Pic: Alvi’s Drift Wine shouldn’t be about a price point. Part marketing hype, part production expense, part controlled scarcity, pricing means that there are plenty of less-than-stellar wines out there that cost the earth but deliver as much as a wine that costs a two-thirds less. Similarly, some wines are massively expensive because they deliver. Similarly, your choice of wine […]
South Africa makes plenty of great wines, which deserve to stand alongside the ‘finest’ in the world. For whatever reason – perception, the relatively low cost driven by the weakness of the Rand against major currencies or something more ethereal – our wines often find themselves firmly in the ‘value’ category, rather than as serious international contenders alongside wines from […]
Former Test Kitchen sommelier Tinashe Nyamudoka is on a mission to make wines that everyone can connect with. Multi-awarded sommelier Tinashe Nyamudoka used the COVID-19 pandemic to make a fresh start, departing his role as Head Sommelier at The Test Kitchen and making the move to Johannesburg to focus on his own wine label, Kumusha. His formidable career in the […]
Glistening gold in the afternoon sunlight, La Cité du Vin on the banks of the Garonne is all swirls and eddies, wine swirling in a glass and knotted root stock – a cathedral to the history, art and culture of wine. The striking structure in the Bassins à Flot district on the outskirts of Bordeaux opened just two years ago, […]
The effects of terroir on a wine can feel greatly exaggerated, with a metre of elevation here or a minute difference in soil composition, there, often used as marquee marketing elements in attempting to set it apart from its regional siblings. While there’s definitely merit to the assertion that the landscape and atmospheric conditions in which grapes are grown confer […]
English wine? Tea – sure, pints of bitter – definitely. For a country not traditionally associated with the artful maceration and maturation of grapes, England is doing pretty well, with over 420 registered vineyards. The largest, Denbies Wine Estate, south of London, picked up the International Wine Challenge Gold Medal for its Chalk Ridge Rosé 2010 and is putting Gallic […]
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