08/11/2026
Each winter, Patricia & Max choose a selection of fine w**es for the festive season. It’s a rigorous selection process of research and tasting with a strict criteria set:
All the w**es had to pair with many of the dishes and snacks eaten over this period; serve as spectacular aperitifs and digestifs; act as exemplars of their region and style; please any epicurean drinker with an open mind; reward contemplative sessions where the passionate oenophile can witness the grape, w**emaker, terroir and the vintage reveal themselves over the course of a couple of quiet glorious hours; and, most importantly, of course, pair immaculately with our best cheese.
Perhaps the ultimate test: on tasting each of them we simply had to be silenced by pure pleasure. And we were…
Amongst our selection are some of Patricia’s greatest finds from over the decades that show increasing relevance with every year, as well as some w**es that have challenged both our preconceptions. We also wanted to highlight criminally underrated, and therefore extraordinary value, grapes, styles and regions from a Grand Cru dry Gewürztraminers from Alsace to a Listán Blanco from Tenerife.
The job was made more difficult but exciting by the civil war going on in ‘fine w**e’ across the Old World and New.
On one side, the establishment crus, first growths and the more commercial w**emaking industry at large, with their insistence on clarity, consistency, the notion that each sub region’s w**es of the same style must be immediately recognisable to the experienced drinker no matter the producer, and most importantly, the unbreakable rule that they must display the total absence of ‘faults’. To their detractors these confections are commercial and dead, resembling industrial perfume production, whilst permanently obscuring each region’s unique terroir.
On the other side we have the ‘Garagistes’, the punk ‘natural’ and ‘low intervention’ w**e movement seemingly intent on destroying the old to create the new. These w**emakers proudly thumb their noses at convention with names and labels apparently designed to provoke a spate of pearl-clutching across the w**e aristocracy. They seek to re-establish
