Mountain wines! The term sounds romantic to any wine lover who also loves the mountains. Ā Beautiful scenery springs to mind, but for anyone with a little knowledge on growing vines and making wine, mountain wines also conjures up an image of difficult, challenging or even extreme conditions leading perhaps to fine wines born out of… View more
The more I visit, the more I find that as well as being beautiful and with a huge range of intriguing wines, the Jura wine region is full of great characters involved in different ways in wine. It has been a great pleasure getting to know these people over the years and their generosity in… View more
After my first update with the big news about the Jura wine region, this second one focuses more on what is important within the region, developments that potentially affect hundreds of people. In the spirit of the defunct Wine Report, I have also included a short summary of recent vintages, and an opinion piece with… View more
With some shock I realize that itās more than three years since I wrote the Jura and Savoie chapter for the last edition of Tom Stevensonās Wine Report 2009, published in October 2008. And, although since then Iāve written about wine tourism in Jura, and contributed articles to other publications, I have not written a… View more
For a long time, every other year, Jancis Robinson has encouraged the UK wine trade to partake in a wine-specific charity campaign, Wine Relief with funds going to Comic Relief (who help disadvantaged groups in Africa and the UK). A proportion of income from 80 selected wines available retail in the UK is passed to… View more
Itās been a long time coming, more than 20 years, but this year I am really excited that Savoie wines finally seem to be finding a tiny niche in the UK wine market and beyond. Earlier this month, I offered tastings of wines from three Savoie producers, all imported to the UK, to around 200… View more
In the absence of that wonderfully useful annual guide Wine Report – no 2010 has been published and 2011 is unlikely – I thought a roundup of random news from Savoie might be useful. Some of these items are not so new at all, but Savoie news travels rather slowly. The text I provided for… View more
I reported on this blog back in April, and Decanter have now (4 months later) reported, that Dorling Kindersley will no longer publish Wine Report, the annual wine guide that I have written for since its inception with the 2004 edition. However, all is not lost. Firstly, the author Tom Stevenson still has hopes of… View more
The place to go is right in the old town of BesanƧon in the French department of the Doubs, between Alsace and the Jura. Book a table at Christophe Menozziās restaurant of the same name and then simply ask to see him (or the sommelier if heās not there) and discuss your wishes ā you… View more
The first wine region that should have been covered on Wine Travel Guides ought by rights to have been Savoie. After all, I do live part of the time just over an hour away from the vineyards. But, I was so busy editing and promoting the rest of the site I never got to writing… View more
