While critics are mostly yet to publish their reports on Napa’s 2018, the early reviews are outstanding. Alder Yarrow describes it as “a complete knockout, with phenomenal potential” and “some of the best wines that Napa has seen in almost a decade”. Antonio Galloni has suggested the vintage offers “gorgeous, super-refined Napa Valley Cabernets that are quite a bit more understated than what we have seen in recent years”. Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW has just released her glowing report for the Wine Advocate – the top line that the wines are “packed with purity, vibrancy and energy”. The year was cooler than normal for the region, allowing the grapes to ripen long into the harvest; it was essentially an easy year for the growers that caused little stress. “We usually find the uneventful vintages to be the best years,” says Thomas Rivers Brown – the superstar winemaker behind dozens of California’s top wines, including those of Schrader Cellars. “After a particularly wild ride in 2017, it was nice to have a relatively calm, cool growing season with an abundant crop.” Will Harlan feels it’s a particularly important vintage for Promontory – and one that he’s excited to introduce to the world, although we won’t get to see the wines for a couple of years yet. Talking to him and Cory Empting, the Director of Winegrowing, they explained how it felt like everything had come together – a decade’s worth of work in the vineyard coming to fruition in the wines. Empting noted that it was a relatively dry year (with rainfall down around 30% on average), but the rain that they did get fell in late April and early May – just after budbreak and as the vines were gearing up towards flowering. This enabled them to dry-farm a larger percentage of the vineyards. Temperatures were steady, with the mercury not rising above 100˚F (38˚C) and only rarely above 90˚F (32˚C). The region’s trademark fog, one of the keys to the quality produced, was also a little bit different in 2018 – not burning off until midday, keeping temperatures lower than normal. The season ended with an Indian summer with no threat of rain; meaning a wide picking window for producers to work with. At Promontory, Empting felt there was a real energy in the fruit – he followed his gut, taking a gamble and they finished picking two weeks earlier than normal, long before many of their neighbours. Everyone I spoke to reiterated the joy of having a bit of volume to work with in 2018 (up around 20-30% according to Napa Valley Vintners) – and while the larger berries harvested could have created dilute wines, lower in tannin and colour, that was far from the case. As Brown explained, “Colour and concentration came quickly – mostly due to true ripeness, so it wasn’t necessary to really hammer on the ferments to get them where you wanted. If you did, you probably produced wines that were over-extracted, and focused on structure over flavour.” Mike Smith of Myriad Cellars described it as a “textbook” year – with everything falling into place. There were no heat spikes and the ample crop enabled him to drop fruit without worrying about his yields. The challenge for him with such generous volumes, however, was tank space – especially as he works out of a custom crush, where tanks need to be turned around for someone else to use. Nevertheless, he managed, taking advantage of some extra tanks of his own and the resulting wines have an amazing freshness and purity, yet also dark colour and textural richness.  Empting is similarly happy with the results – wines that he feels really demonstrate the character of the Promontory property. For him, they’re lithe – not having the baby fat you’d normally see, with tension, length and great acidity. “You’ve taken all the weight out of it,” he explains. “It has density – but the perfect amount that isn’t distracting you from the detail.” He’s one of several to highlight the suppleness of the tannins, making it an extremely transparent, crystalline vintage that will drink from the get-go, but has no doubt about the ageing potential given the balance in evidence. So how does it compare to recent vintages? Brown felt many would be tempted to compare the vintage to 2012 – having similar crop and berry sizes, but that the wines of 2018 are “far superior” that 2012's earlier-drinking style. “Though the wines are very charming right now and very drinkable, there is quite a bit of tannin lurking beneath the surface. I assume these wines will be very open for a year or so and then go dormant for a while. They should easily age two to three decades,” he explained. For Smith, they sit somewhere between 2013 and 2016 – the tannins of the former, but the polish of the latter.  No doubt we'll hear more in the coming months, but it's looking like an exciting vintage – one that offers an old-school style of Napa with elegance, balance and great cellaring potential. Browse Napa or read more about California

