Restaurants: Pastel Wine Bar, Adelaide, Australia – superb food meets a good wine list in a nice setting
Website: https://pastel.bar/ On my first night in Australia, after a drink at East End Cellars, I headed over to Pastel
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The Douro wines of Sogrape’s Casa de Ferreirinha, including Barca Velha, Portugal’s most famous table wine
Sogrape is a big company with a wide range of wines, but also has some gems in its range, most
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New releases by Adelaide Hills star BK Wines, some of Australia’s most interesting low intervention wines
Website: https://bkwines.com.au/ I caught up with Brendon Keys at East End Cellars in Adelaide to taste through some of his
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Wine & Soul: Pintas and Manoella from Portugal’s Douro (updated with new notes, July 2025)
Website: https://wineandsoul.com/ Jorge Borges and Sandra Tavares have built something special with Wine & Soul. I first bumped into them
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The wines of Masiero, a biodynamic producer in Italy’s Veneto
Website: https://www.verdugo.it/en/homepage-2/ Franco and Francesca Masiero founded this winery back in 1996, and they farm biodynamically. Their daughter Giulia Masiero
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Justino’s Projects, Madeira, Portugal
This was a really interesting chance to try some special Project wines from Madeira producer Justino’s. The wines were tasted
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Restaurants: Balabaya, London, amazing flavours of the Levant
Website: https://balabaya.co.uk/ Lunched at Balabaya, a really impressive restaurant in the Israeli/middle eastern flavour space – a cuisine that I’m
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Highlights: two from new English still wine producer The Heretics
Website: https://www.wearetheheretics.com/ The Heretics Pale Rosé 2023 Crouch Valley, Essex12% alcohol. Pale in colour, as it says on the label.
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A spotlight on the Dão region, currently making some of Portugal’s most interesting wines
Portugal is a diverse wine country, and of late it has been making increasingly accomplished wines. In the north we
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Highlights: Smith & Evans Higher Plot Pinot Chardonnay Late Disgorged 2010 England
This is really interesting; It’s a late disgorgement of an English sparkling wine that spent 13 years on its lees.
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