The final of three new German estates added at the start of February, Balthasar Ress was the most polished and modern of the wineries we visited late last summer, and yet it's still over 150 years old and in the fifth generation of family ownership.
Yeah ok, so our German was pretty limited (zwei bier, bitte!) but our heads spun and palates gushed with new experiences and flavours in the Rheingau at the end of last summer.
We're delighted to introduce to the portfolio this month, three new wineries and 20 new wines from Germany that are over two years in the sourcing. We had a trip to the Rhine Valley all booked for April 2020, the first full month of lockdown all across Europe as Covid upended our lives.
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.
La Cave du Vieil Armand is one of the smallest cooperative cellars in Alsace, pulling together the vineyards and generational expertise of 80 wine growing families across 10 municipalities.
Il Muro estate has been owned by the Pancaro family for more than two centuries.
Something completely new here, folks. 'Governo' is a winemaking technique going back to 14th century Tuscany whereby a proportion of the harvest is held back, partially dried and then added to the already fermenting first portion of the harvest.
I've mentioned before my stock reply to the oft-asked question I get in the shop, "what's your favourite wine out of all of them?". It's like asking me which of my kids is my favourite — it depends on the day. Schola Sarmenti is unapologetically my favourite child right now.
About a million years ago, when my now early teens were in nappies and we were just getting Curious Wines off the ground, I met Sam Brannigan at a wine tasting in Enniskillen.
So I have to confess, up until very recently whenever someone mentioned "Bergerac" my immediate thoughts would go to John Nettles driving around Jersey in a Triumph roadster*.
A couple of weeks ago we introduced the eye-catching (and utterly gorgeous) Claymore Wines, a new range of music-inspired labels from Australia's Clare Valley including the Joshua Tree Riesling, Bittersweet Symphony Cabernet and Dark Side of the Moon Shiraz.
Chocolate Factory | Shiraz | McLaren Vale from Zonte's Footstep on Vimeo. Many of you will be familiar with our stand-out wine of last year, newcomer Elysian Springs' Spring Lamb Syrah, from Australia's Adelaide Hills.
Six months previously we'd never even heard of Kangaroo Island but in planning our trip to Australia I went straight to looking for wineries on the hunch that just off the south Australian mainland someone would have planted vines there.
Claymore Wines founder and owner, Anura Nitchingham, has three great loves in his life – wine, music and football – and he celebrates all of them through the winery he began in the 1990s, having arrived there with his family after a successful medical career in the UK.
The first bottles of Bleasdale Wines in Ireland landed into our small (and constantly freezing cold!) warehouse in Bandon in late 2009. We were just over a year old and planning our first direct shipments from Australia the following Spring.
In May of this year I finally got myself over to Bordeaux to visit Gavin and Angela Quinney at Château Bauduc.
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