In horse racing parlance, Portugal's red table wines are a handicap certainty. Recently though my form book has also been tracking all the exciting whites emerging from this fascinatingly diverse wine producing country. So, with the Cheltenham Festival coming up I was in the mood to check out the latest runners and riders at The Wines of Portugal Tasting at Lords at the end of last month.
Pewter wine labels are classy, right? Well, Roman Abramovich certainly decided they were when he visited Stellenbosch winery Camberley last year, liked what he saw (and tasted) - and got owner John Nel to
design new labels, also made of the silver-coloured metal, on his
reserve merlot with the Russian billionaire's crest on them (not the
Chelsea one I should add). The affable Nel, as sociable and
hospitable as they come in the Western Cape, has been dining out on
the story ever since.
This past weekend saw the first international Pinot Noir - Spätburgunder Symposium in the small Spa town of Bad Neuenahr - in one of Germany's smallest and most northerly but completely Pinot Noir - dominated regions, the Ahr Valley.
Read more...Anne Krebiehl headed to a seminar tasting with Château Margaux managing director and winemaker Paul Pontallier.
Read more...In the second blog from Harpers' Independent Buyers Trip to Beaujolais, run in conjunction with InterBeaujolais, we hear from a few more of the independent retailers who went out to the region.
Read more...Six months on from the Human Rights Watch report which criticised alleged abuses on vineyards in South Africa, Gavin Smith of the Bespoke Wine Company talks about the effects still being felt.
Read more...Kelvin McCabe, head sommelier at top restaurant Zuma, visited Champagne last month as part of the Harpers Wine & Spirit buyers' trip - here's his blog.
As the numbers were crunched from the 1,380 completed tasting and assessment sheets filled in by the 34 invited bartenders, sommeliers, retailers and journalists, early conclusions after the four days of the fifth annual International Cognac Summit, held at the end of January, included the perhaps surprising view that packaging was broadly considered not to be important to women buying Cognac by the bottle.
Last week Harpers Wine & Spirit, in conjunction with InterBeaujolais, invited a handful of leading independent wine merchants to go out to Beaujolais and discover the wines for themselves.
Read more...Gemma McKenna had the pleasure of dining with some of the world's top winemaking families, and trying some legendary wines.
Read more...In a bright, white gallery space on The Kings Road in Chelsea the annual Australia Day Wine Tasting took place last week. Amid the slurping and spitting, tasters who listened very carefully may have detected a rumbling; deep, subterranean, underground. It could have been a tube train passing below, or a low flying plane overhead. But it was neither of these. The rumbling you may have heard, over the clatter of bottles of Chardonnay and Shiraz, is the sound made as the tectonic plates of the Great Australian Wine Industry shift and rearrange themselves for the first time in a generation.
Read more...Matt O'Connor, manager of Planet of the Grapes store in Holborn, joined in Harpers' trip to Champagne earlier this month, and blogs on his experience.
Considering the viticultural stats of New Zealand - there were merely 238 wineries and 6610 hectares of vineyard in 1996, now there are 698 wineries and 33,600 hectares - and their constantly growing trend, David Cox, European Director of New Zealand Wines does not think that this will continue. "We've had our big vintage years in 2008 and 2009 and we are back in balance now, pretty much. I don't think we are going to see very many plantings, not for the next couple of years," Cox said at yesterday's Annual Trade Tasting at Lord's Cricket Ground in London.
Read more...Ted Sandbach, managing director of the Oxford Wine Company, picks out his highlights from this week's Harpers trip to Champagne, as well as taking note of what it means for his business.
I'm 25 and a sommelier, from Argentina and, as if that was not weird enough, a little bit crazy. Why? Because the past year I set a personal challenge: I had to taste 2,011 wines over 2011. It was a challenge, clearly, especially considering that maintaining an average of 5.5 corkages daily was a task, at least, daunting.
Read more...Andrew Gordon and Bill Page pay tribute to wine trade stalwart Michael William Jarzebowski (known to many in the trade as Michael Hutton-Black), who passed away on October 7, 2011.
Read more...Champagne producers certainly have a thing or two to learn from their French neighbours in Cognac about remaining true to their luxury roots.
Read more...Biodynamic winemaker Monty Waldin has responded to criticism that last week's biodynamics debate with viticulturist, Dr Richard Smart failed to live up to expectations. Anne Krebiehl also responds below.
Read more...What was billed as the "Grape Debate" between Dr Richard Smart, viticultural luminary, co-author of the seminal book 'Sunlight Into Vines' and proponent of 'conventional' viticulture and Monty Waldin, author, consultant and torch-bearer for all things biodynamic ended up being a disappointment.
Read more...What was billed as the "Grape Debate" between Dr Richard Smart, viticultural luminary, co-author of the seminal book 'Sunlight Into Vines' and proponent of 'conventional' viticulture and Monty Waldin, author, consultant and torch-bearer for all things biodynamic ended up being a disappointment.
Read more...
