Wines made from Nebbiolo grapes of Barolo

I’ve had the ‘decant or not decant’ conversation countless times with wine lovers and industry insiders, and have discovered that most either love or hate these seemingly benign glass containers. I fall firmly into the hate ’em camp, especially when it comes to decanting old wines. Aged wines are fragile, and after years of being under cork the sudden explosion of oxygen creates the worst possible shock. On impact, the wine loses aromas and flavours that will never be recovered. Decanting is lik ...

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 ...

At the 2021 Decanter World Wine Awards, the world’s largest wine competition saw its biggest year to date, with 18,094 wines tasted from 56 countries. Over 15 consecutive days in June 2021, almost 170 expert wine judges, including 44 Masters of Wine and 11 Master Sommeliers, awarded 50 Best in Show, 179 Platinum, 635 Gold, 5,607 Silver and 8,332 Bronze medals. Join Decanter at our Fine Wine Encounter NYC this June, where you will have the opportunity to sample 23 of these top awarded Gold, Plati ...