The Right Temperature - Not too hot, not too cold
To chill or not?
It's generally understood that you drink whites cold and reds warm, and broadly speaking that's true. Still, you can enjoy your wines much more if you take a closer look. It's essentially true that the colder you drink a wine the less of its flavours will be apparent.
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A German Blush - The Spatburgunder grape and its wines
Every now and then it's fun to try something unusual. I try to bear in mind Arnold Bax's maxim that 'you should try everything in life at least once, with the possible exeption of incest and Morris dancing', but when it comes to wines it's good every now and then to step outside the grape varieties and commercial standards that are becoming depressingly similar. By now anyone who's remotely interested in wine will have tried a Cabernet, a Merlot, a Sauvignon and a Chardonnay and many of these varieties, even when they come from different parts of the world, will often taste disconcertingly alike.
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After Dinner Drinks - Drinks to help you digest
It's suddenly struck me as odd that after some years of writing about food, I haven't addressed digestion. For an Italian that demonstrates remarkable restraint. Whereas in Ireland digestion and bowel movements in general are conversations we have with doctors, in Italy these are daily topics of discourse with friends and family.
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Age and Wine - Storing wine for ageing
Wine has a very long history, reaching right back to the Golden Age of Sumer and Babylon some 6,000 years ago. It's tempting to think that the wine that we drink is much the same drink that the ancients enjoyed, but the truth is that it's very different.
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Alba - The wines of Italy's Piedmont
If you were to drive into Italy from its North-west border with France, you come into the French-speaking Val d'Aosta. The valley is long, and nowhere is it wider than a few kilometres. It's sides are precipitous and for much of the year the mountains are capped with snow.
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Alsace & Tradition - Why their wine-makers are traditionalists
Wine and wine-making has a long history and for me, one of the attractions of the industry is that you can find the old and the new, and just about any combination of the two that you like. I have friends and relatives in my Italian village who make their wines in exactly the same way that it's been made for millennia and I have a cousin who makes his wine in a state-of-the-art winery that has more in common with a chemist's laboratory than it does with a traditional cantina.
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An Italian Festa - Gallinaro's annual wine festa
I make it a rule to be in my little Italian village of Gallinaro every year for the second week of August. There are two reasons for this: first there's the festa of San Gerardo our patron saint on the 11th and then two days later on the 13th there's the annual wine festa.
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Appellations - The development of Appellation Laws
In theory the idea of a national body applying rules and regulations to the making of wine means that the consumer will be better protected. The rules of Appellation across Europe and elsewhere are designed to ensure that when the consumer sees 'appellation controlee' or its equivalent, certain things are guaranteed.
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Artisan Wines - The art of home-made wines
Once a year, on the 13th of August, my little village in Italy hosts the annual 'Festa del Cabernet', which is Italian for a three-day festa of drinking huge amounts of our local wine. There's a long wine-making tradition that stretches right back to pre-Roman times. My village, Gallinaro, sits right in the middle of a large valley called the Comino Valley.
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Australian Rieslings - Another look
The Riesling is one of the great white grapes. Today's fashions may have pushed it a little to one side in favour of the Chardonnay, but its inherent nobility is unquestioned. When you think about it, all the very greatest German wines are made from the Riesling and the very finest wines from Alsace are as well. So much for the Old World, but the Riesling found pastures new in the Antipodes as well. It's hard to believe looking through the Australian section of an off-license today where Chardonnay rules that before 1970 Australia's white wine production was based on the Riesling, which arrived in Australia with the large influx of German settlers in the 1840s.
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Australian Rieslings - Australia' re-emergent variety
It's almost a knee-jerk reaction; when you think of Australian white wines you think of Chardonnay. Until the 1980s Australian wines were almost unknown in Ireland, but it's the measure of their export success that now Australian wines outsell French and are the market leaders. What coincided with this export success was the arrival of Chardonnay varietals in Australia; until the 80s the principle white wine grape had been the Riesling.
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Australian Shiraz - The grape and its varietals
There's a story that at the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873 the judges were tasting the red Hermitage wines from Australia. After the second bottle was tasted they judges began to mutter out loud 'this can't be Australian Wine, it's too good, it must be French'. This may have been the first recorded moment when Europeans were surprised at the quality of Australian wines, but it wasn't the last.
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Australian Varietals - Some of the lesser-known grapes
A few years ago, surveying the popular end of the wine market, you might have been forgiven for thinking that Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay were the only two grape varieties in the world. Certainly I was beginning to believe that whatever about anywhere else, Australia appeared to be concentrating its efforts solely on those two varieties. Huge, heavily oaked Chardonnays and jammy Cabernets exploded onto the market and were such an instant success that everyone leapt onto the band-wagon, not only in Australia, but in just about the whole of the wine-producing world.
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Austrian Wines - A general view
When you think about wines from the 'Old World', which I suspect means Europe, thoughts tend to move towards France, Italy and the Iberian peninsula. When pushed, you might come up with Bulgaria as a source of cheap red plonk, you may even think of Hungary and its noble Tokaj, but I'd be surprised if Austria got a mention.
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Balsamic Vinegar - The great condiment from Modena
Anthony Barton of the eponymous chateaus in Bordeaux once remarked that 'wine is the brief interlude between grape juice and vinegar'. It's true; a wine that's been naturally fermented and without additives will become vinegar upon exposure to air, a fact long known to wine-makers.
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Beaujolais - The Old and the Nouveau
The news that M. Deboeuf has just poured many thousands of litres of Beaujolais down the drain tells us a thing or two about market forces. I can still remember the first time my father drove me through the Beaujolais region I kept asking him 'so does all the Beaujolais in the world come from here?
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Beaujolais - The area and its Grands Crus
Beaujolais is one of those recognisable wines. You can find it on plenty of restaurant lists, it's easy to drink, it has a fruity smell. In many ways it was the European prototype of later New World trends, when fresher, livelier wines began to made from classic varietals all around the world. It's a wine that's light in colour, but still often fairly alcoholic. It's not a wine that designed to age in the bottle, it's a wine that made to be drunk young and without a great deal of ceremony. You could call it the perfect party wine.
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Biodynamic Wines - Wines in harmony with nature
Last week I was writing about organic wines, but there is a movement - especially strong among French growers - for biodynamic wines. Biodynamism has all the rigours that are applied to organic growing, but has a whole raft more on top of those. For these holistic growers their crop, their management of it, and their ultimate vinification of it is ruled by the moon.
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Bordeaux - It's significance to wine-lovers
There's no doubt that the single most pivotal word for wine-drinkers is 'Bordeaux'. Its eminence rests on centuries of producing high-quality wines and in large quantities. The whole wine-making area, which takes up a tenth of the department of the Gironde, regularly produces between 4 and 5 billion hectolitres a year - a lot of wine by any measure.
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Bordeaux - What makes those wines great
Not much in the world of wine is universally accepted as true. There are shades of opinion and degrees of truth. There is, however, one truth that seems to hold across countries and across the ages, and it's this: the world's best red wines come from Bordeaux. It's worth looking at why this should have become an unarguable maxim.
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