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adelaide hills, australia, fiano, grenache, mclaren vale, tasmania -

australia

I'm just back from a two-week trip to Australia, only the second time I've been there. I visited producers I know well, and discovered others I'd never heard of. Some are making wine that's quite traditional to Australia's long wine-producing culture, others are much more experimental, many are somewhere in-between, advancing the quality of Australian wine with lower alcohol, less fruity wines. Here were some highlights. sparkling wine There is some phenomenal sparkling wine being made in Australia. The history of bubbles in the country goes back to the nineteenth century, when wines won awards in Europe. The development of...

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asturias, chile, dão, itata, portugal, slovenia, spain -

always on the look-out for the unexpected

In a wine world dominated by the same grape varieties made in more or less the same way, it’s always exciting to discover something different. More unusual, esoteric varieties are often connected to the history of a region, made by experimental mavericks, and stand out for the individuality of the wines. Take, for instance, Fran Ascencio and his Urogallo winery (named after a spectacular looking local bird) in Asturias in northern Spain. Asturias is a cool, wet, beautiful region, between Basque Country and Galicia, rising from the Atlantic Ocean into the Cantabrian mountains. It’s most famous for its cider as...

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alentejo, field blends, portugal -

field blends

After phylloxera, Prohibition, and the Second World War, California wine was in a sorry state and needed reviving. There were a handful of growers and producers, especially in Napa Valley, determined to make quality wine and get California back on the map. There was also an influential wine writer called Frank Shoonmacker, who was frustrated by the insistence of many producers labeling their wines as "Chablis," "Sauternes," "Champagne," or "Burgundy" (which sadly still happens to a limited extent). Producers did this to make their wines seem more European and higher quality, neither of which was true. So he came up...

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california, castilla, chardonnay, Friulano, grüner veltliner, malvar, marlborough, new zealand, ribolla gialla, spain -

unusual white varieties

blackpoolmatt's wine club likes to find unusual wines that you're not going to easily find in most retail outlets and as there are so many producers around the world making wines from unlikely grape varieties there are lots of choices. Producers make wine from lesser-known varieties to stand out from the crowd (how much Chardonnay does the world need?), but also because they feel different grape varieties can express a sense of place in various ways. This can happen in two ways: returning to grape varieties which have been neglected but long planted in the region, which is how Rías...

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alcohol, bugey, côte roannaise, itata, nebbiolo, rheingau, savoie, valtellina, washington -

low alcohol wines

A couple of years ago, I tasted a wine from Napa which shall remain nameless and which had a relentlessly high alcohol of 15.8%. Not only did this level of alcohol cause the wine to be out of balance, it's dangerously high: a glass, let alone a bottle, would get you drunk. The wine was borne out of the trend in the late 1990s and 2000s for high-alcohol wines. The grapes are left on the vine for a long time to build up sugar levels, in the belief that it results in more flavor in the wine. Some producers and...

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