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Gary Jordan, Claudia Brown and Francois Haasbroek So I arrived with a jolly bunch of UK journalists in Cape Town, on a cold and rainy day. We’re all on slightly different itineraries here, so some of us headed off for Sunday afternoon at Ernie Els’ place in Stellenbosch, where a bunch of Stellenbosch winemakers had gathered [...]
The wonderful Bruce Jack sent me a bottle of a new wine that he’s making under his Flagstone label. Just 200o bottles of this Pinotage, from a single vineyard high up in the Bredekloof mountains, were made. It’s just an infant, and although it will be released this September, it’s a wine to hold onto for [...] The long bank holiday weekend provided an ideal opportunity for a family get together. Remarkably, we managed to find a house big enough to take 15 on budget in the quaint village of Erdisland, Herefordshire. My job on these occasions is to provide the wine. There’s a strong demand for crisp, dry, unoaked white wine, and [...] Swartland-based Mullineux is one of the most respected of the new wave of South African wine estates, and in the 2012 Platter Guide they achieved a remarkable clean sweep of three out of three five star wines. Last year they added two more wines to their portfolio: a pair of high-end Syrahs named ‘Granite’ and ‘Schist’. [...] I have written before about how export approval systems in New World wine-producing countries can hinder producers who operate outside the commercial norms (here: http://www.wineanorak.com/exportapproval.htm) It’s a big problem for natural winemakers. You make a really good wine, have customers abroad clamouring to buy it, and you can’t sell it because a group of conventionally minded winemakers [...] Kew’s Glasshouse has to be one of the best places to lunch in London. It’s the sister restaurant to the equally impressive La Trompette in Chiswick, and together this pair of gems gives those of us out west reason to feel grateful. They both possess brilliant wine lists alongside highly creative and utterly delicious cooking, and [...] I’ve ranted here before about how stupid the export approval systems in some countries can be. They are well intentioned: for a wine to be exported from South Africa and New Zealand, it must pass a taste test. The idea is that this keeps bad wines from being exported and letting down the country’s reputation, [...] Had these two fabulous older whites, and thought they deserved a blog post of their own. Both have aged beautifully. Domaine Marc Morey 1er Cru Virondot Chassagne Montrachet 1999 Burgundy, France Klein [...] A short film of Lammershoek’s vineyards, which I find rather beautiful. They’re just typical of the Swartland, with most of them dry-grown bush vines. I have just written up my visit to Swartland producer Lammershoek, which you can read here. It was unusual for two reasons. First of all, they’re making a new series of wines, called ‘Cellar Foot’. These are heaven for wine geeks: oddities bottles in small quantities. I tried one, as yet unreleased example: a varietal Hárslevelű, [...] |
 This is the blog of wine journalist Jamie Goode, online since 2001. Feel free to nose around; your comments are welcomed.
 
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