When opting to have wine with a meal, many people often just choose the name they recognise and know they enjoy, without considering what food they will be eating with it and how the two flavours will mix. It isn’t a complicated process, pairing food and wine choices, once you know what you are looking […]
The Beginner’s Guide To Food and Wine Pairing – Part 1: The Body
Wine and food pairing is something that people often don’t take into account, and when they do they usually tend to just make common sense pairings based on the flavours of the wine alone, rather than considering the different layers of both the meal itself and the wine. In this guide we aim to help […]
The Beginner’s Guide to Wine Tasting – Part 4: Taste
Identifying the taste a wine is the most important stage of a wine tasting (otherwise it might be called a wine smelling, or a wine looking). Before you start, you may wish to decide if you’re going to be spitting the wine out once you’ve tasted it, or if you’d prefer to swallow a mouthful. […]
The Beginner’s Guide to Wine Tasting – Part 3: Nose
Describing the scent of a wine is a vital stage of the wine tasting experience. Don’t be afraid to really get your nose stuck in the glass, as the smell of the wine will give you heaps of clues as to its quality and potential taste. In order to really release the scents of the […]
The Beginner’s Guide to Wine Tasting – Part 2: Appearance
Since part one of our wine tasting guide discussed how to identify faulty wines, parts two, three and four get down to the fun part – the tasting itself. We’ll cover appearance, smell and taste in the hope that you’ll feel equipped to go to a tasting event, host your own party, or simply appreciate the next bottle you […]
The Beginner’s Guide to Wine Tasting – Part 1: Faults
When you think of wine tasting, you may envisage a crowd of well-to-do individuals describing high-end vintages in terms rarely heard in normal conversation. Whilst it’s necessary for us as wine merchants to be able to describe our wines in order to fully inform our customers, we’re often asked why the average Joe should take an interest […]
Supper Club: Peppered Steaks and Red Wine Butter
In the first of our new Supper Club posts, we show you how to create the perfect peppered steak, partnered with some tasty red wine butter. This fantastically easy recipe serves four and takes around half an hour to prepare, though the time-savvy amongst you may wish to make the butter ahead of time and […]
Our First Grape Of The Month – Grenache
Grenache makes gamey wines with flavours of strawberries, raspberry, spice and hints of pepper. Often blended with other wines but can make very good wines on its own. Displays ripe sweetness, herbs and spices. Best known for Chateauneuf Du Pape it thrives in France’s southern Rhone Valley and vineyards all over the world which enjoy the […]
The Real Wine Fair 2013
Domaine Cousin-Leduc, Olivier Cousin (Loire Valley. France) I am naturally drawn to a character such as Olivier Cousin and having met the man, my opinion has not wained. An amiable, free spirirted non conformist who is happy to stick two fingers up to convention and indeed the authorities in a just cause! A man who sold his […]
New Wines at The Grape Store
There are several organic, biodynamic and natural wines to be added to the list in the coming weeks and this news section will be getting a well deserved update with more postings. We promise to keep you in touch with what’s new and tasting great! We kick off with a Tuscan treat from Poggio Argentiera and their Bellamarsilia, […]