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Shaw about Wine, Malmesbury (2025)

13/11/2025

📣 Happy International Tempranillo Day! 🍷🍇

This time last year I was hosting a Spanish Wine Tasting evening, to coincide happily with Tempranillo Day. Vina Tondonia Lopez de Heredia’s excellent (and VGVFM) Cubillo Rioja stole the show that night.

This year tasting event dates didn’t quite align, so I celebrated the Tempranillo grape with exactly the meal I’d mentioned at the tasting last year* and, more importantly, a glass of Cubillo’s big brother - the famed Tondonia Reserva itself. The wine many would say is the archetypical Rioja. (Thank goodness for my coravin, as I want to keep this to savour at a later date or two as well.)

🍷Viña Tondonia Reserva 2011, Lopez de Heredia

There’s 75% Tempranillo in the very traditional Rioja varietal blend here, which also includes 15% Garnacha and 10% Graciano and Mazuelo.

Even though it’s labelled a Reserva, this wine has had 6 years’ barrel-ageing (way over the minimum 12 month Rioja DOCa regulatory requirement). That means it’s had plenty of time to quietly mellow, smoothing the tannins and letting the flavours meld, round out and develop perfectly.👌

There’s aromas of dried raspberry, black plum and morello cherry, and a hint of vanilla. It’s a very dry, rich, smooth wine, with lovely savoury earthy/leathery notes from bottle-ageing adding to complexity. Full-bodied, with firm but ripe tannins, and so very well-balanced.

Despite the pelting rain here tonight, one sip and I was straight back to sunnier days and the trip to Bodega Lopez de Heredia in Haro early last year (👉 for a few pics). It’s a veritable living museum of wine-making in the best possible way! Steeped in tradition, with the winemakers doing everything the same way their great grandfather did over 150 years ago. Why change the winning formula eh?

*The aforementioned dinner was my Spanish Chorizo and Butter Bean stew. Packed with rich smoked paprika and tomato flavours offset by the creaminess of the butter beans. Such a good match, and very nourishing and comforting on a night like tonight too.

06/11/2025

📣 International Sherry Week, 3-9 November🥂🇪🇸

This week it’s time to shine the spotlight on the wonderful world of sherry, and celebrate the wines of Jerez, in southern-most Spain. A week I’m always ready to give a big shout out to!

I’m a self-confessed sherry-head! I’ve always loved these bone dry, deeply savoury, full-flavoured wines which pair so well with all kinds of food. And I’ll try to convert anyone I meet who has yet to discover their delights.

Having travelled to the Jerez area twice, one of the pleasures of my WSET Diploma Fortified Wine module/exams earlier this year was the deep-geek-dive into sherry wines, and the discovery of this particular gem I bought for blind-tasting exam practise.

🥂Amontillado Goyesco B. Rodriguez La Cave
The fact that this wine has spent years going through a two-stage maturation process, in two different solera systems (protected from oxygen by a thick layer of flor yeast in the first, and in contact with oxygen in the second) allows it to develop its particular taste profile and adds many layers of complexity.

Such a gorgeous amber colour, and there’s sooo much going on on the nose. Bone dry, it’s deeply nutty (roasty, toasty hazelnuts and almonds), bruised apple and ye**ty ryebread flavours abound, with green olive, dried apricot, dried porcini... It’s so very savoury and saltily fresh, with a really long lingering finish. Umami-central and just delicious! 🤌

A wonderfully balanced aperitif with cured meats, green olives and warm pan-toasted whole almonds with sea salt. Though I can’t help myself going full-on tapas-night as soon as I open a bottle!

Available through Shaw about Wine. Contact for more details/local orders

I can heartily recommend a trip to Jerez, Cadiz and Seville too. Just writing this makes me wish I were there again, it’s very nice at this time of year.

01/11/2025

📣 Happy International Xinomavro Day! 🍇🍷

Xinomavro is Greece’s most prized indigenous black grape variety. It’s grown all over the north of Greece but the best wines come from Naoussa, in the region of Macedonia situated along the northern border of the country. The grapes ripen slowly there, allowing them to fully develop their aromatic potential while retaining the natural acidity which is a marker of the variety, creating very age-worthy wines. And that’s exactly where the wine I’ve chosen to talk about comes from. Made by the renowned Thymiopoulos winery, it was the most popular red at my Mediterranean tasing earlier this year and rightly so.

