(See this comment on the forum about Cigare Volante) In rather convoluted celebration of England’s regaining the Ashes, I offer up the following tasting notes on wines made at...

Nino Pieropan and his sons Andrea and Dario have decided to bottle their 2008 Soave Classico under screwcap, which makes it their Soave and not their Soave Classico, even though the grapes are...

Yesterday I visited the new/old Bonny Doon winery in Santa Cruz, California, to taste the weird and sometimes rather wonderful. (More about that later.)  Over lunch in a tasting pod made out...

See also my tasting notes on 169 Alsace 2007s. It is perhaps not surprising that French wine producers have been much slower to embrace screwcaps as an alternative stopper to natural...

Before wrestling with the cork or other stopper , the wine drinker encounters another illogical barrier to wine enjoyment, the often impenetrable foil or capsule that covers the cork. An...

The world's wine producers spend a lot of time asking themselves and each other how to persuade more people to drink wine. And yet they continue to sell the vast majority of their production in...

Purple pager Barbara Burlingame of Rome has just reminded me of an article I wrote for the Financial Times five years ago which she found particularly useful. It occurred to me that the...

Here is a modest assemblage of a few wines tasted recently that made a particularly strong impression for one reason or another.   At dinner on Easter Sunday we served four 1983 red...

  Sam Chafe, research scientist now retired from Australia’s CSIRO, sent these thoughts on screwcaps back in 2004. He has clearly been rummaging around in his cellar quite a bit...

David Schildknecht, OH:   You write in Should screwcapped wines be tasted before being served? that "Some Australian wine judges incidentally believe that it is...

I’ve just received the latest bulletin from Amorim, the world’s dominant producer of natural corks. The thing they really want us to know is that “Amorim’s global sales...

Mario Mizzi, Malta:   I suppose there is a point about the possible risk in storing srewcapped bottles upright but, assuming it was safe, there could then well be another...

Several of you have written in response to my most recent rant about plastic stoppers to ask whether I knew about the Australian plastic Zork and/or the German glass Vino-lok stoppers,...

Michael Martin, Martin Creatics, Salt Lake, UT: Re your recent rant , yes aren't we ALL frustrated by the surge of plasticized and composite corks (and yes, screwtops)? But within...

John Schreiner, wine writer, Vancouver:   Congratulations on your blast against synthetic corks. There is nothing good to be said for them, especially for the colour-coded...