Standing on the steps of a farmhouse north of Reims, it is easy to see why most Champenois stay here for generations. From the back door, the carefully tended fields of barley and Pinot Noir grapes are flanked by rows of beehives, which all tell their own story. This...

After a delay of two years, the 10th International Cool Climate Wine Symposium finally got under way. Held at Brock University’s ‘Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute’ in St Catharines on the Niagara Peninsula in eastern Canada, some 300 delegates and...

A genie came out of a lamp and said: ‘I am going to whisk you to Burgundy where you will be allowed to choose one dish, one single dish, that you have had before in a restaurant there. You have 30 seconds.’ Ooh…Bending the one-single-dish diktat I now declare a...

The rain poured down… and down, yet it did nothing to dampen the spirits as I and a host of colleagues avoided the deluge in a most pleasant fashion: tasting scores of about-to-be-bottled wines from the already storied Bordeaux 2020 vintage. I was taking part in the...

When Ryan Opaz and I decided around 2016 to co-author a book about Portuguese wine and winemakers, we were quickly confronted with a challenging question: why does the wine-loving world have so little appreciation of Portuguese wines?

On a misty mid-April morning in Barbaresco, with the cobblestone streets wet and glistening, the village breathed a palpable sigh of relief. For its six hundred residents, life revolves around wine and finally, after four months of drought, the rains had come.

An Appreciation of Blanc de Noirs Champagne (Malmö, March 2022) Just what is it about champagne and Scandinavia? The crystalline air; the purity of vision, the taste for luxury? Who knows? One thing is for sure; between them, the Scandi countries can offer three of...

It is often said that the wines of Margaux are more perfumed and less powerful than those from Saint-Estèphe, Saint-Julien and Pauillac, but within the appellation, the wines vary still further in style due to the differences in terroir and the characteristics that...

There are 15-second growths in the 1855 Bordeaux classification and one-third of them come from Margaux. Wouldn’t it be fun to hold a Margaux party, and invite Durfort-Vivens, Brane-Cantenac, Rauzan-Ségla, Rauzan-Gassies and Lascombes – the five-second growths – along...