Amanda Barnes MW Brings Uruguay's Top 10 Wines to London
Tannat is not a grape most London wine drinkers have strong feelings about. That's sort of the point.
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Dispatches from the UK wine scene.
Tannat is not a grape most London wine drinkers have strong feelings about. That's sort of the point.
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The pickers went into the vineyards on August 13th. In Burgundy. That date has not happened in recorded history, or at least not since the 1500s, when a French monk named Salomon Rose began keeping harvest records that wine historians still cite today.
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The grapes going into your next bottle of Champagne were picked in August.
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The grapes in Franciacorta were already being picked in late July 2026. For a region that built its reputation on slow, cool ripening, that's a strange sentence to write.
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The Sicilian harvest started early this year. Specifically, around July 28, according to Wine Business, with growers describing conditions as "decidedly positive." That's a phrase you don't hear much from European wine producers in the summer of 2026.
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The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board confirmed it on July 31st: growers across England and Wales are picking right now, weeks ahead of any harvest this century.
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The duty on a bottle of still wine sold at a UK vineyard is the same as the duty on that same bottle sold in a Tesco in Slough. There is no discount for the small producer who grew the grapes, harvested them, made the wine, bottled it, and is now pouring you a glass twenty feet from the vines. That has always struck me as a bit mad.
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Nervous about your first wine tasting? Here is what actually happens, what to wear, and why you do not need to know a single thing about wine to enjoy it.
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An honest look at UK wine clubs - the types, what to check before you commit, and whether a wine subscription is actually worth the money. No snobbery.
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The Kent coast produces some genuinely strange wine. Not strange-bad. Strange in the sense that you stand in a Waitrose in Bromley, pick up a bottle of something made forty miles away, and still can't quite believe it exists.
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Four trophies. One Dorset estate. That's not a good night at the WineGB Awards, that's a statement.
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The Judgement of Paris happened fifty years ago, and French wine has never quite recovered its monopoly on the conversation.
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