As Napa’s top names start to release their 2018s – with more to follow over the next couple of years, we talk to some of the valley’s top names to find out more about the vintage, a year that shows great promise

We talk to top Napa Valley wine estates Schrader Cellars and Promontory to find out more about the 2018 vintage that is tipped for greatness

2018 Napa vintage report

Napa 2018: a promising vintage

If my wife and I are lolling around on the sofa, sharing a bottle of wine and listening to jazz, I’ll sometimes ask, in tones combining the genial authority of a quizmaster with the tacit menace of a Stasi interrogator, “Who do you think is playing bass?” Or piano. Or drums. If she doesn’t know, I respond with appalled astonishment because it’s so obvious (you only need to hear a couple of notes) that it’s Charlie Haden. Or McCoy Tyner or Max Roach or whoever. When I was studying jazz in the 1980s (by studying I mean getting as stoned as possible with my friends) we’d play records for each other without revealing the identities of the musicians and, in this way, I built up an instinctive database of who sounded like whom. Of course, that’s not all I was doing, back then. I was also swilling gallons of beer and respectable quantities of wine, both of which I consumed with just as much pleasure as I listened to music. The difference is that with wine, I never paid any attention to what I was drinking, where what I was drinking had come from, or what grapes might have gone into it. Still don’t, actually. So, while my wife sometimes doesn’t know who she’s listening to, I rarely know what I’m drinking. Now, if my enjoyment of jazz is enhanced by knowing who I’m hearing, when an album was recorded, how a given version of a tune compares with other versions by different musicians and so on, does it follow that my enjoyment of wine is correspondingly diminished by ignorance and indifference as to its provenance and ingredients? Am I sitting around liking what I like while unable to tell whether what I’m liking is a bottle of Kenny G or vintage Sonny Rollins? To answer this question and address the larger issue, a bit of history is helpful (isn’t it always?). I grew up in a non-drinking household. We knew that other people drank wine with dinner but this was seen as an exotic, middle-class custom, as removed from our own potential experience as the tribal rites featured in National Geographic. No one we knew drank wine except the homemade kind – blackberry, pear, potato etc – that my parents made, stored in the cupboard under the stairs and offered to thirsty relatives who came to visit. Bearing no relation to wine as usually conceived, this beverage was more akin to a potent species of cider. Ah cider! As was the case for all boys of my generation, cider proved such an effective conduit to getting blind drunk that I’ve not been able to face even a sniff of the stuff since a horribly enjoyable first encounter. Same with Cinzano Bianco, but I’ve never turned my back on beer. As part of the general drift into all matters alcoholic, I drank a bit of Liebfraumilch (yum) but didn’t encounter anything like the notion of a ‘good’ wine until I was at Oxford. (The fact that I had to wait till then is a good indicator of the class status of wine in the UK back in the 1970s.) One day a fellow-student at my college offered to sell some bottles of what he pimped as “excellent red wine.” Three of us forked out for six between us. It was great. Sort of peppery tasting. We glugged the lot in one evening and I was violently sick, from my friend’s window, into the lane outside (a reversal of Charles Ryder’s first encounter, in Brideshead Revisited, with Sebastian Flyte who pukes into his room), but I was on my winey way. Most boozing took place in the pub (beer) but, as I gradually got used to drinking wine at dinners and at art openings, an unreliable and poorly projected map of wine awareness began to take shape.  In my early 30s, there was a Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon for which I developed a particular fondness. At three quid a bottle it seemed more appropriate, even then, to cut it down to three syllables: Bulg-Cab-Sauv. Then came the news that the contents of any bottle could be improved by being allowed to breathe. Sometime later, living in Paris, I got wind of a crude truth that you could tell a better wine by how far you could stick your finger in its bottom, in the whatever-it’s-called at the base of the bottle. The further the better was the rule of thumb, so to speak, though why this should be the case I never discovered. These were excellent, easy-to-implement tips but the bigger picture remained blurry. I knew there were regions, different kinds of grape, but I was never sure which was which (Burgundy