What is it about the mysterious tuber-like truffle that seems so luxurious compared to its more pedestrian cousin, the humble mushroom? The truffle belongs to that top-tier of niche culinary curiosities which also includes famously rare delicacies such as Beluga caviar, Iberico ham and Foie gras.
In the town of Haro, in Spain’s famous La Rioja region, lies a historic region often described as Haro’s ‘open air’ museum where at almost every corner you are greeted by bronze and stone statues depicting traditional trades.
I met a mate yesterday for an old catch up and chat about business and family and other things. He 'confessed' to picking up a bottle of red wine in one of the low cost German supermarkets last week. "It was their cheapest bottle", he told me, "I was just Curious to try it".
Probably the most exciting release and buying opportunity we’ve had the privilege to present in our 13 years in business. Bodegas Corral is the winery behind Don Jacobo, the Rioja wines a lot of you are familiar with from the last year or so since we started importing and distributing them.
This is the sort of wine we exist for and precisely why we aspiringly named ourselves Curious Wines back in 2008. This is Maturana Tinta de Navarrete, a grape deemed lost to history until modern testing revealed it to be unique and unrelated to anything else grown in Rioja.
Colli Orientali del Friuli (free-oo-lee) is the most renowned DOC in the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region of north-east Italy, its calcareous and sandstone soils combined with Alpine geography and altitudes making it capable of producing world class white wines and some of the very best in Italy.
The last of the new finds for this year, from one of the world's furthest wine outposts (well from Cork anyway) and New Zealand's oldest winegrowing region, Hawke's Bay.
Taming the wild beast: In search of the gorú in his Jumilla spiritual homeLAST WEEK during a trip to Cartagena I decided to make, along with my small daughters Este (3) and Tilly (1), the 150km pilgrimage across Murcia to the wine region of Jumilla, to visit one of our most popular suppliers Ego Bodegas.
Le Mas de l’Ecriture ('ecriture' means 'scripture'), run by Pascal Fulla (who enjoyed 20 years as a 'juriste', or legal expert, before, in a carpe diem moment, turning to wine) and his daughter Lea, is situated in the south of France, a short drive from Montpellier.
In search of the grailWE OFTEN TALK IN CURIOUS about finding the grail in wine terms - those wines that look great, massively over-deliver for their price point, and give us something resembling a religious experience on drinking.
Hotker gushes over timely floods(Dispatch from South Oz: weather update via Bleasdale Winemaker Paul Hotker. )Hi Curious!Hope all is well and you’re enjoying summer. We’re having an excellent winter and have had the best floods for years.
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"Gewurztraminer, most associated with Germany, or France's Alsace, is a brilliant-but-Marmitey white wine - love it or hate it. Full of character (overburdened, some might say), wines made from Gewurzt are full bodied and exotic, often with hefty alcohol and noticeable sweetness.
WE WERE DEEPLY SADDENED to hear of the passing of a true legend of the wine world at the weekend when the founder of Mas de Daumas Gassac, Aimé Guibert, died at home in Aniane at the age of 91.
WE'RE HAVING A MINOR DIFFERENCE OF OPINION with one of our Spanish suppliers, Ego Bodegas, over the naming of one of their extremely popular wines and we need your help to sway them. Meet Gorú. That's the mass of hair above that shares a name with the winery's organic label, confusingly also called Gorú.
EXCITING, wooded Albariño that bagged a GOLD MEDAL at the prestigious International Wine Challenge! ________________________________ ..
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IF YOU’RE LIKE US you probably ‘cellar’ your wine in some idiosyncratic combination of fridge, wardrobe, pantry, attic and glove box; and, while those spots will do in a pinch, it’s of course much nicer if you can gather all your beloved bottles in one handy place where the ..
BROTHERS Frederic and Benoit Lavau (pictured above) have really taken their family domaine upmarket since taking over from their parents in 2000, switching to bottling their wines under their own name instead of letting local negotiants take the glory, and partnering too with Château Maucoil, a 40- ..
VINES CAN LIVE FOR A CENTURY or longer but after the first twenty years of life they start to gradually give smaller crops. Old vine - 'cepas viejas' here - is common wine label term to show that a wine comes from these notably old plants.
Seductive multi-vintage Cab from one of Chile's most exciting growers.
"TONY CARTLIDGE sat in the cab of a cement mixer on a nuclear power plant construction site in Washington, reading a book on great California winemakers…Inspired to somehow enter the wine industry he had become enamored with, he jumped into his 1960 Rambler and headed to Napa.
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