🍷 Xinomavro 2021, Thymiopoulos Vineyards
A paler coloured red wine, belying the complexity of aromas and flavours in the glass. The fragrant nose is full of of leafy wild strawberry with floral, herb and spicy notes. There’s plenty of character on the palate too - black cherry, black olive, a little earthiness, and pepper and clove spice from aging in oak. Bracing acidity and bold but smooth tannins, with a long, lingering, savoury finish. Delish.

Those tannins make it a fabulous pairing with red meat, either steak or a stew of slow-cooked beef in a rich tomato sauce (Stifado if you’re going full-on Greek), or hard cheese.

If Xinomavro isn’t already on your radar, it really needs to be! Look out for it on a wine list - it falls into that ’hard to pronounce, so actually usually better value for money’ category. And yes, that really is a thing! It’s a lovely alternative to the (generally pretty pricey) Barolo or Barbaresco wines of Piedmont, NW Italy, made from the Nebbiolo grape. In fact they have such a similar taste profile that they’re regularly confused in blind tastings.

Available through Shaw about Wine. Contact for more details/local orders

30/10/2025

Orange is mostly definitely having a moment. It’s everywhere, even more so this week, so it felt opportune to talk about orange wine.

First things first. No, it’s not made from oranges, as I’m sometimes asked! It’s all about the amber hue of the wine, which comes when a white wine has been made in the same way as a red wine. So, the white grapes are crushed, and the juice fermented with its skins, with the wine drawn off once fermentation has finished. All this skin contact gives sooo much flavour and a really interesting taste profile, quite different to a typical white wine. They’re usually made using traditional methods, with minimal intervention and no addition of SO2, so aka a ‘natural wine’.

🥂 Pulenta Estate Naranjo, Mendoza, Argentina
The grapes for this fragrant blend (60% Chardonnay, 20% Viognier, 20% Torrontés) come from vineyards at 1200m altitude in the Andes. The long slow ripening gives elegant aromas of orange blossom and jasmine, and fresh flavours of citrussy mandarin and peach/apricot 🍊🍑 Dry and well-balanced, the finish is long, complex and spicy with notes of orange peel.

And it’s most definitely interesting! Try it if you fancy a change/pushing those boundaries a wee bit, and see why the hipster crowd love it!*

I had it with a ‘fridge/cupboard-raid’ dinner involving butternut squash (roasted with lots of chilli and Ottolenghi-esque levels of spice), mixed with chickpeas and spinach (to offset all that orange!), piled into layers of filo pastry with some crumbled feta, formed into a kind of ‘casual pie’ and baked. All very autumnal and a jolly nice pairing too 😋🎃

(*It’s not just for the self-styled hipster! My son’s just moved house in London, and took me to a teeny wine bar near his new place last week. And the glass he ordered was an orange wine from Alsace…with no prompting words from mama! 👏🤐)

Available through Shaw about Wine
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EstatePulenta Estate

10/10/2025

Fizz was always going to be fun, and we had lots of both at last night’s tasting! A lively chatty crowd, as well as a lovely new room to try, created the perfect ambience for an evening of sparklers.

Covering all bubbly bases (well a fair few at least) the line up included:
Prosecco di Valdobbiadene DOCG, Cava de Guarda, Crémant de Bourgogne, Trentodoc, English Sparkling Wine and, of course, Champagne (a Blanc de Noirs in fact)

It’s always good to have the opportunity to try the wines side by side, and it always leads to some surprising discoveries… Top of the Sparkling Chart last night, for many of the group as well myself, was the Everflyht NV from Sussex. Crisp and bright, full of delicious ripe fruit flavour, with gorgeous texture and toasty complexity. It’s an ‘Ab Fab Fizz’ for sure! 🥂🍾

Thanks for coming along folks! It’s so lovely to still be welcoming new faces along with some regular wine friends. Happy Birthday again Tony, and thank you for spending it fizz-tasting with us! 🥳🥂

Now back to studies…

The Kings Arms Malmesbury

01/10/2025

Another week and another Tuesday Portfolio Tasting. This time in a beautiful glass-roofed room in a lovely sunny Bristol. Lots of great wines to sample, some already old favourites, others were new discoveries. With lots of informed wine chat, what’s not to love!

