The flavor of plum in wine of Rioja

How’s the weather been this year? Awful. ‘La nature m’écoeure’, one of my wine-growing friends posted on Facebook on 8 April, having been out to look at the frost-crippled shoots on his vines that morning: ‘Nature disgusts me’. It takes a lot to make a wine-grower feel that. He wasn’t alone. Jeremiads echo around the northern hemisphere as 2021 closes. It’s been the year of all the miseries. None suffered more horribly than the growers of Germany’s Ahr valley, where floodwaters caused by the fou ...

The Roussillon is home to a range of wine styles, at varying price points. Sweet fortified wines (vin doux naturel) used to dominate production, with still dry wines (vin sec) in the minority. In the last 30 years, however, this has completely changed, and vin sec now makes up the majority (80%) of the Roussillon’s output. The recent Wines of Roussillon tasting, held in London, not only highlighted many good quality dry wines being produced, but also cemented the idea that Roussillon whites are ...

Being notably peated, the inaugural chapter emerged in 2020, followed by Chapter Two in 2021, finished in a first fill Port pipe and refill Bourbon cask. The concluding sixth chapter is reserved for release in 2025, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the foundation of the Old Midleton site, which operated from 1825 to 1975. ‘When it’s gone, it’s gone, which is sad in some ways, breaking the link to the old distillery,’ said Kevin O’Gorman, the Master Distiller and head of maturation of the ...