Robert Boutflower

All right, I’ll admit it – where exactly is Bologna in Italy? If you are a devotee of all things Italian, particularly the food, then I expect you already know but… for the rest of us it’s ‘somewhere up North, maybe?’ And what can a ‘wine finder’ turn up? Well, the first thing to say is that it has an international airport, so you can get there via Ryanair or BA, or you can drive/train past Milan and keep going across the country to the eastern seaboard. Bologna, in all its glowing redness yet anonimity, sits in the middle of Emilia-Romagna’s Po valley and you really can’t miss it.

Bordeaux 2015 is so good we needed to call in some reinforcements! In fact, the reports from last autumn when the harvest came in had already steered us to send over more bodies than usual so that this vintage – the best since 2010 – could have a thorough examination from the Tanners team. Robert Boutflower (your scribe) and Graham Mason were the advance party, with Stephen Crosland, John Melhuish, Rachel Armstrong and James Tanner doing the second week. The task in week one is always to get round the Union des Grands Crus tastings, where one château from a particular commune or village shows all the wines from its neighbours.