Wine

A chilly vineyard has become Britain's most Northerly commercial WINE producer for the first time in history. The British wine boom has rarely seen vineyards pop up as far north as Watford as the French try to snap up land for the same desire across the South of England. But no other grape-grower has managed to achieve the longitude co-ordinates of breezy Malton in North Yorkshire. The effects of climate warming and hardier strains of vine have blown away the...

You don’t have to be an expert in fine wine investment to know that when demand grows, so does price. The cost of fine wine from regions like Bordeaux and Chablis have been driven through the roof, making it unaffordable for anyone but the super rich. But change has quietly been brewing in the world of wine, and notions towards fine wine may be set to change; much like everyone who became fed up of having to swallow cheap, tasteless...

So you’ve made the decision to invest in fine wine; you don’t like the abstract nature of the numbers in the stock market, and you’re partial to the grape itself, so it seemed like a natural decision. Well, a few words of caution before you go head-first into the wild world of wine for profit. You should not treat fine wine investment as a source of guaranteed profit. Of course, you want to make money from it, but it is,...

China’s thriving wine market will be worth more than the UK by 2020, VINEXPO has forecast. The UK will be pushed into third place among the world’s biggest wine markets when sales of still and sparkling wine reach $21 billion in China compared to $16 billion in the UK. The data reveals changes in the behaviour of drinkers of still wines over the next five years as UK imports fall from 120.9 million 9-litre cases in 2015 to 117.4 million...

Wine has long been seen as the stuff of connoisseurs, a beverage which comes with its own arcane mythology, only slurped and understood by an insufferable few. Films like Sideways and Somm have only served to deepen the mystery around the hallowed grape, and most sensible-thinking people are put off by anything breaking the dreaded £10 barrier. “Sometimes,” as the great cultural critic Alan Partridge once said, “you just want to say, sod all this wine, just give me a...

I always love a wine with a story. And so steeped in historical significance is The King’s Wrath Pinot Noir that this bottle may just take the biscuit. Most of us are familiar with the term ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’ which became synonymous with the Elizabethan era. But to trace its origins you have to go back to Henry III. During the High Middle Ages those in England guilty of treason were punished in a variety of ways, including drawing...

There is something gloriously refined about drinking Venetian wine on a warm summer’s evening. Located in the best vineyard sites in foothill and hillsides near the Italian Austrian border, winemakers Masi has been at the forefront of Venetian wine for several decades, working to identify the historic "cru" vineyard sites for Amarone. They produce modern, attractive and well-balanced wines credited for “revolutionising the art of wine-making in the Venetian region”, defined as a “touchstone” of the area by Hugh Johnson....

Is White Rioja an underrated classic? That’s the question Quentin Sadler posted on his wine pages recently, and one I set out to explore on a warm mid-week evening drinking al fresco in central London. Bold red wines are as synonymous with the Rioja region as light clarets are to Beaujolais. But there is a notion that we risk seriously underestimating the region by narrowing our focus on just red. Brits have traditionally eschewed Spanish white wines because they have...

Earlier this year British wine growers toasted a rather iconic achievement. At a tasting in the prestigious Juveniles restaurant in Paris an elite group of experts rated English sparkling wine as being better than Champagne, with many pointing to the 'sham' nature of the contest. For the first time ever, they couldn't spot the difference! English wine has been on an upwards trajectory for over a decade now, each year being pulled closer to our neighbours across the Channel who are now cautiously looking over...