News from Jancis Robinson

A fight, and some better news in Italy. Katia Nussbaum continues her Tuscan wine producer's diary. Click on the Katia's diary tag for the rest of the entries. Day 13: 22 March 2020 I wake up very late this Sunday morning, at 9.30, refreshed. I ring Shani (my step-daughter) as I haven’t talked to her for some time. She is well. Leon her son

Montalcino winegrower Katia Nussbaum on hair dye, tying up young vines, keeping apart within one household and disappearing eggs in lockdown Italy. Click on the Katia's diary tag for previous days.  Day 11: 20 March 2020   This morning I wake late and well-rested. I get up and have a coffee with Gigi. He is feeling good as he has restored

This week and next, not how to buy wine but how to sell it. Wine merchants may be glad of any local top-up of stock at the moment. A shorter version of this article is published by the Financial Times. So strong is the collecting instinct (our illustration of the grip of stamp collecting is François Barraud's 1929 painting Le Philatéliste) that

An ideal wine for a crisis? 2018 vintage from €4.95, £9.99, 77.40 Swiss francs per case of six, SG$26  Older vintages from $7.99, 297 Ukrainian hryvnia, 930 Russian roubles, 63 UAE dirhams, 89 Malaysian ringgit, 630 New Taiwanese dollars, 158 Chinese renminbi, 119.90 Brazilian real, 870 Thai baht Find this wine Right now, the most

In which things become even more personally worrying for Katia. For previous diary entries, click on the Katia's diary tag above. Day 9: 18 March 2020 Very little to be said, particularly as I am writing this after having put all my diary notes onto the computer. Which in itself was an exhausting endeavour emotionally. To put it all into

Founder of Winetraders Michael Palij MW has been branching out, resulting in a blind tasting that confounds Tim during the 100-wine marathon he describes below. We preface this tasting article with the text of an email Michael circulated widely yesterday. Dear Friends, Apart from anything else, COVID-19 has certainly broadened my reading

This follows my earlier tasting notes taken during a recent week in Argentina in New-wave Malbecs and Argentina 2020 – mainly whites. See also Argentina update for wine students for some of the geekier aspects of current Argentine wine production. There are signs that Malbec might just be loosening its hold on Argentine red wine. Not that there

Katia Nussbaum continues her daily diary under lockdown in Italy with some of her family at her Montalcino estate, San Polino. Click on the Katia's diary tag above for previous instalments. Day 7: 16 March 2020 This appears to have been a somewhat uneventful day, but perhaps that’s a fallacy, maybe we are just getting used to a new ‘normal’

We’re offering temporarily unemployed hospitality professionals free access to our Purple Pages until the end of May. Life is incredibly tough for everyone at the moment but, hosting a wine website, we are particularly concerned about the thousands of hospitality professionals who have suddenly found themselves temporarily unemployed. Our

For accompanying tasting notes from my recent week in Argentina, see New-wave Malbecs, Argentina 2020 – other reds (to be published tomorrow) and Argentina 2020 – mainly whites. Despite Malbec’s recent popularity on export markets, Argentine wine producers have not had an easy life in recent years. Argentina’s political and economic fortunes

More from Katia Nussbaum in Montalcino as she tries to navigate her way through lockdown. Click on the Katia's diary tag above for earlier instalments. Day 5: 14 March 2020 Yesterday I finished at around 2.30 am talking to my sister, Eva, who lives in Freiburg, Germany. I cannot understand the UK approach. Seems to me Boris Johnson is

Rob MacCulloch MW and team hold their breath in one of Hawke's Bay's biggest contract wineries. It was the unannounced management meeting on Monday morning, and the hushed conversation that I witnessed this morning between our senior management staff and a worried-looking European harvest intern, that got me properly scared. Scared for my

Some more memories of the expert on wine tasting. See also memories from others at the bottom of this article, as well as this 15-minute film we made for the BBC about Michael Broadbent in 1998. The wine world is still digesting the death of Michael Broadbent, whose obituary I wrote and published on Wednesday morning. But I promised to add a few

Montalcino winegrower Katia Nussbaum continues her very personal diary during lockdown at her estate. See days 1 and 2 for a who’s who of Katia’s family and colleagues mentioned below, and for the story so far. Day 3: 12 March 2020 Began gloomily for me: a grey day. I get pulled out of bed by a phone call from Avni telling me he is on his

Poor Alistair Cooper MW, one of our JR.com team members, is just – only just – recovering from what was surely one of the many, many unrecorded cases of That Virus. It left him unable to smell English mustard. Apologies for a lack of wine recommendations today. They will return! There are currently some 6,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the

Katia Nussbaum of San Polino in Montalcino, whose challenging article Biodynamics – new approach needed? we published last year, begins here a very personal day-by-day account of living in lockdown in Italy. We will be publishing her daily updates. Katia is pictured here with her dogs Bessie and Layla. Day 1: 10 March 2020 Yesterday midnight

The coronavirus has had its effect on the team in Samantha Cole-Johnson’s now-busy winery. Harvest is in full swing, all the fermenters are full, and we are even fermenting in picking bins because we don’t have enough small fermenters (more on this in a bit). This would usually be a very happy, exhausting time. It still is to an extent. We’re

Carlos Falcó, a major figure in Spanish wine, passed away last Friday, a victim of the coronavirus at the age of 83. The Marqués de Griñón was well known in Spain as an aristocratic celebrity. But wine people were less interested in his private life (he married quite recently for the fourth time). We knew him as a tireless worker, a great

A shorter version of this article is published by the Financial Times. See also Anderson Valley – the tasting notes. How could one resist a wine district with its own dialect, Boontling, which, according to Wikipedia, is ‘now mostly spoken by aging counter-culturists’? Its northern limit is known locally as ‘the deep end’, one of its characteristic

Two of London's finest Indian restaurants are now flourishing – or at least they were PC (pre coronavirus). A version of this article is published by the Financial Times. In California recently, I found two questions preoccupying my food-conscious friends. The first addressed the implications of Brexit on our hospitality industry, about which