Wine Fictions

 In one of my previous posts I have written about the importance that labels have in our process of choosing a wine. The same is also true of our choice of not buying a wine.  It is quite interesting to see that younger customers tend to feel seduced by the labels of most of the nature wines we have ( like this one ) and the older customers to some of the traditional cote of arms such as the one from Dr. Bürklin-Wolf .  The truth is that this is, by no possible means, an indicative of a wine's quality, even though they often reveal quite a lot about its production processes or to which kind of public they want to reach.  I am also often confronted with the question of the price a wine costs. Even though the major part of the questions are about how and why is such a wine so expensive, there are also customers who openly say that they do not drink certain kind of wines as a courteous way of saying that they do not drink cheaper wines. This often comes with the covered...

The more I dive into the world of wine, the more I come across interesting and fascinating projects, such as this one by Hugo Mendes.  Born out of a crowdfunding, Mendes is producing wines with grapes that he is buying from different producers and different regions. This grants him complete freedom on the kind of wines he is producing.  Following a low intervention philosophy, this is quite an exciting project where you can find from amphora wines to orange or some more "conventional" ones, which end up not being conventional at all.  In this case, it is a rosé made exclusively of Touriga Nacional from a region which is not particularly known for this grape.  I have first tried this wine at a wine festival when I have recently visited Portugal and tried it now again in Hamburg where I am trying to convince my chef to start importing the wines from this project. It is quite a dense rosé, revealing very good acidity allied with some herbal notes and red berries which p...

 How much of our wine shopping is based on the visual aspects of a certain bottle? This is a question that often comes up to my mind when I get confronted with the fact that I have just acquired another bottle for its looks.  In this case, I was having a look at the offer a certain retailer had on wines from Montsant, Catalunya, and, out of a sudden, this bottle was inside my basket. Only later have I realized that this is the same producer from Anima Negra which is a winery from Mallorca that down and out ends up on my table. Not that this fact would have conditioned at all my choice, but I find it rather interesting to only late realise that my wine buying decisions can still be  rather emotional. And this besides my constant efforts of making it a more rational one.  I also have to take in account that I am working at a wine shop and that I am constantly confronted with emotional choices like the one I have done, even though I try to convince clients that a good w...