October 8, 2012
Bordeaux is also one of those names in the world of wine that has become synonymous with a number of things: red wine, excellence, scarcity… and inflated prices. It’s a byword for quality wine, but it’s also a word that encourages annoyingly wine-snobby comments like “oh, yes I can pick up the hint of mint and a flutter of cassis on the nose, it must be from the left bank”.
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August 31, 2012
One of the great things about living abroad is that it opens up a while new world of wine enjoyment. Living in a wine-producing country such as South Africa, I drank almost exclusively South African wine. And why not: it’s generally of a very high standard, and drinking the imported stuff is hilariously expensive – so it’s a no-brainer. After a few months in the UK, I decided to get to the bottom of what all the fuss was about with Chablis, Rioja and Bordeaux and so I started exploring the wines of other countries. It has been an interesting learning curve and a very pleasurable way to develop a taste yardstick by which to measure and place your own country’s wines in the larger family tree of world wine. But what I find most interesting of all is that even after 10 years of drinking wines from regions all over the Old World, my palate still shows a distinct preference for the fruit and accessibility of New World wines.
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