Useful Links

• Accessories
• Education
• Food
• Investment
• Magazines and other useful wine stuff
• Merchants
• Restaurants
• Non-wine links
   
• Wineries are linked from individual producer pages

If you think we should include any other links from this page, please let us know.

 

Accessories

Wild Grapes Bespoke wine cellars, wine storage solutions and elegant wine accessories. All useful stuff!

Education

Neil Courtier is an experienced wine educator based near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. He runs courses in wine appreciation in East Anglia so if you live in the region and want to increase your technical understanding of wine (other than just enjoying a good glass or several), Neil is well qualified to teach you. Amongst other things he has the WSET Diploma and is an active member of the Association of Wine Educators.

 

The Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) was founded in 1969 to provide high quality education and training in wines and spirits.  Since then, WSET has grown into the foremost international body in the field of wines and spirits education, with a suite of sought-after qualifications both for the professional and wine enthusiast.

 

Food

Archers of Norwich produce simply the best sausages as well as superb beef and lamb. The pork is locally produced and carries enough fat to give it flavour and succulence. The farm assured beef is bought "on the hoof" from J Temple & Son of Wells, North Norfolk and is hung for up to four weeks to get the best texture and flavour. The lambs, which are reared on a farm in Lincolnshire, are also farm assured.

 

Investment

Invest Drinks is Jim Budd's highly acclaimed site (winner of the Prix Champagne Lanson 2001 Ivory Award) dedicated to showing the dangers of drinks investment and, in particular, to pointing out the dodgy deals. Very useful if you are thinking about investing in wine!

 

Magazines, blogs and other useful stuff

Decanter is the UK's biggest (in terms of circulation) wine magazine, Decanter. The magazine itself offers features on regions, estates, wine personalities etc as well as reviews of themed tastings. The new web-site purports to offer much more, including the Bordeaux Index of auction prices of over 250 top wines. This enables you to compare the growth in value of your own wines (assuming your cellar overlaps with Decanter's listings). The subscription charges are quite high and, unless you are a serious investor, we would not recommend subscribing to this service (£160 for 12 months of UK auction data; £240 for UK and US data). 

Drink Rhône is the online presence of the UK's leading Rhône commentator, John Livingstone-Learmonth. Free overviews of recent vintages but subscription required to see reviews of specific wines. Useful information about local goings on, places to eat and stay etc.

Fine Wine Diary comes across as a more extensive version of my blog - that is to say it is tasting notes organised by date of tasting. A little difficult to find what you are looking for but some useful (and interesting) reviews.

A useful wine resources site with some fun stuff too including a wine quiz which goes from being impossibly easy to infuriating.

The most highly respected wine journalist this side of the Atlantic?

 

Matching Food & Wine seems like a good idea and Decanter columnist Fiona Beckett has the extremely enviable task of trying to come up with perfect answers. There is a subscription side to things but the free stuff is quite useful on its own.

Wine picks, articles and humour from Natalie MacLean, recently named the World's Best Drink Writer at the World Food Media Awards in Australia.
 

The Wine Advocate is Robert Parker's bi-monthly review of wines. For around £50 per year you can receive six copies (see www.erobertparker.com), each issue containing over 50 pages of reviews listed alphabetically within their category. All wines are tasted blind either by Parker or by his associate, Pierre-Antoine Rovani, and scored, according to fairly strict criteria out of 100. Parker periodically produces books which are essentially compendiums of his magazine but it is essential to ensure that these have been recently compiled if you are using them to assist your purchases.

Wine Anorak is London-based Jamie Goode's excellent on-line wine magazine.

Wine Doctor - independent fine wine tasting, recommendations and advice from Chris Kissack.

Wine-Journal was the site that brought Neal Martin to Robert Parker's attention. Neal came to a recent tasting and we chatted about holidays, music and even wine. Definitely one of the good guys and his columns are always entertaining to read.

Wine Pages is Tom Cannavan's extensive and informative on-line magazine with articles, polls, discussions etc - certainly the UK's main wine forum for anyone wanting a chat. Easy to spend a lot of time here! 

Winesearcher is probably one of the most useful tools on the web - but only if you are prepared to pay the small subscription (around £15 a year). Type in the name of the wine you want to buy and it gives you a list of who stocks it in whichever country you want to buy it. The free version only lists "sponsors" - companies that pay them around £3,000 a year - whereas the "Pro" version includes all the little guys like me. Believe me, you can save the subscription twice over on your first purchase.

Wine Spectator is Parker's main rival in the States and another extremely influential publication. In format, it is more similar to UK magazines Wine and Decanter but with an inevitably more American perspective. Wines are tasted blind by a small panel of the magazines editors and wines scoring less than 70 (out of 100) are re-tasted. Reviews are included in the "Buying Guide" section which lists wines in descending order according to their ratings. One particularly good thing about Wine Spectator (unlike any of its competitors) is that all wines tasted are reviewed so readers can discover which wines to avoid as well as those to seek out. Magazine subscriptions apply.

 

Merchants

We are now listed on Any12.com. This site has been developed by our good friend, James Borrett who has given us so much help with our site. James' new site lists several good UK merchants and, as he says, it is all about making great wines more accessible to wine lovers by giving them access to a range of wines from different online merchants. It's an extension of his Casemixer® which was first trialled on this site - click here to see how it works.

A growing band of small independent merchants set to take the world by storm? Let's hope so. With around 25 members, ASDW was established as a forum to query the new licensing laws. It is hoped that eventually consumers will be presented with one portal for all that is good about wine in the UK and that supermarket shopping for wine will become a thing of the past. OK so that's not entirely realistic but you get the idea.

Several members got together in London in early June 2006 to put on a tasting aimed primarily at the press. See our blog and a follow up article in the Independent on Sunday dedicated to the organisation. Since then, more tastings have followed and diverse write-ups too.

Fusion Wines is building to become a force in the UK's on-trade supply.

Restaurants

By Appointment must by one of the country's quirkiest restaurants, certainly the most off-the-wall place in Norwich. The entrance is through the kitchen so you can decide what you want to eat even before you see the menu. Except that you don't get to see the menu; instead you are given a personal presentation by Maître d', Robert, of what chef, Tim has prepared. One thing is guaranteed: you will have an unforgettable experience.

Fairlawns Hotel and Spa is near Birmingham so we haven't been there yet but it has recently added some of our wines to its list (so it must be a good place to relax). Certainly they have much to offer.

The Waffle House is the perfect lunch venue in Norwich. Bustling with shoppers, this is the place in Norwich for extremely high quality (almost exclusively organic ingredients) food and a glass of straight-talking wine. Enthusiastic and friendly staff go a long way to making this a fun place to grab a bite.

 

Other links

YogaBright is Jill's site - Jill is a British Wheel of Yoga trained yoga teacher who teaches adults and has also undertaken specialist training for children