There is something about sipping really good champagne at Christmas. You can open the bottle with a bang and even let the cork carom off the ceiling, but once your fluted glass is full, make sure you take a good look inside. You won’t see oversized bubbles exploding...

When, in 1976, Steven Spurrier invited a panel of high-profile professionals to gather in Paris and blind taste a range of Californian wines alongside their French counterparts, he proved to the world that California played in the same league as the world’s finest...

‘For anyone who is doubtful about climate change, just spend some time in a wine grape vineyard,’ states a winemaker in Mendocino County, California. ‘Because of the increasing temperatures, the grapes are ripening two to three weeks earlier than they did 20 years...

Urban wineries are a growing trend. The earliest were started up in the United States, particularly in California, about 20 years ago, but are now to be found all over the country, and the concept has spread, to Europe, Hong Kong and Australia. London now has four...

What three words would you choose to describe the wine of Romanée-Conti? If you’ve never had the opportunity to taste this iconic wine, expressions of chagrin such as ‘far too expensive’ or ‘not my league’ might come to mind. When I posed this question to Aubert de...

A 50th Anniversary is a big deal not only for couples and businesses but also for California wineries. Throughout 2022, neither fires nor earthquakes will prevent two dozen wineries from celebrating their 50th harvest. In 2023 and over the following years, dozens more...

Over the past 30 years, I have watched the wave of Beaujolais Nouveau rise, crest and break in Japan. It used to be the cultural norm for Japanese adults to drink Nouveau from plastic cups on the third Thursday in November, just as it is to have champagne on New...

Welcome back to our wend around the alphabet of wine grapes! Last time around, we departed from the usual list of known varieties and detoured through a fantastic trio of indigenous whites: Aligoté (France), Bical (Portugal) and Coda di Volpe (Italy). If the next...

The next time you gaze at the wine wall in your local supermarket, imagine each bottle as a person with dreams and aspirations. In the Provençal wine region of Bandol, a lot of those people are women, who may work alongside the men at family wineries but in many cases...