Did I really have to ask Filippo Pulisci, Antinori’s Export Director, to cut short his monologue on Sassicaia and return the focus of the evening in Berrys’ Pickering Cellar back to that of Guado al Tasso and Tignanello? I know he was only making the causal link between Giacomo Tachis, the once winemaker of both […]

As the early evening mist rolled over the sleepy hamlet of little Bedwyn, we drove over the crest of a small stone bridge and arrived at the dimly lit exterior of the Harrow Inn with only the few terraced cottages illuminating our way. With the distant sound of a solitary owl penetrating the dusky quietness […]

A small gathering of some of the UK’s most renowned wine writers assembled in our Pickering Cellar to taste a vertical of 11 vintages of Ch. Haut-Bailly recently (4th October), where the general manager of the chateaux in Pessac-Léognan, Veronique Sanders, gently guided us through 11 vintages from 2000 to 2010. You could hear a […]

Barbaresco has often struggled with its own identity. Half the size of the neighbouring Barolo zone just ten minutes down the road, references about it being Barolo’s ‘sister’, the ‘queen’ to Barolo’s ‘king’, has only served to heighten its complex of inferiority. As a result many of its producers over the past twenty years have […]