Sauvignon Blanc is the original wild child of wine. It makes for herbaceous, green, citrusy and minerally wines that are instantly recognisable on the nose and grab hold of your tongue in an acidic embrace that literally leaves you salivating for more.
Pinot Grigio is an incredibly adaptable grape, making it one of the most popular among winemakers globally. (Which accounts for its frankly ridiculous number of aliases: 227 in total.
Carménère’s story is by now well known. Originally found in the Médoc, Bordeaux, it wasn’t replanted in the region after the ravages of phlloxera (that pesky vine-killing louse) in the late 19th century.
During the late 19th century you would be hard pressed to find a more expensive or highly regarded bottle of wine outside of Bordeaux’s classed growths than that of the Rieslings of Rheingau.
Much maligned and misunderstood, the powerful little white grape Riesling (pronounced Reece-ling according to Jancis Robinson if you are stickler for pronunciation) is one of Germany’s most important grape varieties.
Founded by Marco Savian in 1925, Savian is a third generation wine family making Prosecco, Pinot Grigio and Chardonnay amongst other varietals in a wooded and historical area of Veneto.
Most people will have tasted Rioja, a wine made in both red and white styles from the regions of La Rioja, Navarre and the Basque province of Alava. It is a region with a large geographical, geological and climatic diversity with a length of about 100km and a width of 50km.
Bodegas Pinoso stands in the town of Pinoso, about 56 km west of the city of Alicante, southern Spain. Pinoso is a mountainous, traditional Spanish town renowned for production of rock salt, marble and, of course, fine wine.
South Australia’s rolling Barossa Valley is, to some, the elder statesman in the definitive wine region of Australia. Sitting just 35 miles from the state capital, Adelaide, Barossa was originally a settlement founded by German speaking immigrants from the region of Silesia (what is now Poland).
Back in November 2021 we fell under the spell of a special project undertaken by winemaker Carlos Rubio Villanúa from Don Jacobo (Bodegas Corral), centring around a mysterious grape called Maturana Tinta de Navarrete.
Veneto winery Terre dei Buth, purveyor of organic, vegan, fresh and fruity Prosecco, and elegant Pinot Grigio, is making a splash with a strong, clean design aesthetic and a genuine environmental sensibility. These factors combined make it one of a growing number of sustainable wine estates to watch.
At the beginning of Argentinian French novelist Julio Florencio Cortázar’s experimental novel 62 Modelo para Armar, the protagonist and intellectual, Juan, asks himself the question ‘And why did I ask for a bottle of Sylvaner?’ You might wonder why indeed, as it seems like an inauspicious ..
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.
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