Musings: Thoughtfully Abstracted : Meditative
MUSINGS: One’s thoughts or comments on something you have been thinking about carefully and for a long time…
California Wine: It’s All a Dream
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...
Life After Nouveau: The Rise of the Beaujolais Cru
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...
Jason Tesauro’s ‘Grapetionary’ – A Wine Grape A–Z . Part 2 – D, E, F
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 Wine Women of Bandol
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...
Why Super-Tuscans Have Fallen from Fashion
Once the undisputed darlings of the fine wine scene, the ultra-expensive, ultra-polished Super-Tuscans face a new challenge as the wine world’s focus shifts to authenticity, says Walter Speller In the 1980s, the wine world was in thrall to the Super-Tuscans. These...
The 45th Anniversary of the Legendary Judgment of Paris – 24th May, 2021
Tasting notes Bottles were blinded and randomized. Wines were opened 1-2 hrs prior to tasting. Most started to fade a bit after about four hours in carafe. All wines were in excellent condition and still very much in their prime. Bottle 1- 1973 Stags Leap (total group...
Bandol Rosé: A Wine of Many Pleasures
In France, as we emerge from the shadow of a pandemic unsure of how to interact with others, an old friend on the sunbaked Mediterranean coast anticipates our return. Nestled among the garrigue and olive groves are the vine-covered terraces of the Bandol hills, and...
Still Wines from Champagne – Fizz’s Final Frontier
A wave of new releases from some of Champagne’s most famous houses – and growers – is shifting attention away from the region’s fizz and on to its still wines. Essi Avellan MW explores the world of Coteaux Champenois Charles Heidsieck cellar master Cyril Brun is...
Bordeaux 2020
Ten years on, will the 2020 vintage, alongside 2019 and 2018, make it another golden treble for Bordeaux, emulating 2010, 2009 and 2008? The buzz from Bordeaux is upbeat, bar the decline in volume, but with the wines, as yet, unsampled there are still questions to be...