Latest On The Circular
Living it up at Livres en vignes
Jon Wyand shows what to expect on bringing out a wine book with a French publisher as he goes under a hedonistic house arrest at Château du Clos de Vougeot.
One benefit of struggling through the production of a wine book with a French publisher is that you’ll probably be invited to Livres en Vignes, when it has been published. It’s a kind of house arrest at Château du Clos de Vougeot, where you s...
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Review: The Count of Wine by John Umberto Salvi MW
Neil Fairlamb reviews The Count of Wine by John Umberto Salvi (available from Amazon UK) and reflects on his fascinating life in wine.
This has to be the bargain of the year, at £4.99, indeed of the decade at least. For the price of plonk you have Premier Cru quality of anecdote, history and wine wisdom. Every page is full of precise detail, vivid personalities, frequent hilarity, sometimes painf...
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Shedding light on Slovakian wine
Jochen Erler, who first reported on Slovakian wine in the mid-90s, reflects on the country’s wines after judging at the 2019 edition of Slovakia’s National Wine Competition, held in Pezinok.
Pezinok is a pleasant town in the foothills of the Little Carpathian mountain range, reflecting its Austro-Hungarian past in its architecture, and showing a lifestyle á la Vienna with cafés busy all day arou...
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Sacredly steep Sacra
Amaya Cervera asks what it takes for Ribeira Sacra to become a top wine region, and finds this lesser-known and often neglected Galician gem pretty much ticks all of the relevant terroir-related boxes, at least on a small scale. However, there is still plenty of work to be done. A version of this article was first published at Spanish Wine Lover.
Viña Caneiro is a steep vineyard with stone walls ...
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Meet the Member: Liz Sagues
Liz Sagues is well known for her book on English wine, but it was in fact a bottle of Burgundy (enjoyed in the dark!) that brought her into the world of fine wine. In this interview, we find out how she has enjoyed maintaining a wine column for over 30 years at a North London newspaper and why she believes Muscadet and Loire Moelleux are the most underrated wines today. As a Committee Member Liz h...
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A taste of Les 110 de Taillevent & Christopher Lecoufle
Christopher Lecoufle is the Head Sommelier for Les 110 de Taillevent, a wine-focused restaurant which offers a benefit to Circle members and plenty of benefits to any wine lover as Amanda Barnes discovers on a visit there.
There are restaurants that serve wine, and then there are wine restaurants. Les 110 de Taillevent is definitely one of the latter. Even the name plays on the importance of win...
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Minerality: fact or fiction?
Amanda Barnes looks back at a tasting exploring one of the world’s most divisive wine terms. A version of this article was first published on Around the World in 80 Harvests.
‘Minerality’. Probably the wine word most likely to cause excitement, fury and frustration in wine circles today. And, as it turns out, one that will most certainly fill a room with wine journalists. As was the setting for a...
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Meet the Member: Natalie MacLean
Natalie MacLean is a wine writer, broadcaster and Brunello lover. She's also the only person to have won both the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation and the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing from Les Dames d'Escoffier International. Amanda Barnes interviews her on her career in wine, how digital media has transformed wine writing and educ...
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2019 in review
Robert Smyth and Amanda Barnes take a quick look at some of the biggest news stories and wine happenings in 2019.
2019 got off to a fizzing start as nine prolific Cava producers left the DO to start their own new premium sparkling wine category, Corpinnat (February 2019). Despite the rather recent initiative in 2017 of Cava DO to keep some of their most prestigious producers happy with the spec...
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A Weekend in Ontario Wine Country
Margaret Swaine looks back at one of her favourite weekends of the year, the Cuvée Grand Tasting in Niagara. She shares her food and wine highlights from 2019's event. A version of this article was published in her Global Gourmet column in www.travelindustrytoday.com
Ontario is the largest wine grape producing province in Canada, with 17,000 acres of vines. Its Niagara Peninsula is the largest Ca...
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