Low alcohol wines, quirky whites and maverick reds are among the many diverse bottles produced at Forrest Estate wines. This well known Marlborough brand is our winery of the month. This blog is an insight into the history behind the brand as well as the wines.   Two doctors founded this winery, one of them a practicing GP, Dr Brigid Forrest; the other one a scientist with a degree in neurophysiology, Dr John Forrest, who decided to follow his passion for wine into a new career. That was in the late 1980s and the rest, as the old saying goes, is history, except...

Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara may sound like the names of characters from an Italian or Greek tragedy but they are the names of three grapes, which are the key ingredients in one of the world's great red wines, Amarone della Valpolicella.  The word Amarone translates to something along the lines of 'black bitter' and Valpolicella to 'the valley of many cellars', which could easily apply to most parts of Italy, but this wine comes from the north east region of Veneto. There are many different wines bottled with the label Valpolicella and they range from light bodied reds with hints of...

Dr John Forrest is a Riesling lover and that shines through in a range of the wines he and his daughter, Beth, make. They span the gamut of dry to luscious, including one of our most popular sweet wines in store - the delicious five year old and flavoursome 2017 Forrest Estate Botrytised Riesling.  This little half bottle of deliciousness tastes of honeyed lime zest and green apples and it has a high level of botrytis. But what is botrytis? It may not sound appetising to hear that botrytis is a form of rot, often known as 'noble rot' because it...

Our first whisky tasting of the year kicks off on Friday 17 Feb, upstairs at Regional Wines, and I don’t know about you, but I am super excited!Not only is it on a Friday night (which sounds irresistible), but it’s also jam packed with nine affordable and intriguing drams. We’ve sure done some high end tastings of late, and it’s going to be interesting to get back to grassroots and reassess just what makes whisky tick.The affordable whisky category is becoming a hard one to pin down. Scotch is very much still in a boom phase and prices have generally...

Whilst working on the Sunday mailer a couple of weeks back, which included a collection of Chardonnays spanning the country, I pondered on the notion of New Zealand’s best variety. Before I could say “medium toast” I realised a rabbit hole of epic proportions was opening up before me.  There are certainly plenty of pundits out there for whom Chardonnay fills this role - but can a country like New Zealand, with so many varieties that apparently perform so well, actually have a best variety? And, for that matter, what does best even mean? If you went by volume and...