- Subscribe to RSS
-
Recent Posts
Topics
- Dinners & Tastings
- Wine Trips
- Food & Wine
- Recipes
- Burgundy
- Bordeaux
- Rhône
- Champagne
- Italy
- Germany
- Cecily in Hong Kong
- Will in London
- 2009 Bordeaux
- 2009 Burgundy
- 2010 Bordeaux
- Argentina
- Australia
- Bordeaux 2011
- California
- Chile
- Enrico Santini
- Everything else
- Gascony
- Hong Kong
- In the Press
- Meet our producers
- New Zealand
- Portugal
- Spain
- Sponsorships
- Video
Wine Trips Archive
Benjamin Romeo – Rioja with a difference
The English voice of our sat-nav sounded very out of place as we wound our way through the steep, narrow streets of San Vicente de la Sonsierra, the tiny hilltop village which Benjamin Romeo - trailblazing Riojan winemaker - calls home.
We were racing against the setting early spring sun, so...
Read More Château Phélan-Ségur Vertical Tasting
The C&B tour bus pulled into Château Phélan-Ségur’s gravelled courtyard with a cloudless blue spring sky as a backdrop. Phélan-Ségur was our first stop of the day, so we were on time for once and had a few moments to take in the rows of vines stretching away from the...
Read More A Medieval Tasting at Château de Lamarque
With the inspirational philosophies of François Mitjavile ingrained in our thoughts, we headed to our next appointment. Château de Lamarque, a gem of a property in Haut-Médoc with whom we have enjoyed a long and strong vinous relationship. The drive from Saint-Emilion would take a while but as a South...
Read More “We are forbidden to create” François Mitjavile – Tertre Roteboeuf & Roc de Cambes
The C & B pilgrimage from Domaine de l’Aurage to Tertre Roteboeuf, (owned by his father, François Mitjavile) just down the road in Saint-Emilion took no time at all.
We were warmly greeted by François, escorted to the back gardens of the house and perched carefully on a wall with a dangerously...
Read More C&B Trip to Louis Mitjavile’s Domaine de l’Aurage
From immaculate topiary and raked gravel to a vineyard governed by passion alone. The contrast between the Ch. Hosanna and Domaine de l’Aurage is extreme, yet the journey is only 10 minutes by bus, and the owners are the best of friends. We were here to visit Louis Mitjavile (pictured above),...
Read More Octavian’s Corsham Cellars – Discovering why this is known as the UK’s best storage facility…
A windy and grey day in February could not have been a more perfect time for a Corney & Barrow trip underground. Myself and a few curious colleagues were on the mid-morning Bristol express with an afternoon ahead at Octavian’s storage facility in Corsham, Wiltshire.
Our car pulled up at a...
Read More Romanée-Saint-Vivant 1999-2009
What difference a couple of weeks can make. Two weeks previously I had been in Burgundy to collect samples for our Burgundy ’09 tasting. The vineyards were thick with frost and difficult to discern through freezing fog.
As Adam Brett-Smith and I arrived later on in the month, the fog had...
Read More Golden Barrels – Gascony’s Liquid Gold
In July this year we took a group of customers down to Gascony to visit one of our producers by the name of Plaimont (you may have already seen my colleague James version of events, in his blog post Plaimont and all that Jazz...)
Among their wines that we represent, one of...
Read More The importance of putting Italian Wine into Context – Diaries of trip to La Tunella – Friuli.
Italian wines are notoriously difficult to understand which makes our job communicating them, that much harder. Putting them into their own regional context, by which I mean learning where they were made, by whom and with what they are typically eaten with, is the answer to really "getting them." So...
Read More 
