By Martin Day
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a grape variety doing rather well in California at the moment, going by the name of Zinfandel. There’s nothing new about Zin, but what is exciting is the current crop of high quality, good value wines making their way over here to the UK.
Zinfandel is going through a re-invention process in the same way Chardonnay has …
Picking a wine for Christmas is notoriously difficult. You have to weigh up the meat (turkey? duck? turducken?), pigs in blankets, the wine-hating cranberry sauce and the dreaded sprouts and that is before you have thought about who is coming, the price and how much you’ll need. In short, you need a wine that can be all things to all people and all foods – and they simply don’t exist.
So stuff the food and wine …
By Omar Raafat
Calera vineyards
Part 3 of Omar’s harvest experience at Calera. If you missed the previous posts click part 1 & part 2 to get the whole story.
In addition to lab tests and punching down, I also got to receive grapes coming from the vineyards and run them through the destemmer, crush Viognier in a vaslin press …
By Omar Raafat
Punching down workout
It’s easy to miss the turning into the region’s most prestigious winery and I very nearly did, coming as it does just after a slight bend in the road and with not much by way of signage to warn you but after a swift (and probably illegal) reversing manoeuvre I was in! …
by Omar Raafat
Calera vineyards
It all started at last year’s Bibendum annual tasting. I’d always wanted to work a harvest but had never had the chance and with none of my European languages being good enough, doing so in France or Italy had never felt like an option. I wanted to be able to ask lots of questions, really find out how …
Last week Bibendum played host to the hottest American wine tasting of the season. Our man on the red carpet, Gareth, was there to assess the best hemlines, haircuts and Cabernets…
Tyra Banks may have been replaced by a bearded winemaker called Ray, and as far as we could tell there were no backstage tantrums, but apart from that our ‘America’s Next Top Bottle’ tasting last week was pretty …
