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 "For the wine collector, the connoisseur, the Europhile, the wine investor or for those who crave forceful opinion about wine and the wine world couched in carefully rendered prose, this is perhaps the only publication you need."

Tom Wark, Fermentation.typepad.com 

PUBLICATION DATES

The World of Fine Wine is published four times a year.

2012 publication dates:

Issue 36 - 22 June

Issue 37 - 21 September

Issue 38 - 10 December

We are so pleased that you are visiting the website of our quarterly journal, The World
of Fine Wine. In the journal we aim to take
wine publishing in a new, more sophisticated direction. The editorial team is led by Hugh Johnson OBE, and our contributors include
Jancis Robinson MW, Andrew Jefford, Michel Bettane, Tim Atkin MW, Clive Coates MW,
Michael Schuster and Tom Stevenson.After seven years WFW is well established in over
30 countries.

BORDEAUX 2011 SUMMARY

Tricky...but I am very positive about it

By Michael Schuster, WFW contributor

This is an excellent year for both dry and sweet and there is a great deal to like among the reds, too. But the style and quality of the reds varies so much that you will be best considering them very much on an individual wine basis.

Tricky to ripen

Born of a very dry and particularly uneven viticultural year, the red grape bunches at harvest had fruit colors covering the spectrum from green to black. Assuming you selected only the fully ripe grapes, these were small and thick-skinned, high in acid and potentially very  high in tannin, but with much more modest sugar levels than the 14% to 15%+ of 2009/10.

Alcohol levels average 13% to 3.5%, and the figure 12 is also sure to reappear on labels!

Tricky to make

The style and quality of each property's red wines depended hugely on how they decided to "interpret" and vinify grapes that had the potential to produce a tough, astringent style at one extreme - a latter-day 1975 - as well as juicily rich middleweights, if vinified gently.

Many, but by no means all, opted for a very gentle extraction, allowing the fresh, often vividly juicy, ripe fruit to shine through. The best of these are fresh, supple, elegant medium-term wines, often with a most attractive core fleshiness, which will give considerable pleasure at, say, eight to 16 years. But there are also numerous fairly long-term wines, red-fruit cored, with a considerable structure of tannin and acid, relatively austere, 15-to-30-year wines. Hence the impossibility of useful generalizations, and the need to look at the reds wine by wine.

Tricky to predict

The tannin in the most sensibly made reds tastes limited, and very fine-textured. The long-term, tannic wines are easy to spot, and the attractively supple ones seem to have textures that won't harden too much in bottle, but the tannin "indices" were very high, and predicting quite how tannins will develop in bottle is a mug's game.

Situating the vintage - relatively simple for the white, tricky for reds

Whites: This is probably the best and most consistent vintage for both dry and sweet whites since 2007. Concentrated and vigorous for the dry wines; a freshly defined linear elegance for the sweet wines, without the sheer power of the many recent fine vintages of Sauternes - some relief there, then!

Reds: The variability accepted, these are better than 2007, 2004, 2003, 2002; clearly not up to 2010, 2009, 2005; but equal to, and from the dismal pre-primeur-tastings image.

Any tricky to buy en primeur?

Price will of course be everything, and you should look at what a given figure will currently buy you from 2008, 2006, 2001. But if prices come down sufficiently there should be some really attractive deals for the drinker's cellar. St-Julien and Pomerol look like relative sweet spots, and it is mostly not a year for second wines, but that said there are a few that are really lovely.

Michael Schuster, April 16, 2012

WFW wins at the
Roederer Awards

For the second year running, The World of Fine Wine won the Louis Roederer Award for International Wine Publication of the Year. Editor Neil Beckett  and Publisher Sara Morley collected the prestigious prize at a glittering event held on Monday 12th September at the Savoy Hotel in Central London, confirming once again WFW’s preeminent position as the most respected wine magazine in the world.

Neil Beckett commented: “We were astonished and very delighted to win for the second year in a row. But we commission out almost all of our articles, to the most authoritative and entertaining writers we can find, so the achievement is really theirs. There were more than 200 entries this year, almost twice as many as last year, and there were four times as many international entries, so the competition was stiffer than ever and the general standard very high."

The World of Fine Wine is also a past winner of the prestigious Gourmand Award for the World’s Best Wine Magazine.

To read articles by WFW contributors who were nominees or winners at this year’s Roederer Awards, please click on the 'Sample Features' tab at the top of this page.

IN THE LATEST ISSUE

In-depth tastings:

Burgundy 2010: Stephen Brook, Michel Bettane, Margaret Rand, Joanna Simon, Michael Edwards and Neil Beckett review a surprisingly fine vintage.

Galicia: Jesús Barqúin assesses the arrestingly original and stylistically various red and white wines, with additional notes by Tim Atkin MW and Simon Field MW.

Australian Chardonnay: Andrew Jefford describes the renaissance of Australia's most familiar whites, with additional notes by Jancis Robinson MW and Anthony Rose.

Authoritative features from the world’s best wine writers, including:

John Gilman praises the pioneers and dynmic new producers of California wine.

Adam Lechmere profiles Châteu Phélan Ségur

Alice Feiring argues the case for Aligoté, Burgundy's "other"white grape variety.

Andreas Larsson, Andrew Jefford, and Stephen Reinhardt explore how fifteen different glasses perform with fifteen Pinot Noir wines from the Old and New World.

Bill Nanson profiles four very different Burgundy producers: Albert Bichot, Domaine Sylvie Esmonin, Domaine Michel Lafarge, and Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair.

Plus outspoken and provocative columns from our regular contributors: Hugh Johnson, Ella Lister, Tom Stevenson, Francis Percival, and others.

Subscribe now, and have this issue delivered right to your doorstep, or click here to find your nearest store.

Publication date for the next issue: 22 June 2012

The World of Fine Wine's award-winning editorial team is led by Hugh Johnson OBE, Andrew Jefford, and Neil Beckett

Our international contributors include

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