Wine blog
My tasting notes of fine wines I have enjoyed.
We found this rosato wine very acceptable with our summer salad in Terry’s garden in Preston Park, Brighton. Slightly tangy, slightly bitter so interestingly complex and nothing like a French Tavel. Overall impression to us was apricot although the label claims wild strawberries. It’s a mass-market wine available on many supermarket wine shelves in the UK.
A personal import from Corsica - I brought this bottle back from Marseille. Tasting it in Brighton with Terry’s Petits Farcis, the wine immediately recalled that hot night in Sartène exactly four Saturdays ago. The wine is surprisingly light in colour in the glass, tannic but not harsh. We made the dominant taste raspberry and not blackberry, which was a surprise for a red wine from France. The Nielluccio grape varietal’s common heritage with the Sangiovese was more apparent in the neutral situation back in England than the bottle of the same wine that I tasted in Marseille.
A survivor bottle from more than forty years ago, kept largely undisturbed in my cellar since the happy times of the New Romantics, just after the marriage of Charles and Diana but also the year of the Falklands War.
Château Chasse-Spleen was considered a Cru Exceptionnel at the time, it has some of the best-placed vineyards in the Haut Médoc and in 1982 was using traditional methods of vinification with excellent keeping properties. So a last chance to taste this classic claret - or a chance at last!
Read more: Château Chasse-Spleen 1982 - Moulis-en-Médoc - Cru Exceptionnel
This bottle of Pinot Gris from Alsace is a personal import by friends of the family of the vigneron, a memorable wine that is a rare pleasure and which is impossible to buy in a shop. My friend for lunch has met four generations of the winemakers and stayed many times in the hotel near the vines. Note the tall shape and brown glass style of the bottle, which is mandated for the Alsace appellation. The Rhineland wine-glasses are my own.
Read more: David Ermel - Réserve Particulière (2017) - AOC Alsace
A Saint Emilion Grand Cru of a vintage nearly thirty years ago, one of the last of my Father’s cellar. It’s a long time ago: in 1995, John Major was Prime Minister, the €uro had not yet been introduced and the UK enjoyed a long summer heatwave. My Father would have been just seventy, still contributing research papers to the academic journals of biology. Me, I was lighting television studio programmes in London.