Always a tough call, but here’s a few personal standouts:
🥂Domaine Couly-Dutheil Chinon Blanc Les Châteaux - Beautifully subtle, well-balanced Loire Chenin. Just lovely!
🥂Chateau de Chamirey Mercurey Blanc - Rich Burgundian Chardonnay with a gorgeous butterscotchy finish. Yum!
🥂Ridge Vineyards Grenache Blanc - Ripe, yet restrained Californian white. So savoury, so flavourful and right up my street!
🍷Domaine Couly-Dutheil Chinon Rouge Les Boisselières - By the book notes for Cabernet Franc. All fragrant tomato leaf. Loved it.
🍷Ferraton Père et Fils Crozes-Hermitage Les Pichères - Fab N Rhone Syrah. Full of black olive and garrigue herbs.
🍷Soto Manrique Las Violetas Garncha - Aromatic high altitude Garnacha from an up and coming area in Spain. An old friend, as gorgeous as ever.
🍷Bodegas Benjamin de Rothschild & Vega Sicilia - Smooth, mellow, rounded Rioja from 100% Tempranillo. An extremely classy wine!

There were so many others I loved too but looking back at my list above I note that these are all single varietals, and all bar one are ‘old world’ wines. Interesting… 🤔

24/09/2025

A lovely change of routine yesterday when I grabbed the chance to get up to London for the Trade Portfolio Tasting of one of my favourite suppliers. So many wonderful wines, so little time! Especially when you’re chatty and all your fave South African winemakers are over for the event… My favourite English producers were there too. So nice to catch up with them all, and meet other wine heroes for the first time. There was *so* much winemaking expertise in that (very atmospheric) room! And the moment I walked into the Crypt I bumped into WSET Diploma pal Jack. A very nice surprise 😊

Supremely hard to select wines for special mention, but here goes just a few…

🥂Tesselaarsdal Chardonnay - A lovely expression of my favourite grape from an awesome winemaker in Hemel-en-Aarde
🍷Keermont Topside Syrah - Complex and spicy, yet restrained. Reminiscent of the best of N Rhone
🥂Blankbottle Luuks Chardonnay - On stunning, smoky form. Lean, lovely and yes, luxurious
🍷Savage Wines Girl Next Door - Elegant, savoury, black olive-overtoned Syrah. Fabulously intense
🍷Weather Report Flight Farm Elgin Cabernet Franc - Quintessential cool-climate Cab Franc. All fragrant tomato leaf!
🥂Flint Vineyard Silex - Complex, unusual English white blend, with real depth and a lovely smoky, flinty character
🍷Danbury Ridge Octagon Block Pinot Noir - Absolutely wonderful single block PN. England does Burgundy (and succeeds!)
🍾Digby Fine English Brut NV - Sophisticated PN-led fizz, with a wonderful nose from 5 years on the lees. So biscuity!
🍾Danbury Ridge Solstice NV, 1st Edition - Gorgeously rich and full, PN-led English sparkler, with 25% blend from a ‘perpetual reserve’. Packed with sumptuous baked apple pie notes.

Great to catch up with the team too. A bit of a flying visit, wish it could’ve been longer. (…and I’m well aware I used the word ‘favourite’ a lot here, but they really are! 😊)

19/09/2025

📣 Happy International Grenache Day!🍷🍇

Grenache is probably best known for being a big part of the blends of the Southern Rhone, contributing it’s ripe red fruit flavours of strawberry, red plum and red cherry, along with spicy and herbal notes 🍓🍒🪴 The naturally sweet grapes can accumulate high sugar levels quickly, leading to higher alcohol levels in the final wine in warmer vintages.

In Spain it’s called Garnacha Tinta and it figures highly in Rioja and Navarra blends. However the wine I have in my glass here is 100% Garnacha from La Mancha, a DO (appellation area) on a large, flat plateau (the ‘meseta’) south of Madrid at 500–700m altitude. It has an extreme continental climate, with very hot summers and very cold winters. This elongates the growing season, slowing down grape ripening and sugar accumulation, and producing fruit with the potential to make a fresher, more aromatic style of Grenache wine.

