Natural, organic, biodynamic, real wine and the people and places behind them

We have already tried to build an ark for forgotten grape varieties, and our list is still populated by examples of the rare and autochthonous. Sometimes they feature gloriously on…

The trouble with jargon is that it is catching. We consciously (or unconsciously) echo this slanguage as if using certain hackneyed words or expressions is the only way to grab…

In the Doctor Who episode "Robot of Sherwood," the Doctor angrily declares: "That isn't even funny. That was bantering. I am totally against bantering.”  Wine has come a long way since…

It just struck me. Next year, I will have worked 30 years for one company. The days of wine. Laughs, we had a few.  Allow me to clamber creakily into…

Mostly small and beautiful So many tastings, so little time. So say probably most of our customers. Not only is the calendar crammed with massive international fairs, conferences and symposiums,…

  Reputation can refer to renown (widespread fame) or esteem (the regard in which something is held). It is something that feeds on itself and grows larger until such time…

Popular singing has a highly valued place in Georgian culture. Polyphonic singing, in the Georgian language, is a secular tradition in a country whose language and culture have often been…

Les Caves doesn’t do Champagne and Burgundy tastings until they do. And so it came to pass with our inaugural punt into these regions on Monday October 13th at London's…

  They’re here! (Poltergeist) To whet your thirst, the following newbies are on order now, nestled in LCB and awaiting your surprise and delight: Beulah Violetta, Umbria Beulah, peel me…

“I hope your mind will explore the music and take you wherever the music takes you. It’s not a case of just singing along, it’s listening. It can be one…

Buy me brandy, A snifter of wine. Who am I kidding? I’ll drink turpentine. --Barney Gumble, ‘A Boozehound Named Barney’, The Simpson’s (a parody of ‘Feed The Birds’ from The…

Your Jaw Will Hit The Flor… …When you learn of this fino not from Jerez It is not from Jerez, and it is not Palomino, yet here we have a…

Other zero abv drinks may apply The demand for low/zero alcoholic drinks has increased steadily over the last two decades. The primary motivation is driven by health concerns related to…

Something BAD (sic), something new, and something a bit older (Ed- that’s feeble) Marto Wein is the project of Marto Otto Wörner and Alanna Lagamba who make natural wine in…

  When the song of the terroir drowns out the background noise Five years ago, I tasted a new addition to the Zidarich portfolio. I was already deeply enamoured with…

The time for wine is a feeling akin to switching off one’s phone (or sloughing off one’s work persona), marking a point in the day when one’s behaviour for a…

Puglian all one’s talents I Parieti was founded in 2019 by Matteo Santoiemma on his family farm in the Murge between Bari, Taranto and Matera. Matteo personally takes care of…

What is bang-for-buck wine? The Bang  …happens when a wine that favourably impacts your senses. It does not have to be obvious or powerful, the proverbial 2 x4 to the…

What is bang-for-buck wine? The Bang  …happens when a wine that favourably impacts your senses. It does not have to be obvious or powerful, the proverbial 2 x4 to the…

  We’re getting used to wines being other than what they should be. Cue a woad-spattered Mel Gibson screaming “freedom!” at the top of his lungs. Vin de France has…

'Tween seasons (summer & autumn) bottles End of summer sounds so final. Like the end of childhood. I always associate September with going back after hols like “the whining school-boy,…

Why are you not tasting what I am tasting? (I ask silently) Why are you making undue allowances for a wine that is plainly not interesting? To me! Every rhetorical…

Sclavos Tsausi, Cephalonia, Greece The Sclavos family traces its roots back for centuries in Cephalonia. A branch of the family emigrated in 1700 to the Black Sea port of Odessa…

A magnificent six ride again   Italy was known as Enotria Tellus, the land of vines. Metternich said that Italy was “a geographical expression.” From the Alpine valleys of Valle…

What sort of wines make me think, 'yes, I am now on holiday'? I am nothing if not predictable. My holidays are always spent in the same cottage in the…

  The Beck winery is a family estate in Gols, in northern Burgenland near lake Neusiedl. Traditionally, there were small mixed farms in the area, but they always grew vines…

I always subscribed to the notion that low/no sulphur wines would be more invigorating, more digestible than more conventional added-sulphite wines. Despite this romantic feeling, I always reserved a portion…

The dog’s bellottis   Stefano Bellotti understood farming and the language of nature at a fundamental level. He made wines that were wild, long-lived and spoke deeply of their origins.…

A Georgian supra is so much more than eating and drinking. It is a form of nourishment for the soul, an affirmation of the civilising effect of the meal taken…

  One of the terms that wine professionals frequently “deploy” in conversation amongst one another is terroir, although it can also be used when referring to food or the rootedness…

In "From Russia with Love," James Bond famously comments, "Red wine with fish? Well, that should have told me something”. That should tell us something of the old-fashioned preconceptions regarding…

