THE first I heard about Portovino was an email invitation from Paul Raven to a tasting of Portuguese wines. “I just want your help,” he wrote, “in choosing some wines from about 40 I have sourced, with a view to starting a new importing venture with a few like-minded individuals.”Read
THE Australian wine industry has grown so rapidly over the last couple of decades that it’s easy to forget many of its leading producers have a long tradition of grape growing and wine making. It’s a tradition as proud and as long as that of many of Europe’s great wine houses.Read
I'M deeply unconvinced by lists of the top 10 films, books, records, holiday destinations or wines. They always seem to leave out my favourites. That said, any reasonable list of the great Champagne houses would have to include Veuve Clicquot.Read
I’M tickled by a ditty which I remember from one of the first wine books I bought: “Port, Port, no Briton ought, consider that he’s done his duty, until he’s felt, beneath his belt, a bottle of the old and fruity.”Read
THE owner of a French transport company who’s passionate about fine fizz recently asked me to translate an email he’d just received from an English friend.Read
THERE are many fine dry white and red wines made near Bergerac on the gentle slopes of the Dordogne Valley, but the greatest wines of this lovely region are sweet. The best known, Monbazillac, is a worthy rival today to Sauternes and Barsac, made less than an hour’s drive away.Read
HAVE some Madeira, m’dear, I’ve got a small cask of it here,” goes the Flanders and Swann song, “and once it’s been opened, you know it won’t keep …” Such deception is only to be expected.Read
THE unique selling point of South African Wines is that they “lead the world in producing wine with integrity”, says Su Birch, the CEO of Wines of South Africa.Read
GÉRARD Bertrand looks like he was quarried, not born (as was once said of ex-Liverpool football star Tommy Smith). He is every inch the former rugby international, except, contrary to a surprisingly large number of reports, the height of his rugby career was the captaincy of Stade Français – when the Paris club was in the second division.Read
LOOK very carefully at the picture of me picking grapes in Champagne a few years ago, and you’ll see that there are green and black berries on the same vine.Read
