The week in pictures

On 3 November it was red carpet day for the BAFTA Scotland awards, and Champagne house Taittinger was, naturally, the star of the evening.

Winners included Jessie Buckley in Wild Rose, Lorn MacDonald in Beats and Jon S. Baird for Stan & Ollie in the Director of Fiction category, sponsored by Champagne Taittinger.

Guests signed a jeroboam of Taittinger that will be auctioned to raise funds for BAFTA. Outlander’s Sam Heughan, all dressed up for the occasion, added his signature to the bottle.

Taittinger has been BAFTA’s official Champagne partner for close to 20 years.

In diplomatic libations, French president Emmanuel Macron presented Chinese president Xi Jinping with a rare bottle of Romanée-Conti 1978 in Shanghai this week while marking a new trade deal.

In weird science, a case of Bordeaux was been sent into space this week to study how weightlessness could affect the ageing process of wine.

12 bottles of red Bordeaux were delivered to the International Space Station on Monday aboard a Northrop Grumman capsule that was launched from Virginia on Saturday.

On Tuesday night, 14 weapons-grade oenophiles were welcomed into the Institute of Masters of Wine at an awards ceremony in London.

The crack team of wine buffs passed the final part of the MW examination in 2019 and were announced as Masters of Wine in February and August this year.

They are: Edouard Baijot MW (France), Julien Boulard MW (China), Thomas Curtius MW (Germany), Dominic Farnsworth MW (UK), Lydia Harrison MW (UK), Nicholas Jackson MW (USA), Brendan Jansen MW (Australia), Christine Marsiglio MW (UK), Heidi Mäkinen MW (Finland), Edward Ragg MW (China), Jonas Röjerman MW (Sweden), Harriet Tindal MW (Ireland), Jonas Tofterup MW (Spain) and Gus Jian Zhu MW (USA).

Christine Marsiglio MW was crowned the 2019 winner of the Madame Bollinger Medal, which is awarded for excellence in tasting and outstanding achievement in the Institute of Masters of Wine practical examinations.

Canadian-born Marsiglio is a programme manager at the WSET School London, and recently contributed to the development of materials for the newly released WSET Diploma and teaches all WSET levels.

db caught up with the inimitable Neil McGuigan in London this week, who is days away from stepping down from his role as chief executive of Australian Vintage. Over lunch at Fenchurch restaurant inside Sky Garden, McGuigan poured guests three of his new five-strong zero alcohol range, McGuigan Zero, which is due to go on sale at Morrisons next month priced at around £4.50 per bottle.

Formed of a rosé, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz and a sparkler, McGuigan developed the range in response to a growing consumer demand for zero alcohol beers, wines and spirits. He revealed that in order to get the Chardonnay recipe right he had to create a base wine that was out of kilter. “We had to ramp up the oak, malo and lees contact in the wine. It was totally out of balance as a wine with alcohol but fell back into balance when we stripped the alcohol out with a spinning cone column,” McGuigan said.

“To make decent zero alcohol wines you have to add everything in your backpack. The wines have higher than normal residual sugar levels as they don’t work as dry wines. I’m particularly happy with the rosé as it has a pretty pale pink colour and notes of Turkish delight and rose water – it slips down so easily. If alcohol free wines are going to work, they’re going to work with something like this. We stopped making our lower-alcohol 5.5% wines a few years ago because people want all or nothing these days,” he added.

While the MWs were welcomed into the upper echelons of the wine world, db’s Edith Hancock spent the evening at a horizontal tasting of something quite different….

Last month we learned that critic and author Matthew Jukes has entered the low and no-alcohol drinks sector with his own line of low-calorie cordials designed to pair with food.

So this week, we headed to 67 Pall Mall to try them for ourselves.

Jukes told db there’s been plenty of interest in the cordials from “the elite of the elite” restaurants in London. In fact, 67 Pall Mall (aka the Death Star of London’s wine scene), will be one of the first placed they’ll be listed.

For now, the cordials are only available from Juke’s website and through select bars and restaurants, as the critic said they’re being produced in extremely small batches.

In TV tie-ins,Diageo has released the last whisky in its series of spirits inspired by HBO series Game of Thrones.

Hoping to cash in on its lucrative partnership with HBO once more, Diageo is rolling out a limited number of Mortlach Single Malt Scotch Whisky Aged 15 Years, called Six Kingdoms, in select retailers and Amazon in time for Christmas.

In celeb spotting, the team from New Zealand winery Yealands were delighted when chef Marco Pierre White dropped by their stand to say hello at the Taste of Auckland show in Auckland’s Queen’s Wharf at the weekend.

On Wednesday, we hopped on the Jubilee line to Mayfair.

If there’s one thing we will brave central for, it’s excellent food and gorgeous wines, so when the invitation to the opening night of Mercato Mayfair came through, we simply had to scope it out.

Mercato Mayfair, housed in a Grade I listed church, is the latest street food market to crop up in London after a £5 million refurb from. It is Italian food specialist Mercato’s latest outpost in the city, having already opened a hugely successful marketplace in Elephant & Castle.

Spread across four floors, there are dedicated areas for cheese, deli produce and wines, while the market will also host events, workshops and classes in the vaulted basement.

Andrea Rasca, founder and CEO (the man with the microphone), has opened markets in the U.K. and Italy, and is now looking to the US and Japan for new sites, each offering food from a range of cultures, produced organically.

Later that day, Chilean wine producer, Valdivieso hosted a Boat party on Wednesday in collaboration with Bibendum.

Over 300 guests were welcomed aboard the Dixie Queen and were treated to Validvieso and Caballo Loco wines, dinner and dancing, all while enjoying fireworks over the Thames.