I recently bought two bottles of wine for £4.99 each: Chateau Mont Milan from Majestic and Marques de Carano Gran Reserva 2002 from Tesco. Of the two it was the Mont Milan that I was most looking forward to; it’s from the Corbières, a region of France I know and whose wines I like; but [...]
Archive for the ‘9 A Love of Wine’ Category
International Prize Winning Wines
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged Chateau Mont Milan, Corbieres, Decanter magazine, Marques de Carano Gran Reserva 2002 on March 28, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Sparkling Tips
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged champagne, Crémant de Limoux, Dom Perignon, Limoux, méthode champenoise, sparkling wine on January 26, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Champagne really annoys me. There’s been a lot of it about recently, so I’m going to get this off my chest. It’s not that I don’t like it; it’s the best sparkling wine in the world, with an ability to age, a complexity of flavour, and the variation from one producer to another is fascinating. [...]
Blenio – the Wine List
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged Blenio, Meursault, Paula Black, Ticino, Willowglen, wine on November 28, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Most people who live near Seven Dials will have noticed, or eaten at, Blenio, the restaurant just south of the Dials with exposed brickwork, paintings by local artists, candles everywhere, and white tiled tables in three partly separate ‘rooms’ on a level well above that of the street. This article is not about the excellence [...]
Special wine supermarket prices
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged Faugères, Languedoc, limestone, schist, St-Chinian on September 30, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
WINE FROM A MUSLIM COUNTRY
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged Celliers des Meknes, Fez, Gris, Meknés, Morocco, Rosé, Slurp, wine producing industry on March 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Just returned from our first visit to Morocco. What a fabulous country, we enjoyed every minute of our stay in Marrakech. The generous, kind people we met; the lively street life; the tranquility of our Riad; the delicious tagines and the walks in the foothills of the Atlas mountains. The only slight frustration for a [...]
COMIC BOOKS SELL TOP WINES
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged China, Christie's, Japanese manga, Kami no Shizuku, Les Gouttes de Dieu, Sotheby's, The Drops of the Gods on February 1, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
There is no doubt that the No.1 buzz in the wine world is Asia’s sudden conversion to wine. Not so long ago this was a region where whisky, cola, rice wines and domestic grape wines of dubious quality reigned supreme. Today, as I write, it is announced that China is the fastest growing wine importing [...]
READING A BOTTLE OF WINE
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged AOC, Gauntleys, Philippe Gimel, wine on December 5, 2010 | 1 Comment »
The French attitude to labelling wine strikes me as absurdly blinkered. Faced with continued domestic over-supply, dynamic New World competition and a government determined to control what they see as an unhealthy beverage, one might have thought the industry would have got the bit they can control (it’s just sticking the right info on the [...]
PLEASING THE EMPEROR
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged Chateau Beaucastel, Hommage à Jacques Perrin, Lafite, Leo McCloskey’s ‘Enologix’, Parker 100 pointer, Robert Parker, The Emperor of Wine by Elin McCoy, The Wine Advocate on October 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
There cannot be many wine lovers who aren’t aware of the phenomenon that is Robert Parker, the American wine critic. For nearly 30 years controversy has raged around this man who, it is said, “makes and breaks the market” for fine wines. The pro-school point to his independence and integrity in relation to producers, his [...]
GRENACHE THE UNSUNG HERO
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged Chateauneuf du Pape, Grenache, Grenache Symposium, The Big Red Wine Company on August 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
It’s the fourth most planted grape variety in the world, should be wholly familiar to anyone who has swigged cheap rosado on the Costa Brava through to classy Chateauneuf du Pape in the Rhone valley or old vine, dry-farmed examples from the Barossa valley in Australia, but when did you last hear anyone ask for [...]
HIGH SUMMER DRINKING
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged cocktails, wine on June 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Want some inspiration as to what you might be sipping in your deck chair this summer? Let’s start with a cheeky cocktail…I know it’s little “off piste” for a wine column but it’ll get you in the mood for some delicious wines later in the day. When the temperature rises we reach for the Campari [...]
THE RODENSTOCK AFFAIR
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged Bill Koch, Hardy Rodenstock, The Billionaire’s Vinegar, Thomas Jefferson on March 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Every now and again a scandal surfaces in the wine world, which reverberates beyond the confines of the connoisseur’s press to a wider public. The Austrian wine adulterated with antifreeze in 1985 springs to mind. This time the victims are less likely to be you or me, regular wine drinkers, but that rarefied world of [...]
VINOTABULAPHOBIA
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged John Arlott, wine, wine list on January 17, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Philip Reddaway, The Whistler’s wine columnist who lives in Provence, could not send us his contribution for this edition because he was surrounded by ten inches of snow, and had no power, telephone or heating. He walked seven miles to buy food for his family and to borrow a computer to send us an email [...]
OLD WORLD WINES STILL RULE IF YOU ARE PREPARED TO PAY JUST A LITTLE MORE
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged bed and breakfast, biodynamic, Domaine des Anges, wine on November 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Philip Reddaway, The Whistler’s wine columnist, is musing on old vs new world wines… In the past few years, French wine sales have taken a battering in the UK. Australia has now been joined by California as the most popular supplier of wine to the Brits. The attraction of New World wines is obvious: the [...]
IS THERE SOMETHING FISHY IN YOUR GLASS?
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged bed and breakfast, biodynamic, gelatine, gum arabic, Provence, wine on August 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Philip Reddaway, The Whistler’s wine columnist, muses on what might be in your glass… Here in the Rhone valley we are surrounded by organic wine domaines. The combination of hot, dry summers and the fierce Mistral winds that follow any rain that does fall, provides the perfect conditions for organic viticulture. We also encounter an [...]
SUBLIME SHERRY
Posted in 9 A Love of Wine, tagged Decanter magazine, Manzanilla, Maribel amontillado, The Wine Society, wine on June 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Philip Reddaway, The Whistler’s wine columnist… How do you picture the typical sherry drinker? Is it your mum-in-law sipping a small glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream at Christmas – a bottle bought five years ago that hangs around at the back of the cupboard, oxidising nicely, awaiting its annual outing? It’s true that no ‘fine [...]
