Drinking around the world: The Scots-Armenian wine alliance
The Scottish Borders are famous for Sir Walter Scott’s old home Abbotsford House, Jedburgh snails and Hawick Balls boiled sweets, as well as being the birthplace of the “voice of rugby” Bill Maclaren. Somehow, it has also become the hub of Armenian wine appreciation and the UK’s centre of south Caucasus viniculture.
“I knew Armenia made wine,” says Glasgow-born Ken Miller of Coldstream’s Borders Wines which launched in 2018. “After all Armenian brandy was a favourite of Winston Churchill, and Georgia’s wine making history is on the radar of most wine lovers.”
Fri 12 Mar 2021 09.00 EST
Regular readers of this column may recall that I was talking about wine descriptions a couple of weeks back and said I couldn’t understand why the word “lush” wasn’t used more often. Admittedly, it wouldn’t be part of your average Master of Wine’s lexicon, but if someone tells me a wine is lush, I want to try it. And not just because I live in Bristol, where “gert lush” is the ultimate term of approbation.
Anyway, having recently tasted a lot of whites I regarded as lush, I thought it might be an appropriate topic to return to for Mother’s Day. Not that I am suggesting for a second that your mother is a lush, even if she does have a glass every night – I wouldn’t blame her, given the unremitting tedium of the past 12 months.
The Drinks Business
15 December 2020 By Lauren Eads
Greece is one of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world, and yet in modern winemaking terms recognition on a global scale has eluded its winemakers.
Its ancient heritage for winemaking is well known, but its viticultural story has more often that not been resigned to history books, rather than the international wine stage. It’s not due to a lack of quality, but perhaps an unfortunate stereotype, combined with a somewhat introverted wine industry, that is to say, domestic rather than internationally-focused.
Writing in his book
The Wines of Greece, Konstantinos Lazarakis MW, explains: “I often see old friends at wine fairs in France, the UK or the US. Even today, when I invite them over to the Greek stands to taste some wine I frequently get the one-line response, ‘I do not like retsina’, as an answer. And it is wine professionals I am talking about here, so this just goes to show the huge a