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To peat or not to peat?

Roger Morris
Features
5 min read
Whisky doesn’t have to smell and taste smoky to be Scotch. In fact, some very fine blends and single malts have little or no traces of the smoldering peat that for centuries has imparted its distinct smokiness during the malting process. All the same, I believe all Scotch master distillers

Trending: the English Sparkling Thing

Becky Sue Epstein
Feature Stories
4 min read
English sparkling wine is now a thing. Unless you’re a sparkling wine nut like me, you might not have noticed. In fact it’s more than just a thing: English sparkling wine has been beating French Champagne in blind tastings every year, lately. Why? And why now? At some point in

The Bitter Cup of Brexit

Gary Thomas
Features
8 min read
2016 was heralded as the year of English wine. In March the British government and the English wine industry announced the ambitious goal of increasing wine exports from 250,000 bottles a year to 2.5 million bottles by 2020. The Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) predicted that UK

Conservation with Condensation

Michelle Locke
Features
2 min read
It’s not every day you walk into a vodka tasting and find winemaker Randall Grahm sitting at the table. But then, it’s not every day you taste vodka that’s been distilled from wine (Grahm’s Bonny Doon, naturally) and cut with water captured from real, live San Francisco fog. That’s the
A slightly battered Madcap Magnus label (Staffelter Hof)

The Unbearable Preconceptions of Riesling

Simon J Woolf
Feature Stories
3 min read
- “I hate Chardonnay – it's so buttery and sweet” - “I can't drink Spanish red wine – it's always too oaky” - “The alcohol level of this wine is 15% - It's going to be unbalanced and jammy” Preconceptions about wine are all around us, and whether they're formed

Travels with my wine

Gary Thomas
Feature Stories
5 min read
If you’re a wine lover (and I assume you are if you are reading these pages) this has probably happened to you: you travel to some far-flung locale, sample great wines, and want to bring some back. Once upon a time, of course, you could simply bring a few bottles