It is so much easier to be a vegetarian in the 21st century than it was even 15 years ago, and with some two and three Michelin star restaurants providing exclusively plant-based menus, or food cultures based entirely around local and vegetarian produce, there are some clearly exciting foods to be found the world over.…
Aslina Wines
It is with small steps that great people effect great change, and this is exactly what Ntsiki Biyela embodies within the South African wine industry. Originally from Mahlabathini, a rural village in KwaZulu-Natal, Ntsiki won a scholarship to study Viticulture and Oenology at Stellenbosch University in 1999, graduating in 2003. She was often posed questions…
The ‘Old Vine’ Question
To consider the perceived qualitative differences in ‘old vine’ fruit we must first define the term, and this begins with Phylloxera – the pest which decimated European vineyards throughout the 19th century. The damage caused and the efforts to combat and restore the wine industry during this time dictated a necessary shift in viticultural practices,…
Moschopolis: In the Shadow of Mount Olympus
Located in the Pontic village of Monopigado which sits around 500 metres above the port of Thessaloniki, Moschopolis exists in the shadow and magnificence of Mount Olympus. The winery was established by Dr. Georgios Germanis, a chemical soil specialist with decades of experience in both the vineyard and the cellar. Famed for his research and…
Pork Shoulder with ‘Mexican Dauphinoise Potatoes’
The intention of this feature is not to tell you how to cook, neither is it to convince you that this one bottle or that one bottle is the only partner to a particular dish. Rather, it is to encourage readers to think about why certain things work together; to enable you to make easy,…
Indigenous Cypriot Grape Varieties
While this isn’t an exhaustive list, we have recently shipped some exquisite wines from Cyprus and sampling these was my first exposure to some of the indigenous varietals that many Cypriot winemakers are understandably so proud of, which form an integral part of their wines. Cyprus, along with Santorini, is one of the only European…
Familie Mantler: Honest, down to earth, good.
Located 60 kilometres north-west of Vienna in the Weinviertel, Austria’s northernmost winegrowing region and its largest by both volume of production and geographically, Familie Mantler is and has always been a family-run operation since it was first established. For over 100 years the privately owned land was farmed to mixed agriculture, often changing speciality from one year to the next until 1977, when a then 18-year-old Karl Mantler…
Lubanzi: Top-notch wines with irrefutable ethics
The idea for Lubanzi as we know it today, was birthed when co-founders Charlie Brain and Walker Brown were backpacking along South Africa’s Wild Coast in 2014. ‘Lubanzi’ is the name given to the wild dogs that roam the area, including the one which chose to match the boys stride for stride on their six-day,…
Astral Projection? Biodynamics, its proponents and detractors.
‘Biodynamic’ is a pretty common buzzword in winemaking, with roots dating back to the Second World War. It is based on the then cutting edge works of an Austrian Philosopher presented in 1924 – Rudolf Steiner – and centres around a holistic and homeopathic approach to farming. This approach forgoes the use of any inorganic…
