Many of the wine journalists have been chipping away at this subject for a while now, but Malcolm Gluck’s new book The Great Wine Swindle has been getting a lot of publicity on the TV, radio and in the press. 
 
There is much in his book I don’t agree with, but on the subject of “half-price” [...]

We were at The Thai Rack in Gerrards Cross last night with friends selecting wines to accompany Thai food in anticipation of a forthcoming dinner party. The Thai Rack will be supplying the food and we will be supplying the wines so we took along half a dozen bottles to see which would work best. [...]

Over the last few days I’ve been involved in a couple of processes that I hadn’t done before. The first was when we had to “brasser” the tanks which contain wine that’s fermenting. There are two valves on every tank which are for attaching hoses to in order to do basically everything that needs to [...]

I made a bit of an error today. I was high up in the rafters after being asked to check whether the contents of one of the tanks looked right, and to have a good look, I sat down to get my face as close to the entrance as possible. This was a stupid thing [...]

When you decide to do something a bit different, you might as well do it a lot different, and that’s just what Miguel Garcia Huidobro, owner of El Huique has done. He planted the internal patio area (bit bigger than my patio!) of the Estate with Cabernet Franc which is not exactly common in Chile. [...]

Day 10
Barrels, barrels, barrels! Topping up barrels is all I’ve done for the past few days. It’s an important part of the process, apparantly, because the barrels ‘breath’, which means that over time some of the wine sneaks out. There are approximately 2000 barrels here at Ducourt, in various workhouses, which is why it takes [...]

Day 6
Over the last few days I’ve been introduced to a new process that has to be carried out during the vintage. Screwed onto the top of most of the vast tanks is a chapeau, which is basically a clear plastic cylinder. My job was to top up all of the full tanks containing red [...]