My Dream Cellar
by Tim Atkin
Imagine, just for one minute, that you were richer than Bill Gates: more loaded than a Hollywood film star, Warren Buffett and a Russian oligarch put together. Which wines would...
Red Varietal: Pinot Noir
Burgundy 2010: the year of the sorting table
by Tim Atkin
Vosne-Romanée. © Tim Atkin MW Burgundy week has become such an established feature of the annual tasting circuit – half of London’s livery halls, art galleries and old court rooms...
Me, Kurt Vonnegut and wine
by Tim Atkin
One of my favourite cuttings, passed on to me by my father more than a decade ago, first appeared in an unlikely place: Inc. Technology magazine. It’s an interview with...
My top dozen wines from the Biodyvin tasting
by Tim Atkin
2007 Domaine Bott-Geyl Gewurztraminer d’Alsace Grand Cru Sonnenglantz (available from OW Loeb)One of a series of stunning wines from this outstanding Colmar-based domaine. Spicy and complex, with real intenstity and...
2010 Anakena Single Vineyard Deu Pinot Noir, Leyda Valley
( £7.99, 13.5%, Majestic )Drinkable Pinot Noir, let alone very drinkable Pinot Noir, under £8 is one of wine’s holier grails. This Chilean example from increasingly fashionable Leyda offers even better value than that. From 22nd of November it will be down to £6.99 each for two months. The wine tastes as good as it looks, with sweet raspberry and red cherry flavours, a touch of oak and refreshing, cool climate acidity. There’s some leafy complexity here, too.
The pick of Waitrose’s wine range
by Tim Atkin
RED 2010 Saumur, Les Nivières (£7.49, 13%) Essence of Loire Cabernet Franc, this unoaked red is a delight: soft and grassy with fresh acidity, no oak and pure blackcurrant and...
German Pinot Noir comes of age
by Tim Atkin
Question: which country is the world’s third biggest producer of Pinot Noir? I’d always imagined the top five would be France (Champagne boosts the numbers), the USA, Australia, New Zealand...
Celebrating 25 years of the IPNC
by Tim Atkin
What would a neo-Prohibitionist make of the International Pinot Noir Celebration in McMinnville, Oregon? There’s enough wine consumed over the course of the three day festival to stock a chain...
The 2009 Burgundy vintage: second opinion
by Tim Atkin
“You call that work? ” asked a friend of mine when I told him about the rigours of Burgundy week in early January. “Most people would pay serious amounts of...
The cult of the winemaker
by Tim Atkin
The death of the Nouvelle Vague film director Claude Chabrol earlier this week has prompted a spate of national mourning in France, with president Sarkozy comparing the great man to...
Acid trip
by Tim Atkin
“Buy on an apple, sell on a piece of cheese,” runs an old wine trade saw. It’s good advice for consumers, too. If a wine, especially a red wine, can...
The other side of own-label
by Tim Atkin
As oxymorons go, they may not be as absurd as “French resistance”, “amicable divorce” and “camping holiday”, but there’s still something fundamentally silly about Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Spaghetti Bolognese,...