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
Rosé is shaking off its reputation for being too pink, too 'girly' and too sweet. New, improved rosé wines are dry, really crisp and display summer fruit flavours. Find out all about how pink wine is made, the different styles of rosé & which foods to eat with rosé. Rosé wine is no longer just for the summer.
Rosés have had
Biodynamic wine remains an enigma to many people and not therefore a priority for most people when shopping for wine. This guide to biodynamic wine explains what biodynamics mean in terms of wine, how you can tell if a wine is biodynamic or not, what the differences are between organic and biodynamic wine and whether biodynamic wines are better for you.
I touched upon the
I had been stocking TWR Pinot Noir for a few years and it had become - and still is - a firm favourite of many Pinot Noir aficionados with customer reviews like this "OMG! Superb, beautifully subtle" and many accolades for all its vintages. So when someone asked me to source some of TWR's white wines, I did not hesitate to investigate.
As luck would
There is a lot of talk about vegan wine these days. You may wonder what all the fuss is about. After all wine is made from grapes, a plant, so you would think it fits perfectly into a vegetarian's or vegan's approved list of food stuffs, wouldn't you? This vegan wine guide looks at why wine isn’t always vegan, the differences between vegan and non-vegan
I'll show my hand upfront - I love a good Chardonnay but I know it is quite a divisive grape with many who don’t like it. Remember the "Anything but Chardonnay" or "ABC" era in the late 1990s? This was almost certainly in part a backlash against "Nothing But Chardonnay" being served. It was just everywhere and then sank almost into oblivion as Sauvignon Blanc