🍷 Garnacha Crianza 2019, Finca Antigua Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
This wine is indeed highly aromatic, with ripe red berries, floral violet notes & a mineral characteristic. There are also subtle notes of oak & to***co. It’s full-bodied with ripe, silky smooth tannins and a rounded, velvety mouthfeel. Yet the freshness prevails, making it lovely to drink either on its own or with all sorts of food. And it’s absolutely banging VFM at this price!

Btw ‘Crianza’ on the label in this instance means a younger wine style, with a minimum of 24 months ageing in total, 6 months of which must be in oak barrel.

Available through Shaw about Wine’s 🌻LATE SUMMER WINE PROMO🌻
£11.75 (RRP £13.95, 16% discount)
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15/09/2025

Saturday night supper for visiting son… He’d requested an old fave of his, to have after a beautiful afternoon country walk - cue ‘Sausage, Fennel seed and Tomato Pappardelle’ (thanks !). Very tasty and very comforting, as always. (Note: Son’s bowl was piled so high it was moved out of shot for aesthetic reasons!)

And I knew just which wine I wanted in my glass to accompany it - one that I’d showed at my ‘Classy New World Wines’ tasting a couple of days previously. Actually it was the most popular red on the night, even among those who’d normally veer white…

🍷Joel Gott Zinfandel 2022, California USA

Expressive aromas of baked plum and blackberry jam, with hints of sweet baking spice. On the palate bright, juicy red fruit flavours are complemented by vanilla notes (from the use of new American oak). A very classy, full-bodied wine with a soft, round mouthfeel and long finish.

A classic BBQ-match, and great with hearty pasta dishes such as this. 🍝🍷👌 Just to show that I do drink what I recommend!

Fact: Zinfandel is the same grape variety as Primitivo, grown in Puglia (Southern Italy), though here in California it displays a richer character with more vanilla.

Available through Shaw about Wine’s 🌻LATE SUMMER WINE PROMO🌻until end Sept.
£17.95 (RRP £21.95, 18% discount)
Contact for more details or for local orders.

12/09/2025

Last night’s wine tasting was fun! Thanks for coming along folks, and it’s so lovely to still be welcoming new faces! 😊

My chosen topic of 6 ‘Classy New World Wines, Classic Grape Varieties’ gave me so much to talk about. The new spacious room allowed us to all sit together, enabling lots of round table discussion, and the option to have Charcuterie with the reds went down well too.

Lots of Helen’s Gold Stars were awarded for particularly perceptive comments, and there were some wonderful compound tasting notes such as ‘Victoria Sponge’… Loved that one! ⭐️⭐️⭐️

It was a lovely line up wines to try next to each other. The most popular white of the night was the wonderful, subtly smokey ‘Dog Point Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc’. Very closely followed by Rieslingfreak’s zesty, vivid lime ’No. 33 Clare Valley Riesling’. So the aromatic varieties won with this group.

The most popular red wine was the rather lovely, definitely classy ‘Joel Gott Zinfandel’. This one surprised a few who don’t normally go for red, let alone would think of choosing to drink Zinfandel. That’s music to my ears and what these evenings are all about!

Now to plan the next one. Something else a little different once again…

05/09/2025

📣 Happy National Chianti Day!🍷

Believe it or not there’s another ‘Wine day’ today. None for ages, then 3 in a week! 🚌 🚌 🚌

Today it’s time to celebrate Chianti, *the* wine of Tuscany, Central Italy. So much so that this hugely picturesque region is often affectionately referred to as ‘Chiantishire’. Always predominantly made from the Sangiovese grape variety, this one is produced by the renowned historical winemaking family Antinori, who you’ll have heard me mention a fair few times by now at my tastings.

🍷 Chianti Superiore DOCG 2022, Santa Cristina

A classic Chianti with aromas of red cherry fruit, floral violet notes and a hint of vanilla. Very flavoursome with a delicious balance of fruit & savoury notes, it’s medium-bodied and well-structured with typical spicy notes from oak on the back palate. A very versatile wine which is great paired with tomato-based pasta or grilled meats, and pizza too of course! 🍒🍝🍕

Available through Shaw about Wine’s LATE SUMMER WINE PROMO🌻
£18.25 (RRP £22.50, 19% discount)
Contact for more details or for local orders.

Shaw about Wine

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