It isn’t the views but rather the aromas that capture you as you drive through the Dão wine region: pine, eucalyptus, the fresh forest pours through the crevices of even a closed car door window. The aromas are overwhelming. The view, however, is surprisingly …
Category:
Wine Region Guides
How are wine corks made? It’s a much longer process than you might imagine – it can take up to half a century to get your first quality wine cork from a tree. Following my visit to the cork harvest in Portugal, I put together a …
The Couvent des Jacobins is an integral producer in Saint Emilion’s wine history. It’s not very often you get to taste a vertical going back half a century, but while in Bordeaux recently I was lucky enough to do an excellent vertical at one …
The Douro is easily one of the most spectacular wine landscapes in the world… The Douro river snakes its way through the valley where vines and stacked stone terraces appear to almost tumble down dramatically steep schist hillsides, the very sight of which induce …
Lavaux is one of the most striking wine regions in Switzerland with dramatic vineyards dropping off into Lake Geneva and facing France to the south. Over 800 hectares of continuous vineyards are blanketed on the steep hillsides beside the lake and vines have been …
David Howell is one of the authorities on Napa geology and he explains how Napa Valley is a very young wine valley, with its geological formation only happening in the last few million years and creating three distinctive soil types. In this exclusive 80 Harvests interview, the geologist and …
As a journalist visiting wine harvests, I’m pretty used to swanning in and out while others are doing the hard work. While the harvest team are busily picking grapes under the hot sun, I usually just take photos, kick around a few rocks with …
The rediscovery of Carménère is a fascinating story. While many different grape varieties have been brought back from obscurity in different periods of time, none have made such a fantastic reappearance as Carménère. Believed to be extinct for centuries, Carménère truly came back from …
There was little talk of Chilean Carignan before Vigno exploded on the wine scene in 2010. The first association of its kind in Chile, Vigno appeared as a small but formidable army of Carignan-fanatics ready to put this underappreciated variety on Chile’s wine map. …
There’s no lack of a good fiesta in South America… The Carnival continent certainly knows how to throw a party and the harvest season is no exception. There are several harvest festivals (known locally as the Vendimia) worth visiting. Here is my round up …