Alistair Darling is the minister responsible for Britain’s finances. Lately Britain’s finances have not been doing well. However unfairly, many people are holding Mr Darling to blame. In an interview with the Guardian, he revealed how these people are expressing their displeasure. He and his wife recently ate in a restaurant with another couple. When they tried to order a second bottle of wine,

“The waiter came over and said ‘too much wine’ in a loud voice. So we stuck to one bottle for the entire meal.”

If you have ever wondered why British food and British restaurants are so awful, this story tells you all you need to know. Read the rest of this entry »

The region of Alentejo used to be best known for corks. It is said that over half the world’s corks are from Portugal, and of these nearly all are from trees in Alentejo. Since the 1970s the region has also produced some interesting wine. Its best-known firm, Herdade do Esporão, hit form in the 1990s. Since then a combination of sound investment and the gifts of an Australian winemaker named David Baverstock have taken it from strength to strength.

This Reserva is the estate’s flagship wine. It has a bright, appealing nose of strawberries and tulips. On the palate it is robust and slightly tart, with a strong presence of oak. It is fiercely strong (14.5%), and while not perfectly balanced, it is straightforwardly enjoyable, particularly with the right food: steak or venison would go perfectly. $17 in the US, $8 in the UK. Read the rest of this entry »

Some weeks ago I argued that this Chianti, like so many other red Tuscans, was no longer good value for money.  On reflection I think this was unfair.  I would still say that, in most years, these wines offer a poorer deal than wines of equal stature from, say, Chile or South Africa. But some years are better than others, and a few are exceptional in every sense.  This week’s vintage is undoubtedly one such.

I have heard the Antinori family called the Rothschilds of Italian wine.  It would be truer to call the Rothschilds the French Antinoris.  The Rothschilds have been prominent only since the early 1800s, and they entered the world of wine in the 1850s.  The Antinoris have been growing wine since the late 1300s. Twenty-six generations later, the Antinori family owns vineyards in Tuscany, Umbria, Piedmont, southern Italy, and even California. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chilean house of Cousiño-Macul has been going since the mid 1850s. It is still run by its founding family, using vines imported from Bordeaux at the time the house began. Thanks its to location and climate, Chile is immune to the Phylloxera aphid which destroyed most of Europe’s vines later in the nineteenth century. So the wines of Cousiño-Macul offer a direct link to a much earlier age of winemaking.

The connection used to be very apparent in the house’s flagship wine, Antiguas Reservas. This was an old-fashioned, idiosyncratic red that aged very well and was frequently compared to good Graves. That it cost only a fraction of the price of Graves made it especially appealing. Read the rest of this entry »

Odd region, Ribera del Duero. A plateau over 2500 feet above sea level, enduring blisteringly hot days and frosty nights, this is not the first place one would choose to grow grapes. Yet since the 1860s it has produced Spain’s most prestigious wine. Vega Sicilia is a blend of Tinto Fino – the local name for the Tempranillo grape – and Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Malbec. Recent vintages cost around $400 a bottle.

You might suppose that so renowned a wine would have encouraged a horde of local imitators, as Biondi-Santi did with Brunello di Montalcino. But there have been no Vega Sicilia copycats, and until comparatively recently the Duero valley remained a backwater. This all changed in the 1970s, thanks largely to one man, Alejandro Fernandez. His Pesquera, a 100% Tinto Fino, changed the region’s fortunes. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the big political arguments have their counterparts in wine. Take the question of trade. One of the loudest debates of our time is between those who favour governmental control and those who would rather trust market forces. In this argument the world of wine perfectly mirrors the world of politics, with continental Europe obstinately in the first camp, the New World unthinkingly in the second.

Italy, France and Spain require that wines be classified by government-appointed experts, and that each wine label reveal its classification. The consumer must be sure whether he is paying for a vin ordinaire or a grand cru. He must be certain that if a wine comes from a particular location, it will only contain the prescribed amount of a certain grape. Armies of bureaucrats enforce these rules. Anyone who disobeys faces a stiff fine, perhaps even imprisonment. Read the rest of this entry »

It is now around thirty years since the great Tuscan wines were discovered by the rest of the world, and their prices are no longer competitive. Delicious as they are, Brunello di Montalcino, Vino Nobile, and the so-called Supertuscans – Tignanello, Sassicaia and the like – nowadays offer poor value for money.

Part of the blame lies with the Euro, which has been grossly overvalued since its inception. But mostly this is a problem of fashion. Ever since the British and the Americans fell in love with Tuscany, they have all wanted souvenirs of their summer holiday in some picturesque casa colonica. What better memento than a bottle or ten of those smoky reds they drank with their bruschette and T-bone steaks? Up went the price, and the rest of us had to look elsewhere for affordable good-quality vino. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mourvèdre grape has a bewildering range of aliases. In Spain, from where it is thought to originate, it is known as Monastrell. In Portugal and much of the New World it is called Mataro, after the Spanish town of Mataró. Most of France calls it Mourvèdre, after another Spanish town, Murviedro. But in some parts it goes by the splendid name of Estrangle-Chien: “dog strangler”.

The grape is prone to rot, and so does best where the summers are fierce and there are strong winds to keep it dry. Windswept southern France is ideal: in the Rhône it is blended with Grenache to make wines such as Châteauneuf-du-Pape; in Provence it is the principal grape of Bandol.

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Italians hate simplicity. They abhor it as vampires do garlic. Consider the case of Montepulciano, one of Italy’s more interesting grape varietals. It shares its name with a village in Tuscany which makes one of the country’s great wines, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Any reasonable person might suppose that Vino Nobile was made from the Montepulciano grape. They would be wrong. The Noble Wine of Montepulciano is actually made from Sangiovese. It may contain lesser amounts of Canaiolo, Mammolo and Trebbiano. Occasionally it even contains some Gamay. But the one grape you will never find in it is Montepulciano.

Indeed, the Montepulciano grape is scarcely known in Tuscany. Its real home is Abruzzo, on the Adriatic. This province is less fashionable than Tuscany, though no less beautiful and with as much to offer. The same is true of its wines.  The best of these is Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, a big, fleshy red that really is made from the Montepulciano grape. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the charms of wine drinking nowadays is its endless cosmopolitanism. Regular visitors to this blog will have read about Burgundy from New Zealand, Bordeaux from South Africa, Gewürztraminer from Italy and Margaux from New York State. Now we have a delightful Rhône wine from South Australia.

Of course none of these copies is perfect. And the makers would no doubt protest that they are not trying to create doppelgängers of the French classics. But in that case, one is bound to ask what they are doing. Read the rest of this entry »