Malcolm Jolley on the stories he missed this year.
We put out a good deal of content every week at Good Food Revolution, and try and cover as much as we can, in our particular, way on what’s happening in the world of good food and wine. Invariably though, there are stories and posts that never make it onto the site. I am particularly bad at this: I will attend an event, take notes and pictures (or maybe a video), and then for a number of reasons, the story isn’t finished or published. Sometimes that’s because we have surfeit of related stories, or we have extra editing work, and sometimes it’s because something went wrong and I can’t figure out how to present the story. Because we have an aggressive weekly output, these stories languish and at the end of the year I try and go back throughmy notebooks and picture galleries to see if I can salvage a few. He are three…
Michel Gassier
Winemaker Michel Gassier and Toronto sommelier Cassandra Mosher.
Michel Gassier is a renown Southern Rhône winemaker and consultant. He is particularly enthusiastic about his home region Costières de Nîmes, and will explain that it has the greatest potential of the Provençal vineyards because of its proximity to the Mediterranean. Look for his more affordable label, Château de Nages at the LCBO (click here to see what’s on the shelves). I am a big proponent of Rhône red wines at the holiday table, his will certianly do.
Tre Bicchiere 2016 – Toronto
Marilisa Allegrini shares a toast with Marco Sebellico.
Tre Bicchiere means three (wine) glasses, and it’s the highest rating given by Italy’s influential magazine Gambero Rosso. Among the top rated wines in a given year, the magazine then conducts an awards process for the best wines and/or wineries. The magazine held a ‘Master Class’ tasting of the wines presided by their wine guide’s editor-in-chief Marco Sebellico, as part of a bigger walk-around tasting organized by the Italian Trade Agency. Tony Aspler has very good notes on the wines that were presented on his website here. I don’t have notes because I managed to put them in the recycling before I had a chance to write them up. I do remember enjoying every wine very much, including the 2011 Allegrini Amarone, which surprised me and has made me rethink the possibilities of the appassimento wines of the region.
Ray Signorello Jr.
Ray Signorello
I was really looking forward to going to a lunch for Ray Signarello Jr. to showcase his family’s top rated Napa Valley wines this fall. For one thing, I don’t comparatively know as much about California wines as I do wines from Europe or other regions like South Africa. This has, in no small part, to do with their price-point. If an agency organizes a tasting for a premium California label, as Profile did for Signorello, then I will make it my business to attend. I woke up with that zeal the morning of the tasting, looking forward to lunch at Barberian’s, in their famous cellar, no less. But I should have stayed in bed, because by the time I got there I was running a fever and in no state to enjoy, much less report on the wines. I can say that the 2012 Chardonnay that I sipped some of was awarded a few weeks later 100 points by an American critic called Robert Parker.
