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Caroline Lin - PalateJournal 🍷 Wine & Food Writer | Publisher
✍️ EN–ZH Editor 🇬🇧🇨🇳
🍾 Champagne Specialist & Tea Champion
📩 Read the latest issue:👇palatejournal.substack.com

LadyCarolineWine

10/08/2026

Champagne before noon isn’t a celebration. It’s just lunch, done properly.✨🍾

A Friday at Cavendish Square. Seven cuvées over lunch, four of them in magnum, and William Deutz’s name on three — two from single sites (La Côte Glacière 2018 and Meurtet 2015), and this one — 2008 magnum, arriving with the black cod and never quite leaving the table.

The trade goes quiet in August. So am I. Good time to sit with something rather than race it.

Thanks to Cyrille Harmel and , to Jamie and Richard at , and to Madeleine for organising — and to for the table.🥂

More to come 🔗✍🏼

A Christmas cheeseboard in late July 🧀 Out of season, none of the usual autopilot applies. Just six cheeses, one bottle,...
03/08/2026

A Christmas cheeseboard in late July 🧀

Out of season, none of the usual autopilot applies. Just six cheeses, one bottle, and the honest question of whether they belong together at all. ✨ Swipe →

Paxton & Whitfield 🧀
Exton Park 🍾


The bottle is a paradox. Exton Park built its name on not making vintages — blending across years from one Hampshire vineyard. Yet here is a single 2013: 100% Chardonnay, eleven years on the lees, only just disgorged, and newly crowned Britain’s Best Aged Sparkling at the 2026 WineGB Awards. 🏆

Nutty and ye**ty, stone fruit and honey, a curl of flinty smoke — and underneath, something savoury. Almost cheesy. Which tells you everything: this wine doesn’t tolerate cheese. It’s been speaking the language all along.🥂Swipe →

The board came from Paxton & Whitfield, founded 1797 — four of the six finished in their own Cotswold maturing room, held back until the team judges them ready. 🧀

Two stole it. A triple cream brie that turned out to be Cornish, not French — Britain’s answer to Brillat-Savarin, built on Bodmin Moor cream, and the wine cuts clean through it. And a Montgomery cheddar picked for flavour rather than age: brothy, savoury, gently ye**ty — precisely what eleven years on the lees builds. Both judged by taste, not by the calendar.

Not one parish but a whole country — Somerset, Cornwall, Lancashire, the New Forest. One English wine met all six.🍾

Full pairing on Palate Journal, with two alternative glasses for each of the six cheeses for anyone building a Christmas table 🔗✍🏼 Link in bio.

PR samples — opinions my own.

23/07/2026

Nobody warns you that the cellar tour comes with a gallery. ✨😍

Bodega Enate was founded in 1991 — 450 hectares at 400 to 700 metres of altitude, six varieties, and not one of them native to Somontano. Walking the estate, Ana Gállego reveals their creative sequence: the liquid dictates the canvas. The team finalises the wine first, then pours it for a commissioned artist and lets them respond. The label isn’t just decoration — it’s a visual tasting note. Antonio Saura was the first to answer that call, on their barrel-fermented Chardonnay. Today over four hundred original works hang here, including pieces by Tàpies, Chillida, Canogar and Eduardo Arroyo, all housed in a striking building by Jesús Manzanares.

When we sat down for the tasting, that same logic flowed into the glass.

Chardonnay Fermentado en Barrica 2023 — the wine that started it all, still standing tall in the range today.

Merlot-Merlot 2022 — from a single stony parcel at Alcanetos, 400 metres up, undergoing malolactic fermentation and ageing in new French oak. Frederic Amat’s spiral came after the wine. We tasted bottle 06308 of 10,000. Black plum, damson, violet and graphite emerging with air; full yet composed, with the new oak absorbed into the fruit and a polished, persistent finish.