always sounded like a type of brandy) and I knew enough to know that it wasn’t enough to know that you liked a Merlot, say; you also needed to know what was going on within that species of grape or region, that certain brands and years were better than others. Although a drawing of a château on the label could be a good sign, it was not an infallible one, especially when some high-quality wines began to feature labels that shared an aesthetic with edible marijuana products or t-shirt design. And over all this uncertainty hung a larger cloud of astonishment – a symptom of the world’s fathomless ability to defy logic – generated by the ‘fact’ (I still have trouble accepting it as such) that white wine is not necessarily made from white grapes, nor red from red. Even when we factor in the odd big Tuscan moment in Italy, or Pinot epiphany in New Zealand, my understanding has not advanced significantly in the last 20 years. I know what I like but, as with many things – learning German, for example – I feel I’ve left it too late. Any attempts I make are the equivalent of looking up the occasional word in an online Deutsch-English dictionary. One can often spend one’s way to an enhanced experience, but my natural skinflintery means I prefer my father-in-law’s model, whereby he had knowledged his way to improved enjoyment. He not only serves fantastic wine, without exception, on every occasion; he always serves wine that costs a fraction of how it tastes.  I like this approach but, to borrow the term from London’s taxi drivers, I’ve never done the knowledge. I’m like the new generation of Uber drivers who rely so passively on their phones’ navigation apps that, after years behind the wheel, they still have almost no idea where they’re going. My phone comes in handy too. If I drink a fantastic wine at a friend’s house, I’ll take a picture of the label and, if it’s in stock at a local store, will buy a case. It’s nice being able to repeat a pleasing experience but it’s rarely as nice as I remember it and often not nice in the way that I remembered it. Or, if it’s nice at first, it almost always seems less nice, months later, when I’m down to the last couple of bottles. There are as many moving parts in the world of wine appreciation as there are in and around the mouth.  We have moved, by a combination of association and anatomy, to the potential source of the difficulty, to language. Having failed to acquire home-grown expertise, I am at the mercy of advice from the people who work in wine stores. Overall, I would estimate that this has resulted in a 50% success rate at twice the necessary expenditure. Is this because of shortcomings in their expertise and counsel, or is it due to linguistic failure, to inadequate translations of their knowledge into my preferences? We are told there’s no accounting for taste, which is not true, but it seems there are multiple problems with recounting one’s tastes or satisfying other people’s desires. Compared with sex where you can easily get by with half a dozen verbs and nouns, saying either what you want from a wine – or what it will do for someone else – demands a linguistic dexterity that is almost Joycean. We have all sat entranced as a waiter’s attempts to do justice to the merits of a given wine begin to sound like a libationary remix of Chomsky’s “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.” But even while allowing for scepticism, incomprehension and constant proximity to parody, I continue to wonder about the extent to which my experience of wine would be enhanced by becoming more articulate in la langue du raisin. ‘Smooth’ is generally considered a good quality (as opposed to ‘rough’) but Kenny G, a purveyor of ‘smooth jazz’, is tacitly at odds with ‘complexity’. I can sort of appreciate complexity in a wine, without any understanding of how that complexity is constituted but – a defining character flaw – am more often conscious of a lack of complexity.  The strange thing is that while wine appreciation is not like a foal’s ability to get up and running straight away, it does find its feet over time. Even if uninformed, un-cultivated and left to fend for itself without any supporting help, it seems one’s tastes in wine not only change; they improve of their own accord. This might be considered a welcome, accidentally ameliorative side-effect of getting older. Or would be were it not for the fact – one I have no trouble accepting – that this improvement manifests itself negatively, as a steadily increasing capacity for dissatisfaction. To put it simply, what might have seemed an excellent wine a few years earlier becomes merely tolerable because of a lack of what may or may not be complexity. The tolerable becomes unacceptable, and the unacceptable becomes vile. My