Salamanca, 2010
I’m a wine and food enthusiast living in London. I have been studying, analysing and enjoying wine for well over a decade, but only started to write about it (here) in January 2011. I am a firm believer that good wine writing should give you an accurate sense of the wine, enough to decide whether or not you want to try or buy it yourself. My WSET training taught me to be almost dispassionately analytical. I think this is an essential skill but I choose to embellish and wax lyrical here and there. However, the main purpose of these reviews remains to document and to enthuse about great wine making.
In general I don’t review wines from the major supermarket ranges. There are hundreds of wine writers and journalists already providing this kind of advice. It is far harder to find down to earth, objective reviews of what could broadly be termed “fine wines”, and it is this area that I focus on.
I would love to persuade my readers that £10-£20 or more is a worthwhile investment in a bottle of wine, even when it’s not Christmas. Wine making can be a pretty tough, unrewarding occupation, and many of the producers I review would not stay in the business if making money was the only object. Their labours of love deserve to be rewarded.
I don’t score or rate wines, if you want to know what I think you’ll have to read the full post. You can read more about why I don’t use scores in this excellent blog post from Sarah Abbott MW. I don’t accept payment for any of the reviews that I publish on this blog.
I also write for palatepress.com and timatkin.com – that’s my pathetic excuse for not keeping this blog as updated as I’d like!
The very first entry in this blog was written for a competition held by Fine and Rare wines. I didn’t win, but at least it got me started. The winning entry can be read here.
Awards
This piece for Palate Press was awarded Best Post by the Etna DOC Consorzio, at the 2012 EWBC Digital Wine Conference.
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All content on this website is © Simon Woolf unless otherwise stated. Please contact me if you wish to use a photograph or reproduce any of my writing.
