All posts tagged: Wine

Think corner shop wine is bad? These £7 bottles are actually worth buying

Think corner shop wine is bad? These £7 bottles are actually worth buying

Sign up to IndyEat’s free newsletter for weekly recipes, foodie features and cookbook releases Get our food and drink newsletter for free Get our food and drink newsletter for free When was the last time you bought a bottle of wine from the corner shop? We are, after all, a nation of shopkeepers. Well, that’s what Napoleon allegedly said about us as an insult, but I think it’s quite a compliment. The corner shop is often a quiet bedrock of our community. The warm glow of the lights behind the oversized photos of milk, bread and glasses of wine acts as a comfort on those early mornings when you realise you’ve run out of milk for breakfast, or bread for a packed lunch because you forgot your child is going on a school trip (thank you to my local Mace for not only selling bacon, but regularly saving mine too). Or what about those evenings when you’re caught short on your way to a friend’s house and in need of a bottle of wine, and …

Kent is having a champagne moment: ‘English wine has gone from a joke to world-class’ | Wine holidays

Kent is having a champagne moment: ‘English wine has gone from a joke to world-class’ | Wine holidays

The grapes are turning purple on tall green vines, which stretch down towards the distant flint-and-limestone tower of Chilham church. These rows of Pinot Meunier, destined for English sparkling wine, are 51% owned by French champagne house Taittinger. “England is now the most exciting wine region,” says host and sales executive Hilary Sharp as she leads me around Domaine Evremond vineyard, which opened its visitor centre last year to coincide with the launch of its first wine. In his 2023 book Vines in a Cold Climate, drinks writer Henry Jeffreys charts the rise of English wine “from a joke to world-class in 30 years”. The book opens with an alcohol-fuelled scene of vine-planting at Domaine Evremond in May 2017: unseasonably cold, rainy, muddy, with rambling anecdotes from anglophile Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger about “English women encountered in his misspent youth”. The vineyard is named for the exiled French aristocrat Charles de Saint-Évremond, a symbol of hedonistic Anglo-French cooperation. The bon vivant introduced champagne to England and party-loving Charles II made him governor of Duck Island in St James’s Park. …

A Captivating Tour of Elite French Wine Country

A Captivating Tour of Elite French Wine Country

Gifted nonfiction filmmakers Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw have made a specialty of documenting tradition-bound practices rooted in the soil. In The Truffle Hunters, it was the disappearing breed of men and their sniffer dogs roaming the hills of Italy’s Piedmont region in search of aromatic Alba tubers that fetch a high price in the best restaurants. In Gaucho Gaucho, it was the community of Argentinian cowboys stewarding the land and tending to their animals off the grid in the mountainous Salta region. In Burgundy, the directors train their exquisitely observational vérité gaze over the vineyards, owners and workers whose lives revolve around production and consumption of the famed French red. (White burgundies don’t get a look in.) Burgundy The Bottom Line A drop to be savored. Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)Director-writers: Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw 1 hour 30 minutes Dweck and Kershaw have honed the skill, relatively rare among documentarians, of breathing lyrical dimensions into their lovingly crafted ethnographic studies. They also have a strong sense of character, which they step back and allow to emerge organically …

Gary Barlow admits wine ‘is like a passion’ ahead of Take That star’s new ITV series

Gary Barlow admits wine ‘is like a passion’ ahead of Take That star’s new ITV series

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Take That star Gary Barlow has stated his love for wine leaves him feeling as “passionate” as his music. The singer, aged 55, who has hosted several food and travel television programmes in recent years, embarked on his latest “epic adventure” across New Zealand alongside comedian Jason Manford. During Gary Barlow’s Food And Wine Tour: New Zealand, the pair taste local fare while visiting chefs, winemakers, producers and communities, uncovering how gastronomy connects people, personal stories and the natural world. Speaking in an interview with the Press Association, Barlow explained the inspiration behind his enthusiasm for travelling across the globe to seek out these novel experiences. He said: “First and foremost, these shows for me are about the wine, and the food is obviously a pairing with that. “Anything that’s homegrown is what attracts me. “I guess my attraction with wine …