tongue has become more responsive to taste while remaining tied; my discernment is entirely inarticulate. The product, above all else, of laziness, this manifests itself in several unattractive ways. Do women on a date prefer men who take control of the wine menu? (Could this be the civilised residue of what was once a more widespread assumption and acceptance of male domination?) My own dating history leads me to suspect that they might, though the belief that the evening gets off to a bad start – with my saying, “I don’t know anything about wine, you choose” – is more palatable than conceding that it might have more to do with the way it ends (with my saying, “Let’s split the check”) or, come to think of it, with the middle passage (constantly refilling my own glass while droning on, without interruption, about the musical complexity of Ornette Coleman). It’s not just laziness and tightness, there’s also the question of sophistication and refinement. I can eat with chopsticks – I really can! – but have never been able to master the knack of swirling wine round the glass and forensically nosing it. You can do it, I’m sure, but I always feel like I’m engaged in such a blatant affectation that the first flicker of an erotic bond starts to form between my date and the waiter because they can tell that I’m parroting the action without any idea of what I’m attempting to discover, that it’s obvious to anyone watching that my head is entirely filled with a single idea: keep the cost down. In this regard, price, I am pleased to report that limited progress has been made. In my mid-20s, in London, I was sometimes invited to the house of the writer Lisa Appignanesi who was at the centre of London’s intellectual and cultural life. Well-mannered enough not to arrive empty-handed, I’d stop off at the off-licence near her house and pick up the cheapest bottle of discounted plonk on offer. Lisa always accepted this shabby gift graciously (she did everything graciously), while making sure that it never darkened the table. It now seems one of the rudest things one can do, to show up at someone’s house with a crap bottle of wine, though where crapness begins or ends is anyone’s guess. A shitty bottle of wine is always over-priced, is always money wasted. At the opposite end of the scale, my limited experience of drinking very expensive wine has confirmed what I had always expected: that it’s wasted on me. I ooh and ah, naturally and gratefully, but even though I enjoy these $200 bottles I am thinking: well, it’s not 170 bucks better than a 30 dollar bottle. Perhaps from a certain point – $100 upwards? – you have to pay twice that for a tiny percentage improvement in experience. That makes sense. If this were not the case, then a $1,000 bottle would surely bear so little relation to wine that it wouldn’t be wine at all. We now have sufficient linguistic tools available to describe my ideal relationship with wine. When I think of wine, it’s never as a drink or a taste experience but always as part of an occasion, part of a narrative. What I love is going to a dinner at a restaurant with a non-clamorous acoustic (wood and carpet, not metal and concrete) and a limited menu (I hate choosing food), knowing that someone else will take care of ordering the wine which will flow without let or hindrance. The problem at my father-in-law’s is that although the wine is always excellent, there’s never an infinite amount of it. And what I want from wine, above all, is more. That’s the key word in all this. I love talk and the progression of conversation as the wine makes itself felt: the glow of friends’ eyes, the flow of chat. Red wine, reflections of the room and of candlelight in the glasses full of wine. Everything is held together by the wine, even though that wine is less important than the people, the subject, the jokes and laughter. The wonderful remarks become more wonderful as the evening unfolds, until nothing anybody says really makes any sense at all. In the morning I will not remember the details of the wine or the food. What I will remember is the warm glow, the happiness of it all.  This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue One

Writer and critic Geoff Dyer charts his slow journey towards an ever-increasing appreciation of – and reverence for – well-chosen wine. Photography by Marcus Nilsso.

Writer and critic Geoff Dyer charts his slow journey towards an ever-increasing appreciation of – and reverence for – well-chosen wine.

FONDATA: The Mirth of More

The Mirth of More

The knife is a descendant of the sword, that emblematic and destructive weapon of war. We learn to respect it from an early age. Though powerful and dangerous, this day-to-day working tool is the one item in the culinary arsenal used to cut flesh