May 2020 Another month of lockdown slips by. I’ll be missing the sociability of comparing several wines connected by a theme, and learning as we go, for a while yet. We opened a bottle of Chateau Musar 2000 the other evening. “Eccentric wines, which have baffled and bewitched,” as Pierre Mansour of the Wine Society has described the wines, from …
IWFS LONDON BLOG – Wines during Lockdown
April 2020 No wine tastings for me to report on while we are all in lockdown. In the circumstances we are doing our best to enjoy drinking wine chez nous – and observing the proprieties by occasionally keeping a day or two alcohol-free. I used to have a big book made for the purpose with pages of columns, to record …
IWFS LONDON WINE TASTING – Mature Champagne and English Sparkling Wines
March 2020 The last wine tasting I got to before lockdown was on How Sparkling Wines Mature, presented by Bernard Lamb. This tasting of ten bottles explored champagnes and English sparkling wines, vintage and non-vintage, at different stages of maturity. Generally with age, sparkling, wines lose fizz and freshness and gain depth of flavour and complexity. But it is …
IWFS LONDON WINE TASTINGS – China, France and South Africa
February 2020 The events I attended this month illustrated different approaches to wine tasting. The wines for our Chinese wine tasting were a selection from a lot bought at auction. They are not exported to the UK, so we did not know what they would cost, and could not assess their value that way. The labels in Chinese provided no …
IWFS LONDON BLOG January 2020
From a fine dinner in Mayfair to a bistro supper in Pimlico, two contrasting events this month, both delightful. Early in January we dressed up for formal fine dining in elegant Belle Epoque style surroundings, recently refurbished, at the Savile Club, based in an elegant 18th-century house in Brook Street, Mayfair. This is a social ‘gentlemen’s’ members’ club. Many celebrated …
IWFS London Blog December 2019
As it’s the end-of-year, please indulge my reminiscing about some of our events in central London over the last twelve months. We held a Dinner in January at Tredwells in Covent Garden. This is a restaurant in the Marcus Wareing group, focusing on contemporary British produce, whose Chef Patron is Chantelle Nicholson. The four courses were each matched by appropriate …
IWFS LONDON BLOG November 2019
IWFS Corney & Barrow Wine Tasting and Dinner London Branch’s AGM was held at Corney & Barrow. Corney & Barrow was founded by Edward Bland Corney in London in 1780. Their headquarters, where we went, is now an elegant converted customs house near Tower Hill. The AGM took up a very small part of the evening, however, as we also …
IWFS LONDON BLOG October 2019
Two contrasting tastings held within a week of each other, each of nine wines, each chosen and led by a member of London Branch, illustrate the variety of the types of tastings on our programme. The first was of a selection of red Bordeaux from the 1970s, led by Jeffrey Benson. Would they still be enjoyable to drink, long after …
IWFS LONDON BLOG September 2019
We happily tried eight white and five red Japanese wines at a novel wine tasting event organised and led by Christopher Davenport-Jones this month. The wines were from a variety of grapes and from different producers. Most of them are not available for us to buy in the UK. We learned that Japanese wine producers are making a wide range …
IWFS LONDON BLOG August 2019
A recent interesting tasting held by London Branch was of fine wines from Châteauneuf-du-Pape. We tasted nine wines; vintages from 1955 to 2014. We were able to compare a 1993 and a 1996 from Château de Beaucastel, one of the finest estates in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Another star wine was the 2004 Clos des Papes from another top estate, a complex and …