Wine

By Jack Peat, TLE Editor Sat in a pub last Friday evening I pitched to my friend the topic of light-bodied wines. He listed the three that immediately sprung to mind: Burgundy Pinot Noir, Californian Zinfandel and South African Pinotage. A credible list, but for me the Mecca of fruity, easy-drinking red wine is Beaujolais. The ballyhooed cherry-red vintages that emanate from the small patch of France offer rich and varied wines that are delicate yet full of character. But...

By Jack Peat, TLE Editor  London is one of only a few truly global markets for wine. Négociants from Old World territories have been sailing wine by the case for several centuries and New World varieties have found fertile ground amongst the city’s liberal taste and worldly cuisines. Which is why it is no surprise that the city is home to an array of brilliant and varied wine bars. From new-age bars in Chelsea to dated, traditional vaults in Greenwich,...

By Nathan Lee, TLE Correspondent  In London, drinking wine from the bottle may be frowned upon, but at times it is downright necessary. Indeed, it is one of 20 wine commonly-committed wine faux pas revealed in a study of 2,000 Brits which found almost a third of Brits (30 per cent) admit to ‘necking’ their wine, rather than savouring the taste and flavour. Ten per cent of them have tried to open a screwcap with a corkscrew at least once, while...

By Jack Peat, TLE Editor  A metaphor linking a renowned opera and an outcast grape variety almost undoubtedly falls under the ‘stretched’ bracket, but I won’t shy away from this ambitious literary feat nonetheless. Carmen, an opéra comique based on the life of Don José, tells of a man who abandons his Basque family heritage in pursuit of the independent and rebellious Carmen. Deserting his bourgeois heritage he is forced to make his way as part of the proletariat, doing...

By Nathan Lee, TLE Correspondent  In Rathfinny on the south coast of England, ex-fund manager Mark Driver is in the process of planting what will be, when completed in 2020, one of the biggest single-site vineyards in Europe. The location offers a lot of promise. According to the local weather station in Eastbourne average temperatures have been climbing since the 1980s to almost a degree higher today, making it an idyllic spot to dabble in the temperature-sensitive world of viniculture....

By Charlotte Hope, Lifestyle Editor @TLE-Lifestyle How’s your sommelier knowledge? Personally, the graph with which I work when drinking wine used to be ‘drinkable’to ‘not that drinkable but I’ll drink it’to ‘that’s just probably vinegar’. Over the last few years I’ve really thrown myself into drinking heaps of wine, on the ultimate selfless journey to find you, dear reader, the optimum bottle for the food that you’re ingesting. With this in mind, I bring to you four offerings for your...

By David de Winter – Sports Editor @davidjdewinter @TLE_Sport When you think of Champagne, you think of a glamorous drink to be enjoyed normally as an aperitif, or, if you’re really indulgent (and rich), with a meal. Cheese on the other hand is a traditionally a dessert or a post-dinner delight, commonly consumed with red wine or a digestif such as sherry or port. But Champagne and cheese together? Oh non! You can almost hear the French convulsing at the mere...

Jack Peat meets Gavin Monery, Winemaker at urban winery London CRU Terroir is a hot topic in the wine world. Never has such an elusive concept caused such division amongst growers, experts and consumers of wine, but what’s the big deal? Well, in the parlance of Bill Shakespeare; nature or nurture, that is the question. Terroir comes from the French ‘terre’, or ‘land’, and is defined by the clever folk at Wikipedia as being a “set of special characteristics that the...

By Jack Peat, Editor of The London Economic  To an outsider it may seem rather perverse that a wine region that has undergone such change in the past century and a half still champions a classification of its chateaux that dates back to 1855, but for Bordeaux, it's actually quite typical. Change is both friend and foe in Bordeaux. Today, thanks to advances in technology, there are few, if any, of the bad vintages that once plagued wineries. Robert Parker’s...