When you’re buying a bottle of wine in a restaurant, it’s often tempting to stick with the familiar. Smart restaurateurs and sommeliers know this, which is why the highest per-bottle mark-ups tend to be on wines like Chablis, Rioja and Sancerre (especially in wine-friendly restaurants, where staff are keen to get guests to try something a bit different, for a change).

The smart thing to do is to take the vinous road less travelled by (enlisting your waiter as a guide, if necessary). True, you might end up with a bottle you’re not keen on, but the odds are far higher that you’ll make some wonderful new discoveries. read more

I’m just back from a brief trip to Tuscany, where I spent a few days visiting vineyards and exploring the diverse nature of Sangiovese, a grape variety with which I’ve always struggled. Not that I don’t like Sangiovese – I’m rather partial to its perfume and its spine of acidity, as it happens – I’m just not terribly good at picking it out of a line up of other grapes.

Four days on the ground in its Tuscan homeland hasn’t helped much, to be frank. The grape takes on as many disguises as a master spy, depending on where it comes from, whether it’s blended with other grapes, and the constraints imposed by its producers, that I still struggle to come up with a working definition that would allow me to say, with any great degree of certainty: ‘That’s a typical Sangiovese’. read more