Wines made from Zinfandel grapes of Monferrato

What kind of wine should you serve at a BBQ?  With the weather (hopefully) on our side, there are few things better than a barbecue in the sunshine accompanied by a delicious glass of wine. Choosing a good bottle for your barbecue can really elevate the occasion, although for something a little less formal, there’s plenty to choose from in terms of canned or bag-in-box wines instead. Forget those days of washing down a burnt burger with warm Chardonnay or a ‘cooked’ red served in a plastic ...

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 ...

Foundational to the notion of terroir is the story of Burgundy. It is a relationship between Pinot Noir and the monks’ investment in defining place, identifying growing conditions in a complex tapestry of climat and cru that has inspired winemakers worldwide. Countless vintners have sought to replicate its magic elsewhere, planting Pinot around the globe. With it has developed an assertion almost unquestioned – Pinot Noir is the grape most expressive of terroir. But in wines grown outside the Co ...