Psst……at a Festival?!

Image shared by vino75com, via Iconosquare.

It’s Festival Season in the Northern Hemisphere and the wine writings of MyWineDaily’s featured bloggers are not surprisingly reflecting this. The heroically selfless Spittoon blog – ‘We spit so that you can swallow’ – was at the Bristol Foodies Festival, where Charles Metcalfe was showing that there is more than one way to think about choosing wines to go with your food, that some reds can be chilled and so on.

He was talking in particular about Parma Ham and Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese, two products that the European Union is promoting as part of its Discover the Origin Campaign.  This communicates, as the name implies, the quality  and provenance of products which have Protected Designation of Origin status.  Charles Metcalfe also included Burgundy wines, Douro Wines and (chilled Tawny) Port Wines in his  recommendations, which can be seen on a video linked to by the blog.

Meanwhile, Helen McGinn, (Knackered Mothers’ Wine Club), was having lots of fun and doing wine tastings at Camp Bestival!

The (Wonderful) Diversity of Wine – and Wine Writers!

 

Port is also Wine – and Cool says Miss Vicky Wine!

Our Feed of the Month on MyWineDaily is Jamie Goode’s Wine Blog. He is rightly a popular writer with his column in The Sunday Express and various wine and drinks publications. He came to wine writing via the slightly unusual route of editing books and a  Ph.D in plant biology, has had a couple of books published, been awarded for his journalism and made numerous TV appearances.

Yesterday we highlighted an approach to wine that tries to make sense of its complexities with straightforward language and humour, for wines at the bottom end of the price range  – perfectly valid in our opinion. Jamie’s latest piece addresses this from a different perspective, asks questions about how to ‘deal with’ the incredible diversity of wine that he details and – rightly in our opinion – celebrates it.

We think that he, The Wine Curmudgeon and we could probably agree that the most rewarding way for the drinker and wine lover, however knowledgeable or inexperienced, to approach the mass of choice available, is to treat it as a lifelong adventure and always try new wines as well as those that we know we’ll love. How complicated can that be?!

(Almost) No Port Left!

Graham’s Ne Oublie Tawny, From a Cask made in 1882.

Following our piece yesterday commenting on Jamie Goode’s blog on the assessment of ‘super-expensive’ wines, today there are a couple of timely blogs that we’d like to point you to on MyWineDaily on a related subject. A couple of the large Port houses have recently released extremely old wines, both nineteenth century, in very high quality, symbolic bespoke packaging and  of course, limited quantities.

Last month Taylor’s announced the arrival of their 1863  single harvest tawny (‘Vintage Port’ is bottled after a few years and matures in the bottle) at £3,000 a time,  presented in crystal decanters. This is from two casks of wine acquired as part of a company purchased last year, as explained by Victoria Moore at The Telegraph. Meanwhile as reported by Amy Wislocki in Decanter today, at Christie’s this week, Paul Symington was launching Graham’s Ne Oublie, to be bottled from one of three casks of wine made in 1882, at the eye-watering price of £4,510. Go to the blogs for the ins and outs of the different names, packaging – and tasting notes!

 

Wine with Chocolate?

Photo by Steve Peralta on Iconosquare.

A couple of contrasting posts on MyWineDaily at the moment about this intriguing subject, as producers get ever more adventurous with the product flavours they  come up with in beers,wines or spirits. Also the food matching possibilities they would like us to explore. There’s an example of each, one a new wine product, the other a traditional wine – Port – that is recommended with chocolate.

Although we’ve noticed the ‘Rubis‘ brand of wine with chocolate flavour, we haven’t tried it yet. It seems to be dividing opinions, as it has won a  Silver Medal at the IWSC (International Wine & Spirit Comp.), while The Cambridge Wine Blogger doesn’t think it works at all and recommends Port or Whisky with a good piece of chocolate instead.

Vinspire went along to Churchill’s Port House, who were doing tastings of Ports with food other than just cheese, and loved them! This was part of London Wine Week which goes on until the weekend. Is Port becoming as trendy as Sherry?

Lebanon, Port and Some History

Vineyards at Chateau Kefraya, Bekaa Valley, photographed by Quentin Sadler.

Today we’d like to highlight a couple of posts that caught our eye in particular over the last few days.  Fans of Lebanese wines tend to be quite evangelical about the lovely reds, which are generally quite big  and from The Bekaa Valley. The country has however developed its offering a lot in recent years, though we didn’t realise quite how much until we saw Quentin Sadler’s post on the Catavino blog last week. Quentin has his own blog as well as writing guest posts like this fascinating piece on the broad range  of wines being made and grapes grown in The Lebanon. As an educator he also provides great historical insights into the development of wine growing, how it and grape varieties have crossed borders since antiquity and so on. “Lebanon, The Phoenicians and Iberian Grapes” takes you on a wonderful tour, in every sense!

Our new Blog of the Month is from the excellent gang at Vinspire. One of their latest posts is also a great bit of history – about the English influence on the development of the Port trade and the making of the wines, which continues today. Vintage stuff for you to enjoy on MyWineDaily!