Archive for October, 2011:
The Douro – cool to be hot
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The Douro is one of the oldest vineyards in the world, and it also ranks amongst the hottest, making it a challenging viticultural landscape. Yet the region makes some of the finest still and fortified wines known to man. When all the buzz is about cool climate, why is it cool to be hot in the Douro?
Château du Hureau
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Nearly midway between Angers and Tours, along the middle part of the Loire’s languid length lies its clutch of red wine appellations, and it is the village of Dampierre-sur-Loire, near Saumur, that Château de Hureau has carved its reputation.
Sicily's own nero d'avola
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Some countries have an adopted signature grape variety – carmenere in Chile, pinotage in South Africa, malbec in Argentina. Sicily has nero d’avola.
Domaine de la Taille aux Loups
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Owner Jacky Blot is one of those charming iconoclasts of wine whose passion oozes out of more pores than he possesses. Almost everything he says makes seductive sense even if you don’t actually quite understand it, and one could easily lose days of fascinating conversation and thesis in his company.
Sustainable viticulture in Burgundy
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With pioneering icons such as Domaine Leflaive and Domaine Pierre Morey who live and breathe biodynamics, Burgundy has long been at the forefront of green viticulture. But in a perfect marketing storm where almost everyone says they’re doing sustainable viticulture, even if they don’t really, how do you separate marketing myth from substantive sustainability?
Authentic Wine, by Jamie Goode and Sam Harrop MW
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I’d imagined this was going to be a book about natural wines under a slightly different name to draw us in. But the reader quickly grasps this book is about more than the narrow, ‘natural’, narrative. It embraces the broadest discussion of wines of place within a treatise around the various environmental issues affecting viticulture and winemaking.
Crus Bourgeois 2009 – tasting notes
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The Alliance des Cru bourgeois announced the list of cru bourgeois for the 2009 vintage at the end of September 2011. Here are the tasting notes of the wines I tasted.
Castagna
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Ex-film director Julian Castagna bought his vineyard land in Beechworth, Victoria, in 1997, planting shiraz, sangiovese and viognier, with nebbiolo following in 2001.
Crus Bourgeois 2009 – facts and figures
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Facts and figures from the 2009 Crus Bourgeois classification
