Wines made from Primitivo grapes of Salento - Page 6

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 ...

Château Batailley 2021 was released en primeur this week at around €26.5 per bottle ex-Bordeaux, level with the debut price of the 2020-vintage release. Batailley 2021 was being offered by international merchants at £330 per 12 bottles in bond, said Liv-ex, which described it as ‘one of the best value [Batailley] wines on the market today’. Some analysts and merchants suggested the Pauillac estate had set a relatively positive tone for the Bordeaux en primeur campaign over the next f ...

You’re miked up. The audience hears every short breath you take, every gulp, every stumble, every mispronunciation. You’ve been handed two anonymous glasses of red wine (which just happen to be Petrus 2012 and 2003). Is the former, you wonder, a top Ribera del Duero? Could the latter, um, be a Hermitage from the 1990s? Well, probably not – if you’ve got this far. Welcome to the sole moment in the wine calendar (and this one only happens every three years) when wine truly becomes a spectator spor ...