Geographical Revision of the Champagne AOC

An article detailing the expansion plans of Champagne as a region

Les Caves wines in the press

More nice reviews…

The Beauty of Natural Wines - From Sparkling Gamay to Ethereal Syrah

Wines don’t have to complicated to be delicious. In fact, the reverse is more often the case. The wines below are not straining at the leash - they are what they are…

Primus Malbecius Superbius

Sometimes you taste a wine so rich that you are tempted to tap it on the shouder and ask it for an unsecured loan of $100,000 Zimbabwean dollars. Reading an estimable wine organ recently I discovered that there are wines among us that do not merely court perfection they seek to transcend it. As a mere humble vessel with a shallow palate accustomed to coarse French wines I needed to understand that greatness can only be critically arbitrated by those whose mouths that can carry a greater weight of wine in them....

Scents and sensuality - matching wines to perfume

It’s a sensory truth universally acknowledged that our sense of smell is closely connected by a series of neural pathways to that section of our brain that holds and processes memories.  When experiencing wine we rarely give ourselves full license to explore the emotional and intuitive nuances of what we smell and taste, as we are too busy analysing the “mechanics of flavour”, deconstructing all the aromatic properties– in a reductive fashion, as it were.

Personal Taste or Lack of Education

A much discussed topic within the trade, brands, homogenisation of the end users palate, fiddling in the winery to fit a ‘universal style’ – we, the lucky ones, in the trade and especially with Les Caves, eschew these dreary examples and tell all and sundry that they are disgusting drinks conveniently labelled as ‘wine’.

Profiteers of the Open Market

Let’s kill all the lawyers, said Dick the Butcher in Henry VI (Part 2 since you ask). I have a better wheeze: Let’s marginalise all the f & b drones whose fantastical margins are the product of a rip-off culture - they are only even-handed in that they cheat their customers and suppliers with equal insolence…

Hannah’s Blog - The Unkindest Haircut

Hannah gets the unkindest cut of all, continues to avoid those crazy Italian drivers and ducks and weaves amongst the local wasp life…

The Price Is Wrong

Many’s the time I’ve been enjoined, like the sullen and notched scrivener like that I am, to pick up my goose quill and etch - with quivering hand - my picaresque adventures in the wine trade. It would be a tale and a half told by an idiot full of the sound of carousing and the fury of eating. Never was a business so evidently bathed in such comity surely, in ostentatious revelry – here were funds of jolly anecdotes and much as I would like to recount “Five Go Mad In Madiran” (I will, I will) I have to admit that business is business and that the prosaic financial scrunch gnaws many dreary hours of my day as I seem to be forever entangled in number-juggling shenanigans with beady-eyed bean-counters.

Gastronomie domine

REAL FOOD DINNER – South West Cuisine de Terroir by Michel Dussau

Cometh the hour, cometh the chef and his massed battalions of ducks. Our Real-Plete Food-and-Wine Dinner was a cartoon of Hogarthian excess juggling hilarious generosity with the swaggering exposition of the artisan’s art.