Rosie the Labradoodle, an update
Far too much serious wine talk of late. Haven't mentioned Rosie The Labradoodle (RTL) for ages. She's pictured above on this morning's walk. A crisp, sunny Saturday stroll. I don't mind cold temperatures if the light is good. The problem with our UK winters is that we don't get to see the sun much - the grey, unceasingly overcast skies are rather depressing.

A Penfolds pair
I grew up with Penfolds. When I was getting into wine, the likes of Bin 369, Bin 28 and Bin 128 were staples. Grange was cheap then (1993 = £35), comparitively speaking, but I wasn't ready to spend this much on wine, so I skipped it. Alas. There was a period when the Penfolds wines seemed to be less impressive, during the late 1990s and early noughties, but they seem to have picked things u

Two good, affordable Spanish wines
Over recent years I've focused a lot on Portugal, but not so much on Spain. It's something I may change: I'm tasting quite a lot of interesting Spanish wines of late, but in the past I had problems with the Spanish tendency to use too much oak. I don't like wines where oak is a key flavour signature. And I don't like over-ripe, jammy reds all that much either. Two wines tonig

Minimum pricing of alcohol
Lots of discussion about minimum pricing of alcohol at the moment. It's prompted by the move in Scotland to introduce a range of measures to combat alcohol abuse (see below, from an email I received today). Would minimum pricing be bad for wine? It might help break the current unsustainable situation where producers and brand owners are squeezed ever harder by supermarkets who want to give their customers ever cheaper wine. It would be great to see people who make wine actually make some money from it.But I worry that this is the thin end of the prohibition wedge. I worry that such measures could actually reduce the number of people drinking

A quick trip to Bordeaux
Just come back from a quick trip from Bordeaux with fellow wine journo Tim Atkin. We were visiting Dourthe, one of the larger negociants who own several properties spread across the region.The focus of yesterday morning was Sauvignon Blanc. Tim and I tried 30 of the blend components for Dourthe No 1 Blanc, which is a varietal Sauvignon Blanc, with winemaker Thomas Drouineau,