What are the best wines to drink with spicy hot food? I’m talking here about chilli-hot food. Your first thought might be to reach for the biggest, heartiest red wine on the wine rack to pair with a hot chilli con carne for example - after all I recommend in my general food and wine matching tips that you think about the matching the structure
Tannins in wine tend to have a bad press but is it justified? This blogpost takes a look at exactly what tannin is and how you can detect it in wine, which wines are the most tannic and which the least and how levels of tannin can be altered during wine-making and during ageing from the effects of oak. I’ll also cover the best foods
Wines With Attitude has been a First Drop wines stockist since tasting their wines at a UK Australia Day tasting in 2015 and the wines never disappoint as they are consistently of great quality and full of flavour, good value and ready to drink on release without the need for long cellaring – in fact a perfect match for Wines With Attitude. And I am
Malbec, Argentinian Malbec in particular, is one of the most popular red wines in the UK. This blogpost looks into the reasons for Malbec’s popularity, explores facts about the Malbec grape that account, in part, for the wine’s different aromas & flavours and for the different styles of Malbec wine.
Although the Malbec grape is the flagship grape of Argentina, it originated in
Terroir is a much-used and much-debated term but what exactly does it mean? Some say terroir produces better wines with more character, so-called terroir wines - but is that right? I confess I have long been a great fan of terroir and I use the expression quite liberally in my unique tasting notes. But there are many who think the term terroir is over-used and
In this blogpost I look at the typical Christmas dishes that feature as a main course for Christmas dinner in UK homes and make suggestions about wines that can complement them - and about wines that won't match so well. See my separate blog posts covering a) Christmas desserts and wine and b) wine for Christmas starters,
Think back to when you first started drinking wine - what was your preferred wine style then? My guess is something different from your current favourite style of wine. For me personally I suspect it was something like a medium-dry German white wine a la Blue Nun or a rustic Chianti from a raffia-covered bottle but that probably says more about my age and wallet
Chances are you will have seen the term "Old Vine" or one of its foreign equivalent terms such as "Vieilles Vignes", "Alte Reben", "Viñas Viejas", "Vinhas Velhas" or "Antico Vitigno" on some wine labels. There is no requirement under any wine regulations that I know to mention the age of the vines used for wine grape production and yet old vine is a term that
Writing my wine blog post A Quick Guide to New Zealand's Wines made my mouth water for Pinot Noir so I thought I would pour myself a glass and write about this tricky grape and its amazing wines.
Pinot Noir was a very unfashionable wine for many years when the market favoured bigger, brasher and more alcoholic styles of wine but since the early
Have you ever wondered why some days a wine tastes great but the next time you open a bottle of the same wine from the same vintage, it tastes really different? There is such a thing as bottle variation usually caused by damage to a seal or cork such that oxygen infiltrates the bottle more quickly making the wine more developed or even faulty. But