After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain's best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success
After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain's best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success
If not actually reinventing the wheel, Rioja is certainly reinventing its wines on a rolling basis, as, astonishingly, it always has done. Since the pioneering Marqués de Murrieta and Marqués de Riscal (as they became) changed the face of the wine in the 1850s, everybody involved in the industry has brought new thinking with every passing generation. The result is an astonishing diversity; from bright, fresh ‘Nouveau’-style wines, through classic, oaky, vanilla-scented gran reservas, to modern, stylish, lightly oaked examples, to the ‘new wave’ high-expression wines geared to terroir and made from ancient plantations of gnarled old Tempranillo - with prices to match.
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A visit to the London International Wine Fair is, paradoxically, a sobering experience.
I’ve been reading an intriguing article by Miles Thomas in the Psychologist magazine. It’s called ‘On Vines and Minds’, and it discusses many of the ways in which our brains determine the experience of drinking wine.
The budget has hit wine merchants and drinkers quite hard.
Time for our annual offer of Château Musar from the excellent folk at Wheeler Cellars, sister company to Lay & Wheeler.
I love Stone, Vine & Sun of Winchester. They keep winning awards for best independent wine merchant; they have a knack for finding delicious wines at excellent prices from places you haven’t heard about yet but very soon will.
This is our positively final offer for Christmas, and it’s terrific. Thanks to Lay & Wheeler we have half a dozen French classics, all of which would be very welcome on the Yuletide dinner table, or at a memorable party. What’s more, every one is generously discounted. They are not cheap wines, but they are tremendous value.
I cannot imagine anyone who looks less like Father Christmas than Adam Brett-Smith, the managing director of Corney & Barrow. Adam is slender instead of fat, his face clean-shaven rather than covered in a fluffy white beard, and he would no more wear a red fur-lined suit and a silly hat than you or I would go to work dressed as Ronald McDonald.
A visit to Averys of Bristol is always a delight. They are one of our oldest wine merchants, and while most of the stock is kept these days in a modern warehouse out of town, they still have a cellar in central Bristol.
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