Ethiopia uncorks a wine boom, Bordeaux vines driving exports and local demand

Ethiopia uncorks a wine boom, Bordeaux vines driving exports and local demand

A partnership between French experts and Ethiopian winemakers is putting East Africa on the viticultural map. Using seeds imported from Bordeaux, and after years of refining, exports are now on the rise. Domestically, Ethiopians are also consuming more and more of their local product. Our correspondent Tom Canetti went to meet a French-Ethiopian winery in central Ethiopia. Keywords for this article Source link

Best rosés under £20, tried and tested by a wine expert

Best rosés under £20, tried and tested by a wine expert

Best overall – Mirabeau X Rosé, Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence, 2025: £13, Sainsburys.com Best budget bottle – Sainsbury’s Fronton Negrette, 2024: £8.75, Sainsburys.com Best for alfresco dining – Cintu Île de Beauté Corsican Rosé, 2025: £10, Ocado.com Best Provence rosé – Château d’Estoublon Roseblood Rosé 2025: £16.50, Tesco.com Best for barbecues – Bird in Hand Pinot Rosé, case of 12: £90, Waitrosecellar.com Source link

Why Hollywood Is Drunk on “White Wine Thrillers”

Why Hollywood Is Drunk on “White Wine Thrillers”

It was just three years ago when Bela Bajaria revealed the internal label for Netflix’s programming ideal, the gourmet cheeseburger. Evoking populist fare with a garnish of prestige, it seemed like the only dining-related descriptor the TV industry would ever need. But there’s a new moniker on the rise, which I learned when a screenwriter friend recently shared their concerns about a project never getting out of development. The rationale? “Oh, they’re only buying white wine thrillers.” This trio of words is so evocative that it barely needs a definition. Let’s establish one, just to be safe. A white wine thriller can get dark but not too dark. The body count is kept low. One, two murders tops. There must be aspirational elements, typically wealthy characters wearing Brunello Cucinelli while emotionally unraveling in Nancy Meyers-worthy kitchens. White wine thrillers are often adaptations of books. And, pivotally, they are centered on female protagonists and marketed with a female audience in mind. The characters may drink white wine. They frequently do. The real implication is that the viewer …

David Hirsch, visionary wine grower who transformed Sonoma Coast, dies at 81

David Hirsch, visionary wine grower who transformed Sonoma Coast, dies at 81

David Hirsch, proprietor of Hirsch Vineyards, winemaker, autodidact, practical geologist, practicing Buddhist and thinking man’s farmer, died Tuesday of respiratory failure in Santa Rosa, Calif., according to his family. He was 81. Over a 45-year second career as a vineyard owner in west Sonoma County, David Hirsch plumbed the mysteries of California vine-growing and its terroir (the ways in which a vineyard site expresses the vicissitudes of climate and soil in the wine) with zeal and attentiveness, transforming a remote corner of a windswept coastland into one of the great sources for Pinot Noir in California, and perhaps the world. Hirsch was born in 1944 in New York. (He retained his thick Bronx accent throughout his life.) In an interview in June, he credited his father for a life marked by insatiable curiosity. Hirsch’s father was a bookseller, and when the family moved to a new home in New Rochelle, N.Y., his father brought his collection of books, some 30,000 volumes. “After school,” Hirsch said, “my job, my homework, was to alphabetize those books, room …

5 Additional Habits Of People Who Can’t Relax Without A Glass Of Wine

5 Additional Habits Of People Who Can’t Relax Without A Glass Of Wine

Alcohol has become hyper-normalized, from beer bros to wine moms, happy hours to pub crawls, and for good reason. Alcohol is a huge industry, generating loads of capital from a captivated audience.  But despite the fun of cocktail hour after a long day, it’s important to remember that alcohol is a numbing agent that falsely enables us to get through another day, and can hurt our health if a harmless glass-of-wine habit becomes something more worrisome. People who can’t relax without a glass of wine usually share these unhealthy habits: 1. They aren’t great at handling hard feelings maxbelchenko / Shutterstock Life coach Sidhharrth S. Kumaar observes that most people who have crossed into needing wine to relax downplay the importance or the effects of drinking regularly, either to themselves, to others, or both. It’s a way for the mind to protect itself. Alcohol numbs us from facing any discomfort, humiliation, or deeper emotional demands that are underlying the need to drink. RELATED: People Who Understand Real Happiness Tend To Live By These 11 Truths, …