For my latest piece in The Buyer, I wrote up a couple of tastings I’d been to recently where Malbec, everyone’s favourite steak wine, played a major role. From America to Africa to Europe, Malbec around the world is pushing forward great guns. It’s a great time to be a Malbec lover!! Mike Turner lunches …
It’s not everyday you bump into the best young winemaker in Argentina. It’s not everyday you can say that and it actually be true either. But when my mate, Louise, took me to meet the very cool German Berra of Finca Flichman at the recent London Wine Fair, it was fair enough. He’d been voted the …
Steak and red wine night and it wasn’t even my birthday! Fantastic! Would have been slightly better had Liverpool not put in the third abjectly terrible performance in three games an hour or so before I ate, but hey ho, can’t have it all…
Sometimes in life it’s ok to be boring. What do you have with Malbec? Most wine drinkers know the answer to this one. Meat! Keep it red, and keep it as rare as you like!
It’s dark, very dark. And it’s big, very big. And it goes well with a steak. This much we know! But what else am I looking for this weekend?
Let’s be fair, it isn’t Argentina’s grape. Well it is, but I mean it’s not a native. It was brought over in the 19th century by a French fella, but from then on, bar a couple of hiccups in the last century, it’s become the first word in the name association game: Argentinian red wine …
Well after getting a bit of stick for having not stuck my neck outside Europe for a few months worth of choices, I’m following Ant’s example and going for another of those world classics; Argentinian Malbec.
The famous Argentinian red? It’s Malbec isn’t it?! Of course it is, especially if any one of us lives anywhere near an Argentinian restaurant the wine list will be chock full of them. Maybe somewhere in there there’s going to be the odd Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, or Shiraz skulking about, but the chances of two …
Otherwise to be known as Week 10: Tannat from wherever you can get hold of it! Tannat is not normally a grape that gets to be up there at the front of the stage, but in areas like Madiran and Cahors in South West France, in Argentina, and in Uruguay it gets its chance.
Pinotage can justifiably stick its hand up as being the red grape of South Africa. Don’t get me wrong, Bordeaux varieties such as Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, and Rhone varieties like Syrah have bigger plantings throughout the vineyards, but these are the international varieties. Pinotage is South African. It was developed here, it’s nearly exclusively …
