Wine Words & Video Tape

Wine, Words and Videotape

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Posts Tagged ‘California’

Napa Valley: God bless the fog

Written by JW. Posted in California

A view of the Rutherford AVA within the Napa Valley AVA.

The Napa Valley is a surprisingly small wine region, just one eighth of the size of Bordeaux, but it is extremely well-endowed in the terroir department. Its varied soils and topography are vital to the valley’s greatness, whether it be the famous Rutherford dust, its red rock terraces or the deep, volcanic hillside soils of Stag’s Leap. Yet the most important influence on the place isn’t the land at all. It’s not even Stephen Spurrier, though his 1976 Paris tasting did put Napa on the map. It’s actually the sea.

1982 Mouton Rothschild: Pushing out the boat

Written by JW. Posted in Bordeaux, California, Italy

Plodding on, minding the pennies, paying off the debts…oh ‘Sod it!’, there comes a point when you have to say that this will all count for nowt when you’re six feet under, pushing up the daisies. A tasting organised by a friend this weekend, reminded me  of the importance of doing something exhilarating.

Napa Valley: On the road again

Written by JW. Posted in California

Despite its big reputation, the Napa Valley’s a relatively small wine region, just an eighth of the size of Bordeaux. Given the acquisition of some pretty prominent names by big business over the past few years, it’s heartening to discover that 95% of the Napa’s wineries still remain family owned. These days it’s maybe not quite the beatnik, boho crowd of the 1960s – you’ll have needed a fairly healthy bank [credit] account to have opened shop in the Napa Valley in the past decade or so – but many of Napa’s founding families are still around too.

California, Oregon and Washington State

Written by JW. Posted in California, Oregon, Washington State

This year the London International Wine Fair celebrates its 30th birthday. For a number of years the event has been held at the ExCel centre in London’s docklands – a vast aircraft hanger of a place en route to Beckton deep in London’s once industrial East End.  It’s a well organised event, and impressive in scale – the UK wine trade’s version of the Birmingham Motor show – but it’s also an alarmingly tricky place to taste wine.  It must be something to do with the multitude distractions, the thousands of people or the weird lighting that makes it a tough job for even the finest wine to sing in this setting. That said there were a number that looked good on the first day here.

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