Wine sales, consultancy and education
First off Happy New Year! The themes for the majority of my blogs this year will look at both popular and lesser known wine regions and grape varieties as well as interesting wines I have tasted. I am as always available to answer any wine questions you may have, just drop me a line. Ok, onto this first post of 2018 – Rioja. As I am sure most of you know, Rioja is a region in Northern Spain not…
Otherwise known as ‘sweet wines’, ‘stickies’, or as my dad endearingly likes to call them “Nectar from the Gods”, dessert wines are sadly rarely drunk except at Christmas time (when we all frantically up our sugar intake) or as part of a food and wine pairing at posh restaurants, which is a real shame. I’ve already looked at the fortified wines of Sherry, Port and Madeira which offer a range of lovely sweet wines options, but there are a…
I spent so long on the last post discussing Port that I ran out of time to talk about Madeira. So this brief (I promise) post gives a quick overview of the other great fortified wine from Portugal. Only made on the island of Madeira, the wines are fortified (during fermentation in the case of higher quality wines, post maturation for the cheaper products which are effectively just sweetened and coloured). Where Madeira differs so much from other fortified…
After last week’s foray into Spain, this week we move slightly further west on the Iberian Peninsula, into Portugal –to explore Port. PORT Fortification process - Unlike Sherry, with Port the wine is fortified during fermentation (and after a fairly short and quite vigorous period of extraction - which put simply means punching down the cap of skins to ensure tannins and colour is extracted into the red wine) Note: This is still sometimes done by the traditional method ie…
Over the next couple of weeks in the run up to Christmas I wanted to talk about Fortified wines (by which I mean Sherry, Madeira and Port) as well as Dessert wines. It seems Christmas is often the only time of year when many of these wines get a run out, which I think is a bit of a shame. Hopefully these blogs will encourage a bit of experimentation and adventure. Sherry Anyone that only knows sherry as being…