Oeno-File, the Wine & Gastronomy Column

by Frank Ward

Posts Tagged ‘Hugh Johnson’

The Master of Montrachet

Posted by Frank Ward on September 30, 2018

September 2018. PORTRAIT. Pierre RAMONET of Burgundy, just short of eighty when I met him in the early 1980s, and one of the greatest wine makers in France, had dreamed all his life of owning a parcel of a small plot of land south of Beaune that happens to give the best dry white wine in the world. The grand cru vineyard called Montrachet. Ramonet had long owned parts of the adjoining vineyards Bâtard-Montrachet and Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet, both grand cru vineyards too and able to yield great wines, so it cannot be said that he had ever played second fiddle. But when at Iong last, in his seventy-third year, he obtained a tiny segment of Montrachet in 1978, it was as if a virtuoso violinist had come into possession of a Stradivarius [….]. Sebastião Salgado

Read article

Posted in Burgundy, Oenophilia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

New World Wines – Old World Terroir

Posted by Frank Ward on March 27, 2017

March 2017. Simpson’s Wine Estate is a totally new property created, here in the old world, in the purest spirit of the new world. The location: Barham in Kent, “the garden of England”. Three 10-hectare plots of land were chosen where no vines had ever grown before; a winery was created within the shell of an old barn, complete with offices and a (projected) tasting room; and Kent-based fruit pickers were induced to transfer their fruit-sensitized fingers from apples and pears to the more fragile fruits of the vine. [….]

Read article

Posted in Other Countries, Tasting notes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Nectar of the Gods: Frank Ward on investing in wine

Posted by Frank Ward on December 5, 2013

There are two chief motives for investing in wine. Monetary gain is one; buying young, high-quality wines and waiting for them to improve, for the delectation of you and your friends, is the other. A bottle of good wine is a time capsule. Without moving an inch it makes a journey through time and becomes utterly transformed in the process. The aggressive tannins and acids in infant wine soften and harmonize slowly, transmuting into perfumes and flavours of astonishing beauty. […]

Read article

Posted in Oenophilia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

More Writers on Wine : Tolstoy, Strindberg, Hemingway

Posted by Frank Ward on August 16, 2013

August 2013. Hugh Johnson, our foremost wine writer (and, indeed, one of the English language’s finest stylists), suggests that wine may have originated in the Caucasus – southern Russia – some 6000 years B.C. Close to 8000 years later the world’s greatest novelist, Leo Tolstoy, describes harvest time in a Cossack community in the region of the Terek River, in that part of the Caucasus close to Chechnya. Picking had started as early as August….

Read article

Posted in Oenophilia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »