• Bordeaux 2017 – Emerging en primeurs

    If you’re anyway interested in fine wine Bordeaux will be a heading bandied around many mails coming into your inbox this month. The 2017 en primeur campaign has started and the first Châteaux are gently releasing their prices. This will be an interesting campaign, not least because support for this vintage is (quite rightly) cautious thanks to late frosts decimating vineyards around the region. Members of the trade are looking for a reduction in prices of at least 20% to encourage take up of these wines, still sleeping in their oak barrels. One of the first to the post; Château Palmer

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  • Australia day(ish) in Dublin

    There’s a certain admiration I have for the Australians. They stick to their guns. Premium is the message and premium is the product. They ploughed on through a massive down turn in exports, not helped by the strong Aussie dollar and a global recession; coming out the other side with a stronger domestic market and a quality driven, pioneering wine industry ready to re-explore exports. Looking at the latest export report from Wine Australia; value is outstripping volume: it increased 15% to $2.56 billion versus an 8% rise in volume to 811 million litres. The average value of exports is also rising, sitting at $3.16 per litre; the

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  • Burgundy 2016

    A look at the 2016 Vintage in Burgundy upon release.

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  • Really? The Rhône? Why?

    Rhône wine week. Will you ‘get your Rhône on’?!

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  • Burgundy, by our Swedish Sommelier selling wines in the West: Fanny Wennerstrom

    A blog by Fanny Wennerstrom. Our saleswoman in the West. For me, wine is my life but I have had little opportunity to actually do a proper professional wine trip to different regions with other knowledgeable wine lovers. When we were asked to go down to Burgundy, Chablis and Champagne to visit our suppliers, my heart did a flip! We all started off very early to be able to use the days to their maximum I guess and it was a great idea. We landed Wednesday morning in Paris and met up with a driver that was going to drive

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  • Shortages in Chablis

    Sancerre and Chablis have long been favourites for the whites; perhaps perceived as being indicative of a more assured wine drinker, someone with a little more ‘je ne sais quoi’. But with the 2016 vintage we’re moving into the realms of a shortage of Chablis….

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  • Experimentation in Chile

    When thinking about wines made from wild vines, amphora experimentalists and almost ‘natural’ fermentations, Anthony Tindal isn’t immediately seen as the flag waving follower of these more radical styles. Yet, new to our list are a number of small production parcels of wine from the outreaches of Chile, made by adventurous, educated winemakers looking to inject a bit of life into the Chilean wine trade and show the world that, while house wines remain the mainstay of Chilean production on export markets; there are many more strings to their bow. We had a selection of these wines open to taste at

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  • Flying winemaker Simon and our new Yecla blend San Simone

    Winemaking exploits and technical know how of our ‘flying winemaker’ Simon Tyrrell currently making the first vintage of San Simone in Yecla, Spain.

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  • Haut-Médoc, Moulis, Listrac, Pessac-Léognan, Sauternes & Barsac. Bordeaux 2015

    Tastings for Haut-Médoc, Médoc, Moulis and Listrac were held at Ch. Citran in the Haut-Médoc. A rural Château festooned with proud peacocks offered a refreshingly understated venue for the tasting. Looking at the communes case by case: Haut-Médoc showed good concentration for most with less expression on the nose than expected for some. The commune was very hard to define for 2015 overall and has proved to be more of a case of judging wine property by property. Listrac-Médoc generally had good structure in the form of integrated supporting tannins and sweet ripe fruit. Moulis-en-Médoc offered perfumed, expressive tones with the sort of open appeal

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  • Margaux and St.Julien. Bordeaux 2015

    Our notes on the Margaux and St.Julien communes from the Bordeaux 2015 en primeur tastings.

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  • Saint Estèphe & Pauillac 2015 – our thoughts

    Saint Estèphe & Pauillac; with their more northerly position just below the Médoc above Bordeaux, saw the worst of the late rains of 2015. This fact does not however seem to have affected the quality of many of the Châteaux.

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  • Bordeaux 2015 – our opinion

    Is the 2015 Bordeaux vintage living up to the hype? We visited in Primeurs weeks and found approachable wines with some standouts, but perhaps not the uniformity we expected.

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