Jefford on Monday
The time test
Maturation potential: is this the difference between ‘good wine’ and ‘fine wine’? Not simple endurance, in other words, but the way in which a wine’s infant beauty is able to modulate, to deepen and to blossom as the years eddy by.
Fishing the shallows
The mood in Burgundy in the final week of June was as luminous as the skies.
Secrets of the quilt
On and on they roll, the hills, one after another, combed to perfection, retreating grandly into the heat haze, frilled and filled out with copses of trees, threaded with pale tracks, and crowned with farmhouses and towers.
The president and the Montravel bomb
[Andrew Jefford] French wine producers will have lived with the 1991 Loi Evin (a law framed for ‘the struggle against tobacco addiction and alcoholism’) for a quarter of a century next January, but it remains a source of contention. It’s been back in the
Where do we go from here?
I tasted more great red wine in four days of visits in Barolo and Barbaresco this May than in any similar trip I’ve ever made, here or elsewhere.
Notes from a dry island
‘There’s an island spirit here,’ said Gérard Bertrand’s viticulturalist Richard Planas, as we toured Limoux together. ‘It’s an island inside a continent.’
Medal talk
Do wine-competition medals abuse the consumer’s trust?
Pity the poor wine student
[Andrew Jefford] A few weeks ago, a friend from Hong Kong sent me the two ‘mind maps’ for grape varieties.
Secret lessons
[Andrew Jefford] Is there a palpable difference between Vermentino and Pigato? Yes, but it may well be the filter of intent.
Palate fitness
[Andrew Jefford] How fit is your palate? And how do you maintain and train it?