The flavor of biscuits in wine of Galice

I first contributed to Decanter back in November 1988; the hundreds of columns and articles I’ve written since constitute a journey of discovery. I squirm, though, if I’m described as a ‘wine expert’. Whatever wine knowledge we acquire quickly cools, congeals and crusts over, like custard or gravy, as the years pass. The wine world expands at a clip. Every vintage rewrites history. It’s the chance to share discoveries – not just about wines, but about people, places and the act of drinking itsel ...

I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...

In the last board meeting of 2021 for the regulatory council of DO Terra Alta, in Catalunya, Spain, a long list of changes was approved. The most prominent was the making of a very strict certification system for wines that are 100% Garnatxa Blanca given that it’s their flagship grape variety. But perhaps the most interesting item is a bit further down the list that allows certification for a type of wines that in Catalan are called “vins brisats”. The name refers to white wine ...