100 Great Natural Wines: Southern Rhône, Provence & Corsica

by blog on July 7, 2020

This is a series profiling the producers on our list who make natural wines. Within this series I will be highlighting some of the extraordinary and rare bottles and vintages that have helped to shape our appreciation of natural wines over the years. Previous posts from our 100 Great Natural Wines series: Intro Austria Jura […]

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Love and Wine in the Time of Coronavirus: Part 1

by blog on July 7, 2020

March I always start writing projects way after the event. So, here am I sitting on the sofa, thirty pages into Bleak House and determined not to skip a page, but struggling to focus. I am of the generation that is bewitched and transfixed by the laptop screen. The emptier it is, the emptier my […]

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Decanting: Andrea Occhipinti’s Alter Alea & Alea Rosa Rosato

July 7, 2020

Occhipintis are like buses. You wait for one and then three come along at once. Giusto (COS) and Arianna are well-established favourites amongst us and the natural wine cognoscenti. Andrea is no relation – as they say – and ploughs his furrow in a different part of Italy, namely in the northern part of Lazio. […]

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The Unalternative Wine Glossary: B

July 6, 2020

Here is a lexicon of definitions of key wine words. The definitions are not intended to be scientifically objective and, in many cases, will be somewhat simplistic. Some will describe the technical side of wine(s), others will examine the more abstract and aesthetic ideas behind wine. To view Doug Wregg’s Real Alternative Wine Glossary, starting […]

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Spring and Early Summer Arrivals: France

July 5, 2020

What’s been and gone and what’s still to come You can lock down a nation (Dominic Cummings excepted), but you can’t prevent a goodly amount of wine from breaking and entering. Over the last couple of months, we’ve had some wonderful wines, some new, some allocated and mixed into pre-selected cases, then some that are […]

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Natural Wine: A Q&A for WSET Diploma Students. Part Two.

June 24, 2020

Read Part One here! Is it easier to practice natural winemaking practices in certain wine regions as opposed to other more challenging areas? You can make natural wine anywhere. But it always comes back to farming. The most exciting region for natural wine is the Loire – so many BD and organic producers operating in […]

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Decanting Burja: VIP in Vipava, Slovenia

June 24, 2020

What’s new: the 2019 Zelen, 2018 Reddo, and a new wine, the 2019 Roza. Posestvo Burja, by Primoz Lavrencic, is located in the Vipavska Dolina, or Vipava Valley. Rich descriptions of Vipava viticulture and winemaking can be found in Winemaking for Slovenes (Vinoreja za Slovence), the first Slovenian book on viticulture, written by Matija Vertovec in 1844 […]

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100 Great Natural Wines: Northern Rhône

June 22, 2020

This is a series profiling the producers on our list who make natural wines. Within this series I will be highlighting some of the extraordinary and rare bottles and vintages that have helped to shape our appreciation of natural wines over the years. Previous posts from our 100 Great Natural Wines series: Intro Austria Jura […]

Read the full article →

The Unalternative Wine Glossary: A

June 18, 2020

Here is a lexicon of definitions of key wine words. The definitions are not intended to be scientifically objective and, in many cases, will be somewhat simplistic. Some will describe the technical side of wine(s), others will examine the more abstract and aesthetic ideas behind wine. To view Doug Wregg’s Real Alternative Wine Glossary, starting […]

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Natural Wine: a Q & A for WSET Diploma Students. Part One

June 10, 2020

This was a webinar organised by Serhat Narsap as part of the WSET Diploma exam on business coursework, the subject in this case being “Natural Wine”. Around 30 students from around the world tuned in. Big fist-bump to the guy who got up at 5.00 am in Hawaii! The students submitted their questions before the […]

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