Ten minutes with … Tom Carson
Tom Carson is pushing the envelope when it comes to making pinot noir in Australia, and is a strong advocate of wines of place.
Elgo Estate
Strathbogie Ranges is a wine growing region to watch, not least due to a mere handful of pioneering producers. Elgo Estate, owned by Grant and Suzanne Taresch is one such property on an upward trajectory.
A taste of the world of wine, Patrick Iland, Peter Gago, Andrew Caillard, Peter Dry
This book offers a taster, as in an introduction, to the wine world, and the erudition of these four authors augurs well for an enjoyable and edifying read.
The next steps for Aussie pinot noir and chardonnay
On a visit to London earlier this month, Tom Carson, the winemaker at Yabby Lake in Australia’s Mornington Peninsula, hosted a tasting of Aussie chardonnay and pinot noir from some of the regions around Melbourne where these varieties are doing particularly well: Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula and Geelong.
A Kamptal quintet
During a recent visit, a group of five growers hosted a tasting from their small corner of Kamptal, which is renowned for its grüner veltliners and rieslings.
Helm Wines
Helm Wines, in the Canberra District, produces the tastiest Australian rieslings that I’ve come across.
Winemaking Problems Solved, edited by Christian E. Butzke
This book looks at categories of winemaking and breaks them up into a question and answer format to deal with problems in the winery.
Loess is more for grüner veltliner
In Lower Austria there is a divide between riesling and grüner veltliner which keeps riesling on primary rock and grüner veltliner on loess. Loess, it seems does remarkable things to grüner veltliner – the wines are creamier, fatter, richer, and more immediately fruity in youth.
Feudo Montoni
Not quite bang in the middle of the island, not close to any major town of import, not quite isolated, but quite out on its own in the uplands of central Sicily, lies the vinous beacon of Feudo Montoni.
The greening of the Douro Valley
A decade ago, the Douro vineyards were a brown, bare-earthed environment, where patches of dry, Mediterranean climate-adapted scrubland juxtaposed with bare earth beneath vines. As a result of a growing use of cover crop, the Douro vineyards are greening over, literally and environmentally.
