Just been reading a recent post on Colin Smith’s blog, all about the Monsoon Valley wines from Thailand – anyone else tried them? For me, they fall into the ‘er, interesting’ bracket, as the following piece I did a few years ago for the now-defunct North West Enquirer will testify… […]
Yearly Archives: 2009
Tonight I’m on blind tasting at its most extreme. Found a bottle lurking in a corner that has no label, capsule or name on the cork. I’m pretty sure it’s from the Languedoc, as it’s awash with fragrant, gentle, herb-strewn fruit, with a hint of old leather. I’d hazard a […]
The Blind leading the Blind
Just been reading this post on Heather Dougherty’s wine blog about the much-abused name of Chablis. My second job in the wine trade** was working in a bottle shop in Albert Park, a seaside suburb of Melbourne close to the vibrant St Kilda. Tuesday evening was washing night, and my […]
Chablis
I’ve tended not to like cheap New Zealand Bordeaux-inspired reds – scrawny and charmless and with overenthusiastic oak-ageing. A bit like cheap Bordeaux, really, although perhaps not the oak thing. The good news is that the Kiwis seem to have realised that such wines aren’t their forte, and have virtually […]
Villa Maria Private Bin Merlot 2006
…but sometimes a wine comes along that you open in the morning and keep coming back to ‘check on’ and suddenly find that come tea-time (tea in the northern sense of the word, being the evening meal, served at any time from 4-7pm) there’s not as much left in the […]
I’m supposed to only taste wine during the day but…
Don’t know why, but on one of the chilliest weekends in recent years, we’ve by-passed red wines and been sipping and supping white wines, all from southern France. It’s a vast and varied region, and as with the reds, trying to pigeon-hole them under one banner is somewhat difficult. But […]