by Stefanie Phillips
Looking to build a wine cellar to store your wine collection? Before starting the project, there are several factors to consider, including: purpose, size, location, storage capacity, type of display, design and budget. Some wine cellars are built to entertain guests, complete with furniture and glassware. Others can be constructed in smaller spaces like closets and under stairs with the sole purpose of storage. Location is important, as it can influence the temperature and humidity conditions. Climate conditions vary by region, many with changing temperatures and humidity. Wine cellars should be kept at 55 degrees with 60 to 65 percent humidity for optimum long-term storage. The cool temperature will slow the aging process and the humidity level will prevent moisture inside the bottle fro...
by Tom Lewis
I recently invested in a number of cases of wine from Laithwaites - one introductory "Discovery" case and a couple of "mystery" cases.The Discovery case is basically intended as a special offer for new customers - a mixture of wines with a significant discount against the list price, plus a couple of freebies thrown in; in this instance, three bottles of a basic Rioja plus a fancy corkscrew.The mystery cases are pretty much just that - you pay £60 plus delivery and get wines with a minimum value of £90. Tantalisingly, there are a number of "golden ticket" cases worth up to £600, so there is potential for some serious bargains and superb wines.A quick trawl through the Laithwaites website for details on the wines I had received showed that both my mystery cases were worth just a few penn...
by Tom Lewis
I imagine it's fairly safe to say that Ukrainian food and wine is not well-known in this country, so I thought it would be at least unusual (and hopefully interesting) to present an evening of Ukrainian food and wine to the Cambridge Food & Wine Society last month.Given the amount of cooking involved (the emphasis of the evening was more on the food than the wine), we had to limit our numbers, but a sudden flurry of last-minute interest led to us deciding to squeeze in a few extra people and even then we had to turn some people away.After a few rounds of revisions, we ended up with around 10 food courses plus two types of sparkling wine, horilka (vodka) and brandy.I started off by asking how many people, if any, had been to Ukraine - it turned out one couple had been on holiday and one mem...
by Tom Lewis
Pinot Noir tasting I went to at the weekend really appealed to the bargain hunter in me. And it was not because the wines were cheap - far from it, you wouldn’t get much change from a tenner for even the "basic" Pinot Noirs we tried, and prices quickly rose into the mid-teens (and beyond for an excellent Burgundy !).Pinot Noir is never actually cheap - or if it is, like the £5 supermarket own-label Burgundy a colleague turned up with a while ago, it is hardly worth even using in the cooking. A low-yielding, thin-skinned grape, prone to mutation and notoriously difficult to grow, it demands cool climate conditions where it becomes susceptible to late frosts and disease. Its spiritual home is Burgundy, but increasingly it is being grown in areas that are cool due to latitude (central Otag...
by Tom Lewis
To understand Austria, you have to understand its history - that goes as much for its wines as for the country itself.This was the basis of a talk I gave some time ago to the Cambridge Food and Wine Society.I lived in Austria for two years before returning regularly on business and was always reminded of something I'd read along the lines of "Austria is rather like a formerly very fat person who has recently slimmed down and has not yet become accustomed to his reduced size and still turns sideways to walk through doorways".Students of history will know that since 1918, Austria has been but a shadow of its former imperial self that ruled most of Europe and controlled the Holy Roman Empire for nigh on 800 years.The key date for Austrian wines is 1985, when a scandal erupted over the additio...
by Tom Lewis
The recent Hungarian tasting organised by the Cambridge Food and Wine Society was a first in a number of ways - not only the Society's first ever Hungarian tasting, it was also their first joint event (in this case with with the Cambridge Szeged Society).Szeged (pronounced SEH-ged) is a city in the south of Hungary, situated on a great plain and with the country's oldest university, similar to Cambridge with which it has been twinned since 1987. The Cambridge Szeged Society, chaired by Julia Seiber Boyd, kindly provided us with some traditional Hungarian food to go with the wines which were presented by Lucien Lanci, proprietor of Malux and supplier to no less an institution than the Hungarian embassy in London.Lucien started by explaining that all the wines came from small producers who m...
by Tom Lewis
If Justine Keeling-Paglia is to be believed, she is living the dream. The ex-marketing manager, married to a former agronomist, is now half of the husband-and-wife team behind Poggio Argentiera, a winery barely 14 years old in southern Tuscany which produces a range of red, white and dessert wines, mainly from indigenous grape varieties, as well as olive oil.It sounds idyllic, but back in the real world, Justine explained to me, she had three children tummy upsets and a cellar manager with an injured knee after a car crash whilst husband Gianpaolo, whom my neighbour described "intense, but very dishy, my dear" explained as part of his talk to the Cambridge Food and Wine Society, some of the headaches he faces as a wine-maker.Giampaolo's approach to wine-making is thoroughly Old World, and ...
by Tom Lewis
Most wine books I checked out in advance of this recent tasting at the Cambridge Food and Wine Society politely suggested that Greece's history as a wine-producing country rather overshadows its present. They have a point: Greece more or less invented wine-production in Europe some several thousand years ago with references to wine dating back to the C9th BC in Homer. Moreover, the Greek word for wine, oinos, has also come variously into most European languages as vin, wien, vino and so forth, as well as giving us the words like oenology (the science and study of wine and wine-making).Compare all this to a tawdry glass of retsina on a cheap package holiday and its easy to see why wine books have, until recently at least, harped on about Greece's history more than its present.That is not to...
by Tom Lewis
When I was asked to do a wine tasting for my company summer party, I decided to pick some good, classic but perhaps not so trendy wines to see if people preferred them to the usual Kiwi Sauvignon or Pinot Grigio. With hindsight, I guess it was always going to be a bit of a gamble - my wine tastes are, if I'm honest, distinctly old school and I rarely have wine without food, so I tend to choose food-friendly, rather than quaffing, wines.I was also working to a budget that was more sensible than restrictive, but which precluded any decent Pinot Noir or impressive labels; that meant, in general, wines from humbler origins which would have to impress on their own merits alone. In the end, there was a mixture of value wines from southern France, inland Spain and the Loire, some stuff from the N...
by Tom Lewis
Bellwether Wines is a newly-established independent wine merchant based in Peterborough set up by Louise Steel with her brother, Michael. Louise recently took time out from the trials of running a successful start-up business to present some of her South American wines (mostly Chilean) to the Cambridge Food and Wine Society. Louise, the most charming lady you could meet who obviously knows a lot about her subject, started her career in the drinks industry working for family firm Adcocks; founded by her ancestors 100 years ago next year, in 1928 it took delivery of a then state-of-the-art Model T Ford for deliveries.Several decades later, Louise's father was bottling and manufacturing soft drinks which were delivered locally to shops and licensed premises. Needless to say, there was never a...
