Held at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in London’s East End, RAW Fair was great fun. Over 200 wineries exhibiting, representing a fair spectrum of natural/authentic/real/artisan wine (or…
Suilven Chardonnay 2015 Adelaide Hills
This is the latest release from Thistledown, a collaboration between Giles Cooke, Fergal Tynan and Peter Leske, based in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia. Suilven is a beautifully packaged,…
Money and wine
Money lies at the roots of our society. It is a structural entity – a skeleton around which much of what happens is built. It is also symbolic. Of itself…
Taittinger Comtes de Champagne 2002
I do like Comtes. It’s invariably a beautiful wine, and it ages well. I’ve written up a vertical of these wines before, and recently tried the current vintage, 2006. This…
Some treats at 67 Pall Mall: Pignan, Montebello, Villard, Vazart Coquart
Had a lovely evening last night with a small group at 67 Pall Mall, the wine-friendly club that opened last year. It was my first time at 67 Pall Mall,…
Black Elephant Vintners Semillon 2015 Franschhoek
This is an important wine, because of the vineyard that it is made from (pictured above). It’s a very old (1905) Semillon vineyard in Franschhoek owned by Basil Landau. Basil…
New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc Seminar: classic versus alternative styles
Yesterday I took part in a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc seminar at New Zealand House in London. The aim of the seminar was to compare classic styled Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc…
Raising the bar behind us
There’s a human tendency which many of us fall prey to. It’s to do with how we got to where we are today. Putting it metaphorically, we got here by…
O-Port-Unidade 2013 Vintage Port
This is a great project – one that I mentioned last year when I tried a cask sample with lunch. It’s a charity Port project to which 20 of the…