Grand Vin Wine Merchants UK | Blog

Both the specialist wine and mainstream press have been buzzing this week with the news that venerable Australian rockers ACDC have teamed up with one of Australia’s largest winemakers to market a range of wines. The winemaker, Warburn Estate, is a respected producer of decent everyday gluggers, and some highly regarded reserve wines. Given that ACDC’s original frontman, Bon Scott, drank himself to death in 1980, ACDC’s “Highway to Hell” Cabernet Sauvignon is presumably an example of the very blackest sort of rock n roll humour. (I hope so – the alternative is depressing.) The other three wines in the range are also named for ACDC songs. Don’t look for a link between title and contents: identifying the rollicking lusty adventure that is “You shook me all night long” with a bottle of sweet little Moscato suggests that relating wine to music was not a priority. Why wine, though? It seems incongruous. I suppose even hell-raisers succumb to dinner parties, eventually. More pertinent...

I love tasting wine, almost as much as I love drinking it. I love arguing about it, or for it. I’m unfailingly thrilled by the opportunities I have to try some of the world’s greatest, rarest or oldest wines. I attempt to convey a wine’s character and qualities in a way that I hope is helpful to fellow wine lovers. But I score wine with a heavy heart. It goes against everything my mentors have taught me, and my own instincts. I concede the usefulness of wine scores. When I am judging hundreds of similar wines (same broad origin, same vintage) in concentrated succession, scores help with the necessarily rapid recalibration of relative quality, and when I get back home and have hundreds of notes to make sense of, they can also help to identify quickly the star-performing commune. I also empathise with the consumer’s liking for wine scores. That unequivocal number crosses language barriers and inspires confidence: a definitive and concise judgment in a wine landscape of bewildering ch...

Ok so we've now arrived at Chateau Ducru Beaucaillou, a stunning chateau in St Julien. In these videos we are in their tasting rooms which I can only describe as a domed hall. The interior is warm golden yellow, and there are sliding doors, made of copper and ornately debossed with vine leaves and bunches of grapes letting the light through. So, here's what Bruno Borie had to say about the wines...

We visit Petrus and speak to Elisabeth Jaubert about the vintage......

Mathieu Chardronnier of CVBG answers a few questions as I catch him at the end of the day at Chateau Belgrave. What does he think of the vintage? Are the wines priced out of the market...?

Following the release this morning of Marquis de Calon, here is the video taken from the tasting room at Calon in April. Don't forget to scroll down this page to the earlier posts on Calon Segur....

Pierre Lurton at Cheval Blanc