Syrah-Shiraz 2023 — one grape farmed twice: Syrah in the Cregenzán valley and Shiraz on the Alcanetos hill. Vinified apart, then blended back together in new French and American oak. Wrapped in Manuel Rivera’s drawing. Bottle 00170. Black cherry, blueberry, cracked pepper and savoury smoke; dense but lifted, with no seam between the two parcels across a long, peppery finish.

🔗✍🏼 The full DO Somontano deep-dive is on Palate Journal — link in bio.

🤝

21/07/2026

Five to nine in the morning, and someone hands me a glass of Gewürztraminer ✨🥂

We sipped it among the vines before the estate as Bodega Sommos rose behind us — its faceted glass and steel silhouette echoing Cotiella, the Pyrenean peak watching over the valley.😍

The building went up as Irius, a pre-2008 ambition the crisis stopped cold; it was reborn in 2014 under the Costa family, who kept the architecture (by Jesús Marino Pascual) and rebuilt the wine.
The estate farms 355 hectares, with a gravity-fed production hall plunging 27 metres underground. Harvest takes place at night, followed by optical berry sorting.

And just steps away sit 73 experimental grape varieties, trained across twenty international systems to prepare for a warming climate. The DO’s entire commercial palette permits just fifteen.

What surprised me most: not one wine poured was Cabernet, Merlot or Chardonnay - though Sommos produces all three. Instead, a lees-aged Garnacha Blanca from 850m. A Pinot Noir on wild yeasts. A single-parcel Tempranillo, numbered by bottle.

Even here — the region’s most futurist address — the selling point has shifted from grape to place.

Full piece on Palate Journal — link in bio 🔗✍🏼


PressTrip

I didn’t plan the dress code. Wimbledon has a way of setting it anyway. 🎾✨A seat at Centre Court is still on my dream li...
18/07/2026

I didn’t plan the dress code. Wimbledon has a way of setting it anyway. 🎾✨

A seat at Centre Court is still on my dream list. But four days after the last ball of this year’s Championships, an evening back at Azzurra with Martin Guntrip — Club Director of the All England Lawn Tennis Club — hearing the stories that never make the broadcast, might be the closest I’ve come yet. (I should be deep in my Somontano notes while they’re still fresh, but some detours are impossible to resist 🤩)

Every course poured no-and-low, with Wild Idol CEO Paul Beavis — over two decades in Champagne — presenting his sparklings: the white with the burrata; a dealcoholised Bordeaux and a Kent 0.5% rosé with the lamb; the rosé to finish, beside a lemon dessert disguised as a tennis ball.

Not one course felt like something was missing.

Recalibration isn’t about what leaves the glass — it’s the confidence that takes its place.💫

With thanks to Wild Idol, Azzurra and Clementine Communications 🥂

Cheers — and enjoy your weekend! 🙌

Some wineries celebrate their history. Others quietly evolve it. ✨Ochoa’s renewed identity says it in three words:Ahora...
15/07/2026

Some wineries celebrate their history. Others quietly evolve it. ✨

Ochoa’s renewed identity says it in three words:

Ahora. Aquí. Siempre.
Now. Here. Forever.

Across the visit, I came to read them this way:

Native-yeast selection and three decades of research—now;

ancestral Garnacha and Graciano vineyard over pebbles from an ancient riverbed—here;

and, over lunch beneath the olive trees, an answer to what endures across six generations—forever.

Not fixed practices. Permission—the freedom to question, experiment and improve what each generation inherits.

And it runs both ways. Javier left behind his dream of becoming a photographer to take over the winery at twenty. Sixty years later, his daughters brought his photographs onto the family’s new labels.

Swipe to the end—the family answered my question.

🍷 Full DO Navarra feature on Palate Journal. Link in bio. 🔗✍🏼

13/07/2026

“I was the lawyer of the family,” Irene told us with a smile. “Technical questions go to my brother.” 🍷

That introduction told me more about Pago de Larrainzar than any tech sheet could. Six generations on this land beside the Monasterio de Irache; wine first made here in 1891; the tradition revived in 2001 by their father — today Irene carries the story and Miguel makes the wine. (She’s being modest: behind the law degree sits a master’s in oenology and viticulture.)

