A sommelier’s view of the care, connection and pleasure behind every bottle.

A bottle of wine is a year, or sometimes several, of someone’s work. Inside it are the rain and the sun, the slope where the vines grew, and people who cared for them. (more…)

I still remember the summer of 2010, when I told my AIS wine instructor, Leonardo Taddei, that I would soon be leaving my beloved Lucca for faraway Australia. Whenever, as a young girl, I shut myself away in my bedroom to daydream, scribbling down lists of exotic places I wanted to visit, Australia would invariably end up at the very bottom of the page. “Too far away,” I would think. (more…)

Having grown up in South Africa and resided near some of my country’s best wine-producing regions (from Montagu to Cape Town’s Constantia Valley to the Durbanville Wine Valley), I can safely say that South African wine, and indeed, our wine industry as a whole, is special. (more…)

For many travellers, Poland means Kraków, Warsaw, castles, forests and vodka. And yet, while almost nobody was looking in that direction, a new generation of winemakers has been emerging. (more…)

Visiting Georgia for a week or two is wonderful, but living here really makes you understand why wine occupies such a peculiar place in Georgian life. I first came to Georgia while I was living in Berlin, and I remember being swept away by a country that felt exotic and strangely familiar at the same time. (more…)

When I decided to move to Burgundy, I expected to find great wines, immaculate vineyards, and a deeply rooted wine culture. All of that was there, of course.What I did not expect was the almost obsessive level of attention devoted to every single vine and every single bottle. Burgundy is one of the world’s most renowned wine regions. (more…)

The instant that endures.
There is a moment in every serious blind tasting when the glass tells you something before you have found the words for it. The colour is too deep for Nebbiolo, too alive for Syrah. The nose arrives in layers — dried fig, dark cherry, a whisper of chocolate that dissolves into something almost medicinal, like a herb pressed between the pages of an old book. (more…)