Sit back and taste the wine

Photo: Supplied
Photo: Supplied
Rebecca Fox does some armchair travelling — and armchair eating and drinking — care of season three of The Wine Show.

With most of us not keen to pack our bags and head to Europe given Covid-19 is still raging, The Wine Show is the ultimate in armchair travelling.

As season three begins to air it is time to sit back and be transported to Europe and the United States, eat yummy food, drink great wine, see wonderful sights and be entertained by your tour hosts.

In this case, the hosts are the presenters of The Wine Show — wine experts Joe Fattorini and Amelia Singer with presenters, actors Matthew Goode (The Crown) and his friend Matthew Rhys (The Americans) as well as James Purfoy and, new to the show, actor, director and wine enthusiast Dominic West.

The history, sights, sounds and tastes are brought to us through evocative shots of wine being swirled around a glass, of pretty cobbled European streets and the repartee between the experts and Goode and Rhys.

Past series have been described by reviewers as "Top Gear for wine lovers" which is pretty apt.

The show is based in beautiful surroundings in Europe’s wine regions. Fattorini holds the show together while directing his hapless presenters, Goode and Purfoy, off on a new challenge in every episode to find special wines while exploring the countryside and meeting winemakers.

Having based themselves in Italy and France in earlier series, this series makes the less well-known — for Kiwis anyway — wine-producing country of Portugal its base, in particular the Douro Valley.

Fattorini and Singer also get to have their own adventures, starting off with a challenge of their own — to develop a one-day tour featuring Maderia wines, with just 24 hours of preparation and haphazard results.

"It’s daunting. Madeira has a bad rap as a sweet, old-fashioned wine," Singer admits.

Goode and Purfoy, meanwhile, have to find a wine that reflects Portugal’s connection with India and the spice trade — giving us a quick history lesson on Portugal’s past exploration and discoveries.

As the series continues, they investigate other parts of the country, experiencing the annual cork harvest and climbing the 300 steps to the Bom Jesus church.

The show brings in experts in food and wine along the way, with this season featuring United States wine stars sommelier Andre Mack and Jermain Stone, aka "The Wolf of Wine" and host of the Hip Hop Wine podcast, and British sommelier Charlotte Wilde, who heads to the Azores in search of who really invented sparkling wine.

Food is not forgotten in this series, either, which features Thai food guru Kay Plunkett-Hoggee, who challenges Fattorini to design a wine list for her pop-up restaurant in London, while Rhys shows Fattorini his favourite restaurants in New York, from lox to Irish stew, which represent the ethnic diversity of the city.

In the first episode, Rhys shows Fattorini his favourite Jewish delicatessen, Russ and Daughters, and Fattorini introduces him to a rose from Eastern Europe to try with their "pink" food.

"Mentor in chief" Fattorini also shares wine from his travels with Purfoy and "new pupil" West, who describes himself as a "vessel that wishes to be filled". He’s treated to rare or very limited finds most people will never get to taste, and that will leave wine lovers’ taste buds salivating, such as a 30-year-old Borges Madeira wine and a 2017 Terrantez do Pico from the Azores — bottle 73 of only 803 bottles made.

In case you are wondering, no New Zealand wines feature in the series, but two Australian ones do — South Australian Grenache Juma Danby and Grosset Polish Hill Reisling.

 - All seven episodes of season three of The Wine Show are now streaming on Neon.

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