Sometimes when Irish friends come to visit me in Italy they have remarked on the habit of wine-makers in my village of drinking their wine out of tumblers. 'Why don't they use proper glasses? The ones with stems?' they ask. I suppose the answer is partly habit, and it's also partly a question of respect. More>>

Once upon a time we got to know wines by their region of origin, and that was defined by the local tradition. Chianti tastes the way it does, not just because of the method of vinification called 'governo', but because it's made from two local varieties - the San Giovese and the Canaiolo.More>>

From time to time I get upset in the column above when I find wine lists in restaurants that have huge and greedy mark-ups. It's worth considering just what makes a mark-up unacceptable. Let's start with the basics. Restaurants don't buy their wines like the rest of us in off-licenses or in supermarkets, they buy them from wholesalers.More>>

A couple of times recently I've been looking down a wine list in a restaurant and found myself inwardly tut-tutting. If a wine list doesn't compliment a restaurant's food, then it's simply not a good list. So let's a have a look at what precisely makes a list a good one.More>>

There are many mysteries to wine, and that's perhaps why as a subject it continues to stimulate the interest as well as the palate. There's one that has been on my mind most of the summer, one that I've noticed many a time, but that I've never really addressed seriously. It's this; the puzzle of taste and provenance. More>>

Wine tastings are curious things, the more you do them the more you're struck by the peculiarities of the tasting process. I started thinking about this some time ago in Italy, when some friends of mine were saying that they'd only drink Champagne, never Italian sparkling whites. More>>

Matching food and wine is a lot of fun, arranging for the flavours of one to enhance the flavours of the other. But there's a new game that I've come across and you might like to try it, it's matching wine and chocolate.More>>

There was a time in my youth when nearly every wine list used to have a motto inscribed underneath it: 'he who drinks beer lives to be a hundred, but he who drinks wine lives forever'. Obviously this is a maxim more likely to be believed in the wine producing countries of the south than it is in the beer brewing countries of the north.More>>

You may have noticed it. More and more wines have little badges slapped onto the labels saying things like 'Gold Medal Award'. Look closely at the fine print and you'll see that the wine won third prize at the Southern Victoria Farmers' Co-Operative Annual show. So what does it mean? More>>

A few weeks ago I was sitting at dinner and the lady beside me made an interesting point about the restaurant's wine list. 'It's very definitely not woman friendly,' she said. I pressed her to elaborate. 'The way restaurants write their lists, all grape types and countries of origin, doesn't help women choose.More>>

There has been a huge increase in the amount of wine that is sold in Ireland over the past ten years, due in part to increasing affluence and in part to changes in life-style. Research shows that a significant amount of the wine sold in Ireland is picked up in a supermarket along with the groceries - which seems entirely reasonable, given that the wine is most likely to be drunk with a meal.More>>

As the world of wine marketing has shifted from a regional emphasis towards a varietal emphasis, there can't be many wine drinkers left who haven't tasted the big four varietals; Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. There are moments when I scan supermarket shelves that I wonder what happened to the other grape varieties. Actually, despite misgivings, they're mostly alive and well and in some cases making returns to popularity. More>>

It's something I've touched on before, but there's a strong correlation between fashion and taste. Sometimes tastes in wines are determined by necessity; I'm thinking of wine in the Classical world that needed to have water added to be palatable. Drink enough of anything with a strong taste and eventually you become inured.More>>

A couple of weeks ago I was wondering in print if the current marketing thrust - that of selling wines by the grape variety to the almost complete exclusion of any other way, was in fact helping wine-drinkers. I have always been a supporter of introducing wines by grape variety, it makes remembering a wine easy and it makes finding a wine that might please easier on a restaurant's list or on a supermarket's shelf. That ease of recognition is a big boon to people who are new to wine, but as your tastes develop and your palate alters, the cracks in the system become more apparent. More>>

A change in marketing strategy took place in the wine business about twenty years ago. Someone, somewhere had the bright idea of marketing wines by the variety of grape from which it was made, what are called 'varietals'. It has been a huge success - there can't be anyone left who drinks wine who hasn't heard of 'Chardonnay' or 'Cabernet Sauvignon'.More>>

In my village of Gallinaro in Italy we've just finished the eighth annual festival of Cabernet, where all the local producers present their wines to the thousands of visitors who come to enjoy free tastings and free food.More>>

Walking into an shop that has a huge array of wines on offer is intimidating. It's the volume of choices on offer today that does it: twenty years ago the choice was limited, so choosing was a lot easier. There are two ways you can approach this multiplicity of choices, you can stick to a couple of wines that you know or you can take a chance.More>>

It must be true to say that the best-known wine-maker in this country is Wolf Blass. It's possible that, like me, you didn't know that that's his name on the bottle - Wolf being a diminutive of Wolfgang. I met him recently in London, where he was hosting a dinner to celebrate his fourth win of the 'Jimmy Watson' trophy, one of Australia's most prestigious for a year-old red. I say 'his', but we have to be exact here.More>>

The reason why we have such a multiplicity of choices when go to buy a bottle of wine is thanks to a millennia-old process of genetic selection. Botanists will tell you that in Europe the aboriginal vine is the vitis vinifera, which translates literally from the Latin as the vine that brings wine. In the wild, vines climb trees for support and left to their own devices produce a few clusters of inconsequential grapes. One of our ancestors in the dim recesses of time discovered that grapes weren't just good to eat, if you put the juice in a container something magical occurred - the juice fermented into wine and you could get drunk. The process caught on remarkably quickly and soon anywhere that was suited to the cultivation of the vine became a wine-maker's haven. More>>