“F” is for films about wine

It's fair to say that if it wasn’t for films I probably would never have got into wine.  Not because I watched a film and had an epiphany that a career in wine may be my future, precisely the opposite actually. Working in IFE providing movies to airlines meant I travelled a fair bit, and it was during trips to places as far flung as Auckland, Los Angeles, Melbourne and Cape Town that I was exposed to wines and…

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“E” is for Entre-Deux-Mers

Weirdly I really struggled with “E”, in comparison “X” and “Z” are going to be a breeze!  The really obvious one: English Wine, I remembered I had covered off in an in-depth piece a couple of years ago.  So rather than cheat and just direct readers back to that post I've switched my attention to Bordeaux, and in particular a less-glamorous, generally less flashy area which nevertheless is worth a mention given it is actually the largest wine producing…

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“D” is for dried-grapes

Before you assume I am writing about sultana’s or raisins, don’t worry I’m not, well not exactly anyway. You may wonder what dried grapes have got to do specifically with wine?  Well, here’s an easy starter question for 10, what do the following wines have in common:  Amarone, Recioto, Vin Santo, Passito di Pantelleria?  Yes, you guessed it, these are all wines that are made from dried-grapes. Now I am not going to talk about Noble Rot (Botrytis) in…

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“C” is for Châteauneuf-du-Pape

Before I really developed an interest in wine, there were always the “go-to“ wines that I would buy – not because I knew anything about them, but because I’d heard of them so assumed (rightly or wrongly), they must be good! Châteauneuf-du-Pape most definitely fell into that category and whenever I was over in France on the booze-cruise, I would fill up the basket with as much of the stuff as I could find, even on occasion grabbing the…

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“B” is for Biodynamic

You may or may not have heard this term, but trust me, it’s an ideal which is increasingly gaining momentum with winemakers globally as the concepts of sustainability and environmental conservation grow. Nicolas Joly, the esteemed Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy and Champagne House Roederer are among producers to make the move into biodynamic viticulture. What does it mean? Based on the work of Rudolph Steiner way back in 1924, the movement pre-dates Organic farming, yet is arguably nowhere…

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