The campaign for value-for-money real wine starts here. We love wines that are packed with personality at democratic price. Finca Casa Balaguer is a small family-owned winery based in Alicante…

Like to the apples of the Dead Sea’s shore; All ashes to the taste. As a wine buyer, you very occasionally cop a bouquet for a newly acquired wine that…

It is arbitrariness time. When you see a wine glorified on social media you are meant to feel a bat squeak of envy. Look what they are drinking and look…

  Damiano Ciolli The Ciolli family has owned five (now seven) hectares of vineyards for four generations in Central Italy, south-east of Rome. Before Damiano, his grandfather and his father…

“The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists…

  Regenerative farming is attractive as a philosophy in that it puts nature and the environment first. Post-war farming practices have been industrial (exploitation of the land leading to over-production)…

Where Frappato (and now Grillo) sings “From season to season the earth speaks to us, listens to us, responds to us. Ours is a silent and authentic dialogue. This is…

Sublime (Natural) Wine in Berlin   My knowledge of Berlin was confined to snippets of Cabaret and its depiction of the decaying Weimar Republic and the Cold War tales of…

Has natural wine become too political for its own good? This is not a question that keeps me awake at night wondering about its ramifications. But it is a corollary…

Where sunshine and wine combine The visual pleasure given to us by wine is underestimated in the overall scheme of things. We may feel that our sense of sight is…

Substance is a label created by Myrko Tépus and Nicolas de Groot, dedicated to fermented artisan lightly sparkling natural drinks made without alcohol. The idea is inspired by vignerons to…

La Luna Blanc by Bruno Duchene I have been singing the praises of cool wines, whites that evoke the crisp fluency of shallow mountain streams gliding over polished stones, firm-skinned…

Smells, words & memories Tasting is an act of transmutation of aromas and flavours into measured and unspoken language. We receive a cocktail of raw chemical and microbiological elements in…

They used to say that if you ate too many carrots you would turn orange. I wonder if the same holds true for orange wine. When I am drinking one,…

Having had the pleasure of working with Te Whare Ra as their UK importer for nearly a decade, it comes as no real surprise that Anna and Jason have been…

In 2005, Pablo and his wife Andrea left their jobs (he was a nursery teacher, and she had studied political science) to become winegrowers in Ribera del Duero. Andrea started…

The grapes we don’t talk about They don’t call us the company that sells wines from 250 grape varieties for nothing. Actually, no-one calls us that, but this is to…

Monsieur Meunier Champagne Eric Taillet is based in Baslieux-sous-Châtillon in the Belval Valley. The domain is composed of 6 hectares of Meunier for the most part (82%), a little bit…

Red fruit day It’s me, isn’t it? When a wine I love one year because its particularly snappy and sappy quality tips over into something that I kind of like,…

Part 2: Volunteers, vintages and winemaking   How do you recruit volunteers to help at vintage time for Lost in a Field? Glad you asked! Alongside launching the wine project,…

Pure class wines from the Basket Range There is a bit of a debate amongst wine growers and journalists about the state of the natural wine scene in Australia. After…

Part 1: Background, branding, heritage varieties & lost vineyards   Tell us about how you got into wine. I wish I had a romantic origin story, something like sipping a…

Value for money is in eye of the stem holder A cheap wine may offer no pleasure and thus is of zero-value, whereas a relatively expensive wine may indeed confer…

Here is a draft of a letter that we sent to our respective members of parliament, showing our concern about the new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) measures. To us, they…

  La Stoppa is an ancient estate extending over 52 hectares, thirty of which are planted with vines, surrounding an elegant medieval tower. In 1973, the estate was acquired by…

Today, I was shopping in the local farmer’s market. The weather was beautiful and energising – high pressure prevailed, cloudless skies vibrated with blueness, and the air was the perfect…

Age is not a number, except when it is. Old vines is not the same thing as old grape varieties. These latter were usually indigenous to a region and drunk…

“Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.”  -Terry Tempest Williams   Every so often, when there…

It is a fact not universally acknowledged (and easily forgotten) that Les Caves has been rubbing shoulders with a notable and varied selection of wine wizards from Oz for quite…

What price pricing Whenever I hear the words natural wine, I reach for my wallet – and put it away. There has been talk abroad of the cost of natural…

It has been a difficult January and February. Firstly, the sun seems to have packed its luggage and gone on holiday. By the time you read this, we will be…

We do like Mondeuse (with apologies to The Boomtown Rats) Louis Magnin is the third generation of the domaine of some 8-hectares spread between Arbin and Montmélian. Organic since 2009,…

We first started working with Dominique Belluard, an artisan-vigneron in the village of Ayse in the Haute-Savoie, almost in the shadow of Mont-Blanc, in summer 2003. We first shipped his…

  Recently, I have been watching YouTube videos of certain leading stand ups and admiring the artful way they construct their apparently artless routines. Even (and perhaps especially) the improvisations…

