The long awaited Produttori del Barbaresco Riservas arrived in store this month from the highly regarded 2016 vintage and, if you haven't noticed, we have already sold through two of the nine single vineyard wines. The delicate silky Assili and the powerful elegant Rabaja are gone and there will be no more. But fear not, we have ordered 18 magnums from Caro's in Auckland, the company that imports these outstanding wines into the country, so we have six magnums each of Rabaja, Ovello and Montestefano.  Always keen to champion the under dog, I have long been a big fan of Barbaresco, the...

Escarpment Pinot Noir is made by one of New Zealand's most admired winemakers, Larry McKenna, one of the first to make wine in Martinborough. Buy The Escarpment Vineyard special priced wines here. Who doesn't adore great Pinot Noir when it's made in a delicate but powerful style. Sound like an oxymoron? Understandably it may sound like just that, but Larry has forged a reputation for Pinots that live up to being silky, smooth, velvet gloves wrapped in structured, powerful, long lived iron fists, if you'll excuse the pun. This month is the opportunity to try his excellent wines made in a range of styles,...

Do aged wines taste better and, if so, why? The short answer is: Yes, sometimes, but only if you like that type of thing. It’s one of the most frequently asked questions we get from customers and wine lovers who are thinking about starting a small collection of wine, which in time, they hope, will grow. So it seems timely to write a little about this concept. Wine that is made to age does tend to taste better when it is aged than wine that is made to be drunk young tastes when it is young. If you need to...

Winemakers Rod and Emma Easthope make one of New Zealand's best  Gamays, Not that there are many Gamays made but Easthope Family Vineyards Gamay is super impressive. Despite its brand name it's actually made with grapes grown on Ian Quinn's the Two Terraces Vineyards in Maraekakaho, Hawke's Bay. Quinn is a fellow lover of the velvet smooth reds that the Gamay grape is capable of making.  Legend has it (by relatively good authority, we are led to believe) that Gamay originally comes from Burgundy, France, but was banished from there in 1395 by Phillippe the Bold. It is documented that this...

Jenny Dobson is a Hawke's Bay winemaker with a long history of European winemaking experiencing, but since most of that is in Bordeaux in the south west of France, it was a surprise to find out that she makes an exceptionally textural dry white wine from an obscure Italian grape. Fiano it is. Buy Jenny Dobson's Fiano here for $34.99 She buys grapes from the Bush Hawk Vineyard on Ngatarawa Road, Hawke's Bay, a site owned by Bryce Campbell, who planted 300 vines in 2010 and had the first crop in 2013. She has since made a 2014 Fiano from this same vineyard,...