For our weekly practice tasting, we focused on wines from the Rhône.
Particularly interesting for this exercise is that all wines were from a single producer: Domaine Paul Jaboulet Ainé.
Read MoreWhen I told friends that I was visiting my home country of Québec for the Christmas holidays this year, the 1st thing I heard back from them was "brrr, it will be cold"... Indeed, such is the reputation and, this year, we were not disappointed!
Perhaps, this is what makes the people in Québec so interesting. They embrace winter in the same way they embrace summer. Going to the full extent of what the cold season can offer. Even when it comes to making wine, or cider!
Read MoreThese days, I am a little obsessed with assessment of quality. Not so much in terms of good/better/best per se but more in terms of regional/villages/1er cru/grand cru. Some will say it is pretty much the same, but in an exam situation like the WSET or the MW, we are often asked to position the wine "within context of origin", in other words not only to justify how good is the wine among its peers, but also to position it within a certain quality segment of that region where it comes from.
In fact, the whole point of assessing wine for quality within the context of the WSET Systematic Approach should be to establish value but also to ascertain whether the wine is correctly positioned within the "quality segments" of its region of origin. Sometimes, one can find some pretty good deals of wines classified "basic" but with a quality much higher than normally found within the category.
Read MoreThis week, we decided to focus on the Italian classics, or I should say, those red wines from Italy most likely to show up on the exams: Piedmont, Tuscany, Valpolicella...
Other than being super interesting in contrast, it was also wonderful to taste such beautiful wines.
Below is a recap of my tasting notes as well as my exercise in compare in contrast.
Read MoreFrankly, I have always had an ambivalent "relationship" with natural wines. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is many of the wines that put me off. Perhaps it is the type of people who seem to insist on waxing lyrical about wines that are either too volatile or oxidised. You know the type, a little smug who discard everything that is not "natural" as being rubbish, even though the very example they are using to make their point is actually rubbish...
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