She walked us through the oak forest to the vines — 17 hectares at the foot of Montejurra, the heart of it ringed by a medieval wall raised by the monks of Irache — and we tasted the Raso beside the very rows it comes from — yes, glass raised rather higher than strictly necessary 😅

Their ‘Vine Garden’: two dozen different ways to train the vines on a single plot, a living viticulture textbook — they experiment here first, then bring what works to the vineyard.

Then the cellar, and the line I keep replaying, on ordering barrels: “…after fermentation is finished. Never before. Because you need to taste the wine after fermentation to know what kind of barrel you need to order.” Most estates fit the wine to the inventory. Here, every barrel is an answer to the vintage — the wine is tasted first, the oak chosen to match.

Study the vine in the field. Listen to the wine in the tank. Some estates show you their wines — this family showed us how they think, and let the wine decide. ✨

Full DO Navarra feature on Palate Journal — link in bio 🔗✍🏼

Thank you and

🍷 Friday mood: High-altitude vines, historic castles, and the ultimate Navarra feast Bodega Monjardin 🏰✨🥂When exploring ...
10/07/2026

🍷 Friday mood: High-altitude vines, historic castles, and the ultimate Navarra feast Bodega Monjardin 🏰✨🥂

When exploring DO Navarra, you quickly learn that the terroir isn’t just in the glass—it’s on the plate.

Our deep dive into the region brought us to the foothills of the Pyrenees at Bodegas Castillo de Monjardín. Situated right along the legendary Camino de Santiago, these high-altitude vineyards produce wines with a piercing freshness and structural elegance that demand a seat at the table.

And what a table it was - a celebration of Tierra Estella. Beautifully composed dishes, impeccable local ingredients and thoughtfully matched wines demonstrated just how seamlessly the estate’s portfolio moves from aperitif to dessert. Every course reflected genuine care and hospitality, while each pairing revealed another dimension of the wines.

One of the highlights was seeing just how naturally the wines performed with food. The Chardonnay Reserva brought texture and freshness to bacalao al pil pil, while the Tinto Reserva Especial found an effortless partner in grilled Navarra beef. Neither sought to dominate; each simply elevated the other.

Enjoying these wines overlooking the vineyards—and just steps from the barrel cellar—was a reminder that they are crafted not simply to impress in the glass, but to accompany the table.

A compelling expression of Navarra, where altitude, history and gastronomy come together in every bottle.

Heading into the weekend craving exactly this energy. Which would you reach for first—the high-altitude Chardonnay or a structured Navarra red with that steak? 😋🍷

📖 Read the full regional feature exploring the diverse terroirs of Navarra via the link in bio. 🗺️✨

Thank you , Wines from Spain and Portugal and Vino de España

08/07/2026

“The vines… especially the old vines.” 🍇

That was the answer from Puy Trigueros, Director of DO Navarra, when I asked what a wine journalist should pay attention to in Navarra ✨🍷

Two days in the region revealed exactly what she meant: century-old bush-vine Garnacha, Chardonnay planted at 700 metres above sea level in winds you have to lean into, and a sixth-generation family still farming the same land.

Navarra was never just rosado. Its five sub-zones tell a far broader story of landscapes, varieties and styles.

Four wineries explored so far—more highlights to come💫

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The full story is now live on Palate Journal. 🔗✍🏼 Link in bio.🍷

Press trip hosted by and ✨

04/07/2026

Old vines in the ground, an old vintage in the glass — the same instinct, different form. That’s the thread I followed through Navarra and Somontano this week.💫

Many more stories, insights and off-the-beaten-path terroirs to come. Stay tuned as I share highlights from an unforgettable journey exploring the diversity of Spanish wine. 🇪🇸🍷

With thanks to Wines from Spain and Portugal and Vino de España for hosting this unforgettable press trip, and heartfelt thanks to everyone who welcomed us so generously along the way.❤️


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