this. I remember, as a young man, turning up in Bordeaux, bewildered by the rather uniform dull landscape and the identical closed iron gates in front of the chateaux. I came away not much the wiser. Now, in Bordeaux, it’s much easier with a Visitors’ Centre that introduces you to the area. But I also want to recommend a different approach, more suited to the lesser known winemaking areas: attend the annual Wine Fair. Continue reading Location, Location, Location
Tag Archives: Languedoc
My Approach to Enjoying Wine
Attentive readers of this column will have noticed a philosophy of wine appreciation emerging. When I started writing I didn’t know I had such a thing, but that’s part of the joy of writing: it forces you to decide where you stand. So here is my advice to someone interested in getting more out of drinking wine than they do at the moment.
Teach yourself. Your preferences are unique to you and they can never be wrong. Forget the scoring systems that give one wine 92 points and another 93. A wine can’t be better than another in the way one washing machine is better than another. Forget the tasting notes, where one expert finds notes of bramble and over-ripe fig while another finds, in the same wine, tobacco and chocolate. Ask just two questions: do I like it and does it have enough character for me to recognise it again? Which leads to the second piece of advice:
Continue reading My Approach to Enjoying Wine
Special wine supermarket prices
We say thank you and goodbye to Philip Reddaway and hello to Andrew Polmear who is going to write a regular column about his love of wine
Supermarket wine has come a long way since those early days, the 1960s, when Sainsbury’s first introduced Vin de Pays de l’Herault and Minervois to their shelves for the same price that we used to pay for a Liebfraumilch or Bull’s Blood. I remember the excitement then – we felt we were drinking real wine that seemed to taste of the soil of those sun-baked parts of France rather than a factory product. Things have come a long way since then but there is still a dilemma when you are trying to buy a bottle of wine for under £10: do you buy a full-bodied wine from a reliable area that produces a lot of wine for the supermarket buyers, or do you seek out a wine that has something unique? A wine made with the carmenere grape from the central valley of Chile is always going to be full and fruity, but, in the end, unmemorable. A wine made by a single producer that has come from a small well-defined area with its unique blend of rock, soil and sun can stop a meal in its tracks, and transport you to that part of Italy, France or Spain where it was made.
Continue reading Special wine supermarket prices
The Whistler 