In response to a barrage of queries from an American wine journalist I have been rifling through our cellars, my old note books and photograph archives as well as grilling my father for arcane facts about the Champet family's vine holdings and our trading history with them. We first shipped wines from Emile Champet […]

Great to see so many Yapp customers at our tasting at Vintners' Hall on Tuesday evening, many of whom gamely had a crack at identifying our blind wine. We never find blind tasting easy (indeed, it's often humbling), but it keeps one match-fit and focuses the mind.     The wine was Patrick Jasmin's Côte […]

"While most of France's major wine regions struggled in 2012, the Rhône stands apart. Vintners are positive after a growing season and harvest marked by dry, sunny weather and well-timed rains." James Molesworth - The Wine Spectator Having read extensive reports about the success of the 2012 vintage in the Rhône Valley over recent months […]

Long before I met my wife she belonged to a Wine Club in Cardiff, not that I think really this was for genuine oenophiles but more of a social club where the cheese got as much attention as the wine. It was though by all accounts great fun and had a loyal following. At one […]

Another pre-dawn awakening as we shuttled up a fog-bound Autoroute de Soleil to make our first appointment in Côte Rôtie at 10.00am. We found gregarious patron Joel Champet talking up the merits of the 2010 vintage as well as the prospects of ‘Les Bleues’ in this weekend’s Rugby World Cup Final: "they have nothing to […]

To Dean Street in Soho last Wednesday for the opening of the latest outpost of the Bistro du Vin and Bar. This is a simple but ingenious concept which is basically the same well-tested offering as the Hotel du Vin but without the bedrooms. The emphasis is on simple menus using great quality ingredients coupled […]

Tom and I are making a whistle-stop voyage down the Rhône valley this week to catch up with vigneron friends and get an insight into the Rhône 2009 vintage, of which we have heard great promise. After driving south from Lyon in heavy rain on Sunday evening we started tasting bright and early on Monday in […]

At Yapp Brothers we are blessed with a spacious boardroom which is used for many meetings but few of them are as convivial as last night's dinner for Accenture and Vodafone Business Intelligence. Our old friend Clive Greenhalgh, patron of the Ambassador restaurant, cajoled us into opening our cellars after hours while he set up […]

If the assembled wine-tasters from Baltimore-based asset management company, T Rowe Price, would rather have been in the park on the finest summer evening this year, they weren't letting on.  Instead, shoe-horned into an upstairs room in this traditional City boozer, they proved to be a model audience and even threw in some tricky questions […]

On Day 2 of our Rhône trip, we schlepped north to Côte-Rôtie for a protracted barrel tasting with our old chum Patrick Jasmin. Harvesting here was a tough job in 2008 and Patrick had to pick his grapes in 3 different stages to obtain optimum ripeness. An early sampling of Patrick’s 2008 revealed a lightish, […]