There is a quite staggering amount of stuff about wine out there on the internet. Many of you may well surf far more energetically than I do and be even more aware of this than I am. But here are links to two articles and an audio podcast that might, for very different reasons, be of interest.
Only the first is very recently published, but it led me to the second – which is strange since I am the subject of it. Karl Laczko is based in Northumbria in northern England but clearly lives a thoroughly international online wine life. He contacted me out of the blue recently asking me to answer a few questions for a feature he was planning for his www.reignofterroir.com (geddit?) website. You can now read the results of his posing these questions to a dozen of his favourite wine pundits together with background on them here. I learnt quite a a bit from it – notably that Karl is, like me, originally from Carlisle in Cumbria and that Gary Vaynerchuk of www.tv.winelibrary.com is originally from Belarus and is also yet another interpretation of the initials GV (along with Austria's signature grape and 'good value').
Reading Karl's article and his introduction to me led me to an audio recording of my session that was part of the Shanghai Literary Festival last March. My talk was called Wine writing – impossible or impudent? (not imprudent, as billed on the site I'm linking you to actually) and the (slightly spotty) recording goes on, and on, and on – for a whole hour so is not recommended unless you have some thoroughly mindless job to do at the same time – a ton of peas to shell, for instance. I also sound much more severe than I usually do. I should definitely have accepted purple pager Marcus Ford's offer of a glass of wine beforehand. I rabbit on for about 40 minutes and then there are questions from the audience, which include two standard ones about my favourite wine and Ch Pavie 2003, as well as a truly bizarre one about whether I agreed that men preferred red and 'girlies' preferred white.
Moving on to something quite different – well, maybe not so different after all – Geoff Kelly is one of New Zealand's most experienced wine writers. With Bob Campbell MW we tasted NZ reds together blind in Auckland so long ago that I don't remember encountering a single Pinot Noir. Perhaps it was this joint experience of adolescent New Zealand Bordeaux blends that led him to draw my attention to his long and learned treatise on The evolution of Bordeaux blends in New Zealand. If you have any interest at all in this subject, I highly recommend this account.
At the end he suggests that the quality of these wines is now sufficiently high that there should be an annual blind tasting in London comparing New Zealand's best with some of Bordeaux's better examples. In fact, now that I come to think of it, it was to sound me out about this that he wrote to me in the first place. Would I be interested in participating? You bet I would.