The flavor of mirabelle plum in wine of Palestine

Last year, there was much mirth on wine Twitter about a particularly excruciating tasting note. You’re right. The wine trade needs to get out more. But still… this one was a beauty. It began well enough – really quite beautiful, in fact. But before long the imaginative descriptions were getting more ornate and strained. It moved from poetic to meaningless before finishing with a reference to Burnt Norton – the first of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets – that put it firmly in Private Eye magazine’s ...

Traditionally the wine auction market took the summer off. Although the season has lengthened recently, summer is usually a fallow period. This year, speculation was rampant – will the market (and the prices) continue their upward spiral? The first fall sales have now been conducted, and if prospects for the wine market remain strong, a few clouds linger on the horizon. Wine auction results in 2021 broke all previous records and set a new benchmark. With sales in major auctions of over £500m, th ...

Described by Courvoisier as ‘daring’, ‘visionary’ and ‘a first-of-its-kind collaboration’, Courvoisier Mizunara was created by the house’s recently-retired maître de chai, Patrice Pinet, and Shinji Fukuyo, chief blender of Japanese whisky maker Suntory. The project dates back to 2015, when the president of Suntory visited Courvoisier at Jarnac shortly after Suntory took over Beam Global, the Cognac house’s then owner, in a deal worth US$16bn. Pinet expressed an interest in experimenting with miz ...