Totally radelaide Eric Narioo, who is somehow and somewhat familiar to us, and Anna Martens, made their first wine together on Mount Etna, Sicily in 2008. Since then, their small…

We are not machines. Our palates are not perfectly calibrated to taste sensitively all the time. We are too tired to taste well sometimes and become aware of tasting less…

  -Once upon a time we were able to put people on the moon, but we have never found a sensible solution for recycling and reusing glass wine bottles. -Weather…

Just as “a policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” the life of the common and garden wine buyer is not all glad-handing and vineyard-hopping in exotic locations and quaffing…

The Makaridze family has a long history of viticulture in the village of Terjola in Georgia’s central western Imereti region. Grapes had always been cultivated, but mostly to sell as…

Professor Natty gets fizzical A new series where you can ask Professor Natty (neither a professor nor well-dressed) any wine-related question you care to, and he will attempt to give…

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order. Samuel…

Doug's Top 10 11 I have got a little list of personal wines of the year. It is a diary of drinking, naturally, but also about my feelings and attitudes…

“For as we would wish that a painter who is to draw a beautiful face, in which there is yet some imperfection, should neither wholly leave out, nor yet too…

So, we were having lunch in The Barbary on Westbourne Grove the other week and Alex Dale popped open a bottle of Vinum Pinotage from Stellenbosch. I don’t have a…

You take the venom out of a cobra and what have you got? A belt. Glenn Quagmire – Family Guy I am a sucker for observational comedy. You know the…

November – the month of the drowned dog ~Ted Hughes; The eleventh twelfth of a weariness ~ Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary and the arrival of the first tranche of…

We started the season with a good water supply. Hot weather in April caused a very early bud break which meant a high danger of late frost. Fortunately, apart from…

Getting on Minerves Our final Pyrenee visit in Southern France was to Domaine Jean-Baptiste Senat, located in Trausse-Minervois, a rural commune in the Aude Department. Trausse is part of the…

Of vines, wines, feasts, oyster-education - and absent Picpoul On the second day of the Pyrenees's jaunt around Southern France--not-so-bright and definitely earlier than we would wish--we left our hotel…

Concerning a debate and a Q & A session with two producers for the trade organised by Sowine on behalf of Beaujolais and hosted with panache by Queena Wong. The…

News of new wines, new vintages Prepare for the seasonal attack of the Cazottes. We have replenished the liqueur cabinet with a host of fruity numbers from the house of…

With Emily Harman, Jamie Goode and Doug Wregg Just Another Wine Podcast.... Or not another wine podcast. Said with heavy irony in a world-weary voice. Does the world need more…

California I'm coming home I'm going to see the folks I dig I'll even kiss a Sunset pig California I'm coming home Joni Mitchell Broc around the clock Broc Cellars…

Columbo: I want you to teach me everything you know. Wine Expert: It took me forty years to acquire my expertise. Columbo: Well, what can you do in an hour…

  I receive around a dozen mails per day from PR companies asking whether I want to improve our brand recognition. I appreciate that much time is dedicated to developing…

Cevennes up Our second port of call on day one was to the renowned biodynamic estate, Mas Foulaquier, owned and run by the affable Pierre Jéquier and Blandine Chauchat. A mas was…

Domaine Hauvette, Beau en Provence   Despite the best efforts of Marseille airport to stymy our arrival, we penetrated France’s Provençale perimeter, hired our fleet of jalopies, and set off…

Part One – Oregon not forgotten In 1982 when Chariots of Fire was awarded an Oscar for Best Picture, actor and director Colin Welland memorably exclaimed: “The British are coming”.…

  We’ve been championing the flipside of the Aussie wine scene since four young Turks, James Erskine, Tom Shobbrook, Anton van Klopper and Sam Hughes combined to form a natural…

Sublime outrage Let us pay tribute to the magnificent otherness of certain wines, those that defy expectations in the most glorious way. Over the years, natural wines have shifted the…

It is with deep sorrow that we learned of the passing of Susanna Forbes after a lengthy illness. She co-founded Little Pomona Cidery & Orchard, with her husband James and they…

  Over the decades wine styles have changed due to the application of modern (often industrial) farming techniques and also been radically altered by vinification methods designed to “clean up”…

I am not an expert (to put it mildly) about whether the systemic use of chemicals in vineyards and the cocktail of allowable additives used to stabilise wines is injurious…

One of the things that I like doing on holiday is to bring a bottle of wine down to the beach when the sun is setting, half fill a glass…

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Denogent family, originally from Fuissé, started the winegrowing business. Andrée Robert, née Denogent, grandmother of Antoine and Nicolas, owned 5 hectares of…

We roll blinking into September with a pair of trade tastings. The first is in London called (Do You) Remember the 23rd of September? The title is a nod and…

  Andrea Occhipinti fell in love with the vineyards of Gradoli while he was at the Agrarian University of Tuscia, so much so that they became the subject of his…