Vindochine
The very top bracket of white wines from Burgundy are the stuff of legend, be they the Grand Cru or Premier Cru Montrachet, (Montrachet, Le Montrachet, Batard-Montrachet, Croits Batard Montrachet, Chassagne Montrachet, Chevalier Montrachet, Puligny Montrachet, Bienvenues Batard Montrachet) the wines of Meursault, Corton-Charlemange, or wine from several other tiny appellations and vineyards scattered […]
Bourbon Barrel Aged Wine Young Things Whilst ‘Natural’ and ‘Orange’ wines get a lot of press as the biggest new trends to hit the wine market in decades, with their rebellious appeal to a younger generation of wine drinkers; another trend has quietly been taking over wine shelves across the United States and […]
Catalina Sounds winery in Marlborough, New Zealand is the proud owner of one of the most unique and exceptional vineyards in the entire region. The small range of Single Vineyard wines they produce off this site are nothing short of remarkable, for both their sheer quality and their distinctive terroir. The property, which sits […]
Gnadenfrei ‘free by the grace of god’ Marananga ‘by my own two hands’ The Barossa Valley is one of Australia’s oldest and most celebrated wine regions, enjoying a history as rich and complex as its world-famous wines. In December 1837, British Naval and Army Officer, Surveyor General of the Colony of South Australia, […]
The Rising Vineyard sits in the Christmas Hills between St. Andrews and Yarra Glen, so named for the emancipated convict David Christmas; who managed to get himself lost in the region during the year 1842. Prior to this landmark event the area was known as the Stringy Bark Forest. The gravel soils here were […]
Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves. -Jean-Jacques Rousseau Masanobu Fukuoka (1913 –2008) was a Japanese farmer and philosopher, he was a trained microbiologist and agricultural scientist and after completing his education he worked at the Yokohama Customs Bureau. In 1937 he was taken to hospital with pneumonia and whilst there had […]
I noted with interest that a special 20th anniversary edition of John Ralston Saul’s jeremiad, ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ had been released, a book that provoked in me a great deal of thought when I first read it, (ironically) almost twenty years ago. The tome is a sustained, agitated and sometimes aggressive tirade; a rant, an anatomy […]
“In vino veritas, (in wine, truth)” ― Pliny the Elder As we approached the end of the second millennium, huge growth in wine production in some countries saw a sort of industrialization of grape growing, of the farming of grapes: hand picking, hand pruning, hand tending was out and mechanization, irrigation and the use […]
“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.” ― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Consumer preferences in wine are a bit like hem-lines in the fashion industry, just as sure as they will rise, they will one day come back down again, for every action there is an opposing reaction. In fact, it seems […]
I have just returned from Vinexpo in Hong Kong, where I was invited by my friend and colleague Robert Joseph, (of Le Grand Noir Wines) to attend an insightful presentation he called, ‘The Future of Wine Has Changed’. His seminar and wine tasting looked at emerging trends through all levels of the wine industry, […]