Wine labels can tell you a lot about what’s in the bottle – and by that, I don’t mean alcohol percentages or the grape variety. The visual style of the label often drops a few clues about the target market, the aspirations of the wine maker and even the price point. Budget new world wines [...]
Tag Archives: review
Friday night at Green and Blue – Bressan Schioppettino 2004 and Pintia 2006
Someone said to me recently that Friday night was all the excuse they needed to celebrate with a fine wine. I decided to put this excellent philosophy into practice last night and recruited a few friends to repair to Green and Blue, an exceptional wine bar in East Dulwich. For those not familiar, Green and [...]
Pinotage, without a lick of paint
The Morning Claret tends to steer clear of the new world, being a lover of the more classic, restrained styles of wine making. But the other night I was searching around for something to match with a south-east asian influenced curry, and settled on a South African Pinotage which had appeared in the house after [...]
Hilliard’s charms
Hilliard is a small cafe-bistro, just off Fleet Street. It’s an oasis of quality and personality, amongst Fleet Street’s sea of tiresome chain eateries. I eat lunch there a few times every week, which always brightens up the day. Well executed, unfussy food, with careful sourcing and interesting twists. By way of example, today’s lunch [...]
Hot but not bothered – Phélan Ségur 2003
It’s always interesting to re-taste the wines from Bordeaux’s 2003 heatwave. There was much scaremongering at the time – the wines were flabby, they might fall apart before reaching maturity, they were largely atypical of the region, and so on. How enjoyable then, to taste Thierry Gardinier’s classic, yet accessible St. Estephe, which has happily [...]