Mathieu’s tasting videos

Many will have met our wonderful winemaker, Mathieu, either when visiting the vineyard or at an event in the UK.  As it’s hard to get to visit at the moment, we asked him to run through a few of the wines in short videos.

We’ll be adding more regularly but you can see them now on the Sauvignon, Rosé and Merlot Cabernet, along with latest vineyard news. They’re on our Youtube channel here.

The Curious Wine Quiz

Open a bottle of your favourite Grand Mayne wine and have some fun testing yourself with our unusual wine quiz.

You might also like to torture your friends and family by sharing it with them at your next techno meet up. They may not thank you for the quiz, but you could always remind them that they get 25% off the wine by using the code DISCOUNT25.

Just answer true or false to each of the twenty statements. There’s no need to turn to Google for help, as you can click here for the answers when you’re done. And here’s what we think of your score:

10 or under: thank you for being honest
11-14: better than just guessing
15-17: showing good knowledge or judgement
18-19: super impressive
20: Genius or Google

Enjoy!

Statements of fact … or are they fiction? True or False?
 

1) In Japan, it is possible to buy wine-flavoured KitKats.

 

2) A temporary worker in the Grand Mayne vineyard left work in protest that the morning ritual of kissing fellow workers was discouraged in the light of the emerging Coronavirus epidemic.

 

3) In the 1929 staging of the Tour de France, the Italian cyclists went on strike when the race officials insisted that their drinking vessels (called bidons) could be filled with French, but not Italian, wine

 

4) Researchers at NASA discovered that at zero-gravity, wine gives off a nasty odour.

 

5) Cabernet Sauvignon can be used to make white wine.

 

6) Scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that wine glasses have increased sevenfold in size over the last 300 years.

 

7) The original 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines was modified shortly after publication when one of the First Growth nominations was found to have been enhanced with black currant juice (cassis).

 

8) Snake wine is a drink in south-east Asia, made by infusing a snake in rice wine.

 

9) In the table of wine bottle names, a magnum is equivalent to two bottles and a goliath is equivalent to thirty-six bottles.

 

10) The restaurants of Piedmont in Italy, used to collect the contents of spittoons from the annual wine-tasting festival, as it was better for cooking than using cheaper wines from other regions.

 

11) Rosé is made by blending a small quantity of red wine with white wine.

 

12) A winery in Maryland, USA, is using a Boxer dog to help deliver wine to customers, thereby ensuring social distancing protocols are met.

 

13) Until the 1970s, it was the tradition for wine makers in the Bandol region of France to use donkeys to tread the grapes.

 

14) The residents of Tournon-sur-Rhône enjoyed an impromptu cheese and wine party after the driver of a wine delivery truck crashed into the village cheese store.

 

15) A winery in Abruzzo, Italy, set up a wine fountain so that pilgrims walking from Ortona to Rome could quench their thirst free of charge.

 

16) Additives that have been used in the past to give flavour to wine include fermented fish sauce, garlic and absinthe.

 

17) At the Grand Mayne annual UK garden party (since June 2014), guests can drink an unlimited amount of fabulous Grand Mayne wine.

 

18) In June 2017, one of the guests leaving the garden party was sufficiently confused to not notice that her taxi drove her to Haslemere in Surrey rather than Hazlemere in Buckinghamshire.

 

19) Wine gums were invented by Charles Maynard, who was the son of a staunch Methodist teetotaller.

 

20) In 2009, a 15-year old boy was not allowed to buy wine gums from a store in Wisbech, as he was too young to buy alcohol.