Latest On The Circular
From the Chair: Help another wine writer in 2026
In her column this month, Circle Chair Meg Maker encourage members to help and mentor colleagues as their New Year’s resolution for 2026.
Wine as a category is experiencing myriad existential threats: climatic, meteorological, social, cultural, financial. It’s a destabilising time, but as wine commentators our role is to help make sense of it all, prying apart false and shaky claims, dismantling ...
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The Mythology of Etna
In this extract from Kevin Day’s Opening a Bottle: Italy, published by Opening a Bottle, Kevin intricately introduces the awe-inspiring and active Sicilian volcano that has such a profound influence on the wines made from its soils and slopes. He weaves together layers of history, flowing smoothly into the present.
Picture a lone mountain by the Ionian Sea, 8,000 years ago. With its broad shoulde...
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Perusing Planeta’s broad and colourful palette of Sicilian wines
Robert Smyth takes a tour through Sicily’s wine regions while visiting Planeta, a prolific producer with vines and wines spanning the large Italian island.
After having long enjoyed Planeta’s wines from afar, it was a wonderful to finally get the opportunity to visit them in Sicily, and also catch up with their Hungarian winemaker Patricia Tóth.
Driving up the winding roads to Planeta’s winery ...
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Age like a fine rośe
Libertation Tardive, in tandem with renowned rosé expert and Circle-member Liz Gabay MW, take a deep dive into the question of how well refined rośe can age. Dominic Buckwell, a co-founder of the aforementioned organisation, whose mantra is “Great wines take time”, and also a Circle-member, reports.
In October 2025, the not-for-profit organisation called Liberation Tardive, co-founded by myself, ...
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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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