What do rare wines from old and new grapes taste like, and should we love them? See also: The strange world of rare grapes Discovery wines Serge Heymoz of Cave les Sentes sums up my feeling for many of the old varieties I’ve tasted, when he speaks of Rèze, a wine that has been around […]
Räuschling
Why sommeliers love a grab bag of wines
Many – most? – of us tend to repeat certain meals at home and we know what we like to drink with them – and now and again we try something a bit different. But home is about comfort and coziness, while dining out is about splashing out socially and emotionally, whether or not you […]
Hunting for great Arvines (Bern)
It’s hard to stay focused at a good wine fair. I went to Bern recently to visit Vinumrarum, an annual weekend wine fair for independent family wineries. I decided to focus on Petite Arvine wines. The more people who make this increasingly popular wine (Valais produced 1.9 million kg Arvine grapes in 2016, about 100,000 […]
Five Swiss rare wines
LOCARNO, SWITZERLAND – Thursday evening I gave a talk to a sellout crowd at the Anglo-Swiss Club in Locarno on unusual and rare Swiss grape varieties. We then tasted five of these wines. Here are some brief notes on the wines, with contact information for the wineries. All of these wines are produced in limited […]
Zurich’s Memoire & Friends, the joy of aging
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – When youth and age mix well it’s a beautiful thing to behold. The Mémoire and Friends wine tasting event today allows wineries to show off their newest vintages to people in the Zurich area, but there are also some exceptional older wines on show. The Mémoire is a group of some of […]