tasting

What makes a good vintage? Generally speaking this depends on what you like. Taste, keep tasting, and taste some more (sorry…) A typical year in Beaujolais should produce wines of medium body, aromatic and fruity, with complexity emerging over the years. If the year does not allow for good ripening they can be overly fresh. […]

Sometimes we have to stop selling a wine because there is too much variation from bottle to bottle. These often come into our home cellar. This happened with the Beaujolais Villages Les Larmoises 2007, taken off list 3 years ago after reports of a disappointing bottle. The Larmoises was a lovely old vines vineyard, which […]

I fell in love with mature white wines with “old” Rhône whites. “they” often tell you viognier can’t age much, but I have had extraordinary wine moments with wines people would tell you don’t make sense. So I don’t give up on wines – I taste them and if they are still good, they remain […]

Now that the March edition of Decanter has been released, we can congratulate those of our winemakers who had wines in the top 40 list for Reserve reds from indigenous grapes. The list gives the scores and the order of the wines and we were intrigued by the wines that made the top 40 and those […]

Friday January 6th, we’re getting ready to send the newsletter out. As is our habit, Friday at the end of the day we open a bottle of a wine (or two) we’ve had a while, for our own Friday “wine o’clock” revisit. Check it out, update our tasting notes, finish the week nicely. Three people […]

Some people accuse me of loving every wine that I taste. I suppose this may be because I try my best to taste not just for myself but also for those people who may be customers, current or future. It may also be because, here at Alpine Wines, we are so rigorous that there are […]

It is one of the most enjoyable aspects of working in the wine trade when a customer decides that they would like a tasting in their home. Ben went to Manchester recently and had a lovely evening with 15 people who ranged from wine lovers to some who had barely ever had wine before. With […]