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Grape growing in the UK resembles cricket: there are just so many different ways to be out. Accordingly, frost damage is a duck - caught for nought. Yet even at the end of the season, like a batsman chasing down a score to save a game, you can suddenly find yourself stranded without partners. Your carefully constructed innings was all in vain.
John Atkinson MW
John began his wine career in 1990 in now trendy Corsica, spending eight months as a stagiaire at Orenga de Gaffory, Patrimonio. In 1999, John completed the Master of Wine qualification, and was awarded the Madame Bollinger Tasting Medal and Villa Maria Prize for the best blind tasting and viticulture paper respectively. Not finished with study, after receiving the Master of Wine qualification John wrote several peer reviewed and published scholarly papers on wine and wine marketing. Over the last thirty years, John has worked collaboratively with some of the wine world’s top producers - Ridge Vineyards, Anne Gros, Armand Rousseau, Telmo Rodriguez, Alvaro Espinosa and, latterly, Champagne Billecart-Salmon. John is currently Viti-Vini Consultant at Danbury Ridge Wine Estate and has been closely involved with the business since 2018.
Recent Posts
The Clay Sea
18-Jul-2022
In discussions of terroir rocks have exalted status. The journey downwards through the geological record is mostly a search for hard boundaries – chalk, basalt, slate – while the overlying burden of clay, silt and sand tends to get lumped together, as soil. Causative descriptions tend to bottom out when bedrock is struck with a few high profile exceptions, most notably at Château Pétrus in Pomerol, where a blister of smectited blue clay challenges the limestone-dominated underworld of French vineyards for the top spot.
2020 Burgundy: a producer's perspective
6-Apr-2022
To claim Burgundy is all about money would be wrong, but neither is it true to say the region only serves the aesthetic interests of its buyers and makers. The truth lies somewhere in between.