Photos
Like a piece of celluloid film, a bottling comprises of several different frames. Each frame, when integrated into the whole, plays its own part in the story.
Taken in isolation, if very lucky, a single frame may be sharp and clear, the image somehow encapsulating the very essence of the film.
More often than not, a single frame will be distorted, out of focus, blurred leaving the viewer floundering for an interpretation.
Look closely at a bottle of Chateau Lafite, or any other of the great Bordeaux, and you will see it is labelled as grand vin. Not ‘great’ as a superlative, but as in Great Britain, big. For the ‘big’ wine is a careful assembly of around fifty ‘small’ wines, each one vinified separately from one of five grape varieties, grown on fifty terroirs.
Here, the skill of the maitre de chai selects and marries the different cuvees and their respective attributes in order to create the ultimate expression from that year’s harvest characteristics: no two bottlings will ever be the same, but they will express the taste of the chateau, its cellar master and chateau owner. That’s why you have never seen a single cask wine.
Read more >
this is why we are here and this is our mission – to push the boundaries, to challenge received wisdom and to ask: “What if?”