Wines made from Primitivo grapes of Salento

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 ...

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 ...

Château Latour 2015 was released for the first time yesterday (14 March), as part of the Pauillac first growth estate’s well-established strategy of eschewing Bordeaux’s annual en primeur campaign in favour of releasing vintages after several years of ageing. Decanter Bordeaux expert Georgie Hindle rated Latour 2015 at 98 points, after tasting it at the Château earlier this year. ‘Still youthful and quite serious but there’s something so appealing about it,’ she wrote. Latour 2015 was priced at ...