With the holiday season fast approaching, we invite you on an exquisite tasting journey through the most iconic grands crus of the world, which may inspire your festive choices to close out 2021 with panache! Called "Reflective Series" by its author John Szabo, our favourite Master Sommelier is sharing with us his bottles of a lifetime, tasted at various charity dinners over the last decade. We will disclose six bottles during the upcoming weeks, keeping you thirsty until the very early days of 2022…

“It hasn’t always been this way.” And it may not stay this way, either”, Emmerich Knoll answers gravely, with an emphatic pause between sentences. We’re driving along the north bank of the Danube River a couple of hours west of Vienna. Above us, vines cling to breathtakingly steep slopes along narrow terraces that follow the sinuous contours of the hills overlooking the river. It’s only March, but the spring has been warm and there’s already a few inches of green pushing out from the arms of these short, rugged vines, leaving the meter-high, dry stone walls that contain the terraces visible from the road in the oblique afternoon sunlight…

Santorini is one of the peaks formed along the South Aegean Volcanic Arc, a string of volcanoes aligned along a 500 km (300 mile) long and 40 km (25 mile) wide semi-circular sweep from just offshore of Athens, south through Santorini and west to the Turkish coast. Nisyros, Milos, Egina and Poros are the other main volcanic islands of this zone, also known as the Hellenic Volcanic Arc…

The tension in the air was palpable when Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, co-owner and winemaker of Gaia Estate, arrived at the Heliotopos Hotel in the village of Imerovigli. Paraskevopoulos, who makes wine at Gaia’s Nemean outpost in the Peloponnese as well as on Santorini, was on the island for one of his regular visits, and the hotel is his usual lodging. The front room overlooking the whitewashed terraces of the hotel rooms below and the spectacular volcanic caldera beyond had become the ad hoc headquarters for a group of volcanologists monitoring seismic and volcanic activity on the Aegean Sea floor. The group was huddled around a screen on which Paraskevopoulos could see a large red blip. It was a full red alert…

Auvergne: an island in the middle of the hexagon. This is how local Auvergnats consider their ruggedly beautiful piece of central France. The main city of Clermont-Ferrand is at its heart, 400 kilometers due south from Paris, 330 kilometers north of Marseilles.
The region is deeply embedded in French history, a symbolic as well as physical heart, remembered and celebrated as the place where the Gaul leader Vercingétorix famously defeated the army of Julius Cesar in 52 B.C.E. A museum dedicated to the ‘Battle of Gergovie’ now stands at the site on the Plateau of Gergovie near Clermont-Ferrand…

Madeira is the name given to a fortified wine made from a handful of endemic grape varieties, outlined below, which grow on the island of Madeira. From the very earliest days, madeira wine was made for export, and the international fame that the wine has garnered over centuries has spread the name of the island around the world. Today, there are few wine lovers unfamiliar with the name madeira, yet what’s actually in the bottle is often shrouded in mystery or ambiguous folklore. The profusion of styles, ranging from virtually dry to fully sweet, bottled at various staging of ageing, from a single harvest or a blend of different vintages, with or without the name of a grape variety and a host of other “traditional” mentions on the label, are confounding to say the least. This confusion led one producer to tell me that: “madeira is the most famous wine that nobody knows”. I have to agree, but here are the details…

Wine was produced and exported from Madeira from at least the middle of the 15th century. Prince Henry the Navigator ordered that the malvasia from Candia, the island’s first grape, be brought from the Cretan port of the same name via Sicily for cultivation. When Madeiran sugar was replaced by cheaper exports from Brazil in the following century, vineyards largely replaced sugarcane plantations and wine production grew…

There are many wines with a deep connection to history, but none can claim as ready and remote a link to generations past as the grand old wines of Madeira. This five hundred and fifty year old wine recalls the great age of exploration, the Renaissance, the dawn of capitalism, and the beginnings of trade with the Americas and India when sailors challenged the wild waters of the Atlantic in search of fortune. It also whispers of a darker period of slave labour, the rarely-told story that links so many traditional wine regions. Madeira has seen it all…

Keen to go further back even further in time, Mastroberadino’s agronomist Antonio Dente agrees to take me to see exactly how vineyards in Campania looked 2000 years ago. The site is Pompeii, the Roman trading town on the south side of the Vesuvius that was buried along with Herculaneum and Stabiae during the massive eruption of the volcanio in 79AD. It’s an event that remains etched in western psyche and has made Vesuvius the most famous volcano of all, in large part because of how the town it destroyed became frozen in time under a thick, funeral veil of ash. Life as it was in the first century, as well as the final moments before death of the citizens of Pompeii, is preserved in frightening detail…

Even the luggage carousel at Capodichino Airport in Naples moves faster than the average. Travelers must jostle and scramble to retrieve their bags from the spinning belt. Perhaps it is sped up on purpose to set the pace and prepare unwitting tourists for the frenetic beat of life in Naples. The streets and highways are famously chaotic, and one quickly gets the sense that they’re unwittingly part of a rally race with real danger at every corner. Traffic in Naples is governed by no obvious code. It’s every driver for him or herself. Lanes are non-existent, and traffic lights are more suggestive rather than imperative. It’s a continual dance of stop and start, dash and dodge, and hair-thin misses timed to a symphony of honking horns conducted by a multitude of upturned palms with fingers squeezed together and pointing to the sky in the universal Italian gesture, accompanied by shouts of “Ohhhh-ehhh”…

The world’s most ancient wine-producing region, with 6,000 years of history, is barely a decade into a modern winemaking renaissance. Unlike neighboring Georgia, whose wine production has continued unbroken for millennia, Armenia’s ill-fated wine culture was drowned by successive waves of inclement historical events. Yet thanks to the country’s extreme climate, phylloxera-free volcanic soils, abundance of highly promising, literally antediluvian grape varieties - the ancestors of all wine grapes, and a growing number of diasporan Armenians with ambition, national pride and a commitment to help rebuild the country through resurrecting its wine industry, small but mighty Armenia is scratching out some territory on the Historic World wine map…