Bob's Blog: Give it Air
OPINION: “Have a look at this” said a good friend as he passed me a cutout from The Times with the heading “The wine gadget sommeliers say can make your £10 bottle taste better”.
OPINION: Cooking, eating, and drinking help take the sting out of lockdown.
I've turned the clocks forward an hour to change our drinking curfew and have pre-recorded our favourite cooking shows. Cooking shows stimulate the appetite and add extra pleasure to meal preparation. In an ideal world we would watch a demonstration, then prepare and eat the same meal immediately afterwards. Bliss! I have a small niggle when the celebrity chefs cook with wine. They tell us to only use wine that we would be happy to drink - preferable they wine we plan to drink with the meal. That makes sense when you are adding a splash to the dish before serving, but makes no sense to me when you need half a bottle of something for slow-cooked stews and casseroles.
If you can't taste the wine in the finished dish, why would you want to sacrifice an expensive and tasty wine?
OPINION: Sauvignon Blanc was famously introduced to New Zealand by Ross Spence of Matua Valley, and then serendipitously planted in…
OPINION: As New Zealand's wine industry grapples with figurative dark clouds (and literal for some wine regions of late) this…
Fifteen premium Marlborough wineries have found a home away from home in the region, with a shared cellar door in…
The large 2025 harvest will exacerbate the wine industry's "lingering" supply from recent vintages, New Zealand Winegrowers Chief Executive Philip…
Marlborough grape growers Will and Jayne Grigg are "cautiously optimistic" about the future of the region's wine industry.