Monthly Archives: August 2007


Partway through a mega-tasting of South African Sauvignon Blanc. I love Hugh Johnson’s line about Sauvignon – ‘it has a loud voice but not a musical one’. In short doses, it can be great, but en masse… New Zealand is probably the source of the shrillest wines. The annual NZ […]

SA SB



Wine is all about pleasure, right? OK, maybe that’s a simplification, but the bottom line is that in a world where we don’t have to drink wine toa) get us in such a mood to attack marauding Gothsb) warm our cockles because we live in a central-heating-less yurtc) warp our […]

Single bottle trauma



Nothing too wine-y today – gearing up to taste dozens of South African Sauvignons next week, but today’s a day when I should be writing and hoping that editors don’t ring up saying ‘Where’s my article on ___?’ But while I’m here, my sister has packed many jobs into her […]

Extremely lost in translation


1) Thou shalt not kill. If you’re planning to keep wine at home for anything more than a couple of years, you need to give serious thought to where and how it is stored, otherwise you could ruin it. More of that in a future post, but for now, it’s […]

The ten commandments of the wine cellar


I confess, this lunchtime, I had a glass of Pinot Grigio. I know, I know, I’m supposed to talk about wine here rather than Pinot Grigio. A press release came through a couple of months ago from a company suggesting that the southern Italian grape Fiano might be ‘the next […]

Too much, too young