Is Beaujolais Nouveau dead as a dodo in UK? + a PS from Touraine

A dodo As Beaujolais Nouveau has featured in several posts over the past week on Les 5 du Vin I thought it worth commenting on how it is now doing in the UK. In the 1980s and into the early 1990s the arrival of Beaujolais Nouveau was eagerly anticipated and made the national news. There …

Cahors continues to impress me

Several articles on this blog have, over recent years, told about how several of us have been impressed by the wines of he south-western appellation of Cahors in France (all red so far, although producers can sell both white and rosé wines from this region under the lesser-known IGP Lot label). A recent, and quite …

Beaujolais and Beaujolais Village Nouveaux 2018: some comments and a selection of wines

These wines will only be on sale later this week, as from Thursday to be exact. Beaujolais Nouveau is out of fashion? So who cares? Not I for one, as I abhor all things chosen for being "fashionable". Added to which, and more importantly, Beaujolais Nouveau (and its often superior neighbour, Beaujolais Villages Nouveau) can …

Penfolds and Henschke: tastings from two top Australian producers.

As I mentioned in a recent article, in successive weeks during October these two famous Australian producers were in Paris where they organized sit-down tastings of a wide selection from their ranges of wines. As there are as many similarities as differences of all kinds between these two producers, I thought it worth while to …

To blend or not to blend? That is the question.

I could well have entitled this article «Is smaller necessarily better?», but the key question is perhaps the one included in the title, as size is perhaps less relevant here unless of course one belongs to the «small is beautiful» religion. I increasingly see, in various documents destined to communicate opinions or even information, whether …

Pour le rosé, autrichien ou sud’Af ?

Voilà une question qu’on ne se pose guère, le rosé c’est la Provence voyons ! Et bien non, pas cette fois ! Jetons notre dévolu sur des productions à la couleur aussi tendre que les provençales, mais différentes par le cépage ou le mode de vinification. Un rosé d’arrière-saisonSi le rosé se boit surtout au printemps et …

Singular Estates of Gonzalez Byass

On connaît le groupe Gonzalez Byass pour ses sherries - notamment la marque Tio Pepe. Mais depuis plus de 30 ans, la famille Gonzalez Byass est sortie de son berceau andalou, investissant aux quatre coins de d’Espagne, où elle exploite une série de domaines regroupés sous le nom de Singular Estates. Et notamment: Bodegas Beronia …