To read my complete report on the 2011 harvest, please go HERE.

Here in this video section, you can hear directly from the vignerons what they expect from 2008 and 2009, 2010 in barrel and the coming 2011 harvest – as of early June 2011, the harvest is almost a full month in advance, which means harvesting could begin as early as August! The comparison with 2003 [...]

Well, what an honor and pleasure it was to finally meet with Hugh Johnson, the legendary wine connoisseur and wine author… Who has not been influenced by his writing? Anway, forgive the nervous laughter at the end! He had some interesting things to say about wine appreciation, and again voiced his opinion against points. I [...]

A great pleasure to finally meet Joanna Simon, whose lovely book Discovering Wine – full of useful text and illustrations – counts as one of my wine loving inspirations. I did not realize that she is part of the Wine Gang, a crew of highly qualified tasters who for the past three years at this [...]

Did we get carried away just a bit with 2008? Certainly Robert Parker’s scores were very high and the talk of grade inflation abounded. But after tasting from bottle in September last year, and now again in New York, in late January, I think we have a rather fine vintage before us, overall, at relatively modest [...]

Tasted in mid January 2011, Chateau Figeac 2000 is youthul, promising and delicious! Complete tasting notes HERE. Over dinner many tasters enjoyed the Figeac 2000 along with the 1998 and 1982 Figeac…

Blind tastings can be so darn, well, humbling. Now, it is not every day that I taste Mouton Rothschild. In fact, for the past five or six years, I have tasted it perhaps once or twice a year, usually en primeur. On occasion with friends who crack open an older bottle, but that is rare. [...]

Now when you see this video and realize we are talking about a wine that could potentially cost $1,000 before it is even in bottle, you may think that this is just absurd. But Château Margaux really reached wonderful heights in 2009. It is easily in my top ten of the vintage, if not top [...]

I attended two wonderful master classes at yet another Decanter fine wine encounter – this time a full day concentrated on Italian wine on Saturday 15 May 2010. Almost 90 exhibitors, some rather famous, others often constituting hidden treasures. I did not taste as much as I wanted because I was slightly under the weather, [...]

17 vintages of Château Gruaud Larose spanning almost a century, from 1918 to 2009…