Yearly Archives: 2009

Spent Monday sifting through some wines for my regular Square Meal Lifestyle column. The next issue, looking at Australian Riesling, Cabernet Franc, Grüner Veltliner, Oloroso and southern Rhône reds, is out some time in Autumn. I already had the Rieslings lined up, but I needed to do some tasting in […]

The Rhône, Cab Franc, GrüVe and Oloroso

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Just spent 5 minutes and 23 second of my life which I will never be able to get back watching a Wine Spectator video on wine service in restaurants. The phrase ‘poncey crap’ does not go far enough to describing quite how horrible it was. I’m not going to go […]

Restaurant rant

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Not sure how they’ve managed to do it but Majestic has got hold of a parcel of wines from four Constellation wineries – Bay of Fires in Tasmania, Houghton in Western Australia, Ravenswood in California and Flagstone in South Africa – and are selling them at prices that will doubtless […]

Fill yer boots – New World madness at Majestic

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Just added notes on six sparkling wines to the First Taste pages here. Above is a pic of the corks from a couple of the Champagnes – you can tell that the Tsarine has had extra bottle age since disgorging (removing the yeast sediment left from the second fermentation in […]

Six fizzes

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a a About ten years ago, I went to South Australia as a guest international judge at the McLaren Vale wine show. There are those who criticise the Australian show system, but as anyone who’s been involved in it will tell you, a) it’s great fun, b) it’s hard work, […]

High Noon

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