Latest On The Circular
Old vine time is nigh
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All change in Alsace
Sue Eames scopes and scans Alsatian soils, studying how the different grapes varieties perform in them, and also senses the strong shift to organic and biodynamic farming.
Back in March, I was lucky enough to be invited on the Association of Wine Educators’ visit to Alsace, and found it be a region that has changed dramatically since when I last visited in 2022. We learnt so much about how the di...
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All hail Acadie Blanc
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Substack for wine writers
CWW Chair Meg Maker shares her experiences on Substack and talks to other wine writers migrating to the online platform.
Five months ago I migrated my wine publication, Maker’s Table, from WordPress to Substack. I was sick of the infrastructure demands and expense of WordPress and eager to take advantage of tools baked into the Substack platform. Those include text and video posts, newsletter ema...
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Shared expressions of the Turbiana grape
From the southern shores of Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake, Robin Goldsmith loads up on Lugana and savours a tantalising trio of tannins, acidity and salinity, served up with freshness and clarity. A version of this article was originally published on The Write Taste.
Lugana DOC, which encompasses five municipalities, lies on the southern shores of Lake Garda, the largest lake in Italy. It's on...
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Chinese wine condensed
China’s wine story is a tale of dynasties and revolutions, emperors and poets, deserts and mountains that’s spread across the ages. Now enjoying a renaissance, can its wine move from a novelty to an international contender, asks Janet Wang? A version of this article first appeared in Sommelier India.
While many regions lay claim to producing the world’s ‘oldest wine’, the truth remains elusive i...
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How Satake shaped sake
William F. O’Connor polishes up our knowledge on the company that made wine-like sake possible.
What is the original alcoholic beverage of Japan? Is this a simple question that the vast majority of people are likely to answer correctly? Well, suspicious readers will have accurately guessed that the rhetorical question posed above suggests that the answer is not sake, or nihon-shu. It just has to...
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“Wine lit something up inside of me that I have never been able to turn off.”
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Unapologetically British
Robin Goldsmith heads on down to Hattingley Valley, where he digs deep to uncover the past, present and future of this Hampshire diamond.
Peter Ustinov once famously described English wine as his "idea of hell". Yet, this once laughed-at industry is now the UK's fastest growing agricultural sector and wine tourism is gathering speed, too. Latest figures show that there are 1,104 vineyards in the ...
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From the Chair: Curiosity is the Writer’s Currency
Circle Chair Meg Maker reflects on how humility and curiosity — not expertise alone — make the finest wine writers.
There’s a nonprofit in my town (Lyme, New Hampshire; population 1,730) dedicated to education about the forests of northeastern America. They create materials about forest ecology, conservation, and stewardship, publishing a print quarterly called Northern Woodlands along with a blo...
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