I’ve said it before, but fell for it again…don’t trust the sat nav. We made our way to the Tuscan hinterland and the charming little village of Panzano in time for dinner. We were due a few hours earlier…as I say; trust the map and one’s own cartography skills. The sun sets late here. You eat at 8.30, while there’s still light, and you’ve had you’re passagiata and built a hunger. Read More >
I am constantly asked for recommendations on wine travel destinations, more so on the specifics to which I would need to become a fulltime travel agent and guide to make any headway or commercial sense. There is no doubt that the best way to fully understand the intricacies of wine and the concept of terroir, you need to travel the wine regions and it is strategic to have close interaction with winemakers and professionals, which is generally not easy to achieve outside of the wine trade. Read More >
When you have been in the wine trade long enough, in my case 30 years, there are certain wines that you follow as benchmarks; a sort of palate calibration that you undergo every year (vintage) as an imperative to get a bearing and setting a course into an ocean of wines to be tasted.
With onset of the southern hemisphere summer the mood in this half of the world is swinging towards fresh, crisp whites and rose.
The surge in popularity of rose is underpinned by the increasing number of genuine wines made in a drier style moreover, from dedicated vineyards and undergoing brief skin contact to achieve their colour, as opposed to just adding a bit of red. There are also more single grape styles being made, expressive of their varietal characteristics and region.
A hankering for the flavors of Chianti has Curtis Marsh planning a trip. In the meantime, he makes do in Wellington Street.
The best laid plans. Everything was set for the archetypal autumn holiday in Italy, two weeks in the heart of Tuscany luxuriating in the 18th-century Villa Pecille, in an idyllic vineyard panorama on the Chianti Azienda (estate) Fontodi, just south of the medieval village Panzano, halfway between Florence and Sienna.
