Video interview: Chris Howell from Cain Cellars

Chris Howell was in town recently and came to see us in St James’s Street. He is one of Napa’s most thoughtful men, producing some of Napa’s most elegant wines, and what he has to say is invariably fascinating.

Voyager Estate - Harvest News March 2011

“This week has seen the completion of the Shiraz and Merlot fruit into the winery. The yields have been spot on our targets for these varieties at close to 2 tonnes per acre, and the fruit looks excellent with great colour and concentration.

The first picks of Cabernet Sauvignon have started to come in, and the early signs look very promising. The first Cabernet fruit we harvest is off a small block in the Wilyabrup sub region of Margaret River, which is located about 25 Kms north of our estate. It is slightly warmer and provides us with an exceptional batch of fruit we use in our Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot wine. The top fruit from this sub region is always characterised with lovely fresh Mulberry fruit and fine silky tannins whereas the fruit from our top Estate vineyard blocks displays dark cassis fruit with more structural tannins. The small portion of this Wilyabrup fruit adds some mid palate sweetness to the wine and is an important component of our style.

Next week is looking very busy with most of the Estate Cabernet being harvested. The weather is holding up beautifully with warm days and cool nights which are perfect for fully ripening the tannins and concentrating the flavours.

Cheers, Steve James”

Brunello - Beauty and the Beast

3 planes in 3 days. The jet set lifestyle is starting to feel like the jet lag lifestyle. But its been in a very worthy and enjoyable cause.. Hopefully by tasting and, eventually importing, some delightful wines with incredibly strong green credentials, I have been able to offset this rather nasty carbon footprint! One such wine is Etna rosso and its crus from the Terre Nere estate. A truely remarkable and marginal vineyard area of rugged beauty,rooted on the rocky, scorched soils of Etna's north facing slopes. Their 2008s, now in bottle, must be saught out, they are totally sublime, whilst the trickier 2009 vintage still yielded an unforgettable prephylloxera cuvee. It goes to show there is no substitute for good vines, planted in the right place and tended with care.

Anyway, onto Brunello di Montalcino. It is a wine of many sides, as indeed, is the vineyard area. Many people's preconceptions is of a wine that must be massive, heady and raisiny but this does not have to be the case.
It may never be a shrinking violet but I can say that over the last 2 days I have tasted pure, enormously drinkable expressions of Sangiovese. Le Ragnaie was one of them, at 550 metres the highest vineyard in Montalcino, as airy and beautiful as the vineyard from which it is made. Siro Pacenti was another, from vineyards on the north and south side of Montalcino, there is a very gentle modern sheen to this but its beauty, balance and depth is crystal clear. A real treat, too, was Soldera, as elegant and complete a Brunello as you will find. One cuvee is made, a riserva, produced from organically farmed vines, fermented with natural yeasts and aged in large oak vat for 5 years.

The Brunello vintage to be released this year will be 2006, a vintage that has produced some really complete and composed wines that mix structure, ripe elegant fruit and freshness. A very good year indeed that should prove most ageworthy.

Bordeaux 2010 - Twitter, Facebook, a Social Media Frenzy...

The dust seems hardly to have settled on the 2009 Campaign and once again the team is joined together in collective fast as another week of Bordeaux En Primeur tasting looms. This annual marathon des calories is an epic of morning till night tasting interspersed liberally with plate upon plate of rich gallic cuisine that at times seems quite decadent and at other times downright unhealthy. It is not for the faint hearted but as per usual, in a little over a week, a full team of 8 will be intrepidly heading south, so that we might give as balanced and as in depth a view as is possible. If in the coming months one of us is advising you on what to buy in 2010 you can be sure we will have been there and tasted...

Throughout the week we will be supplying regular updates via a host of media. In a thoroughly modern embracing of the wonders of newfangled technologies the J&B team updates can now be found on Facebook (here) and Twitter (here and here) as well as our website and the blog. We will be posting and tweeting video interviews, tasting notes, very first impressions, daily updates and of course our hugely popular Hew's Views series so that you can have a first hand opinion of what the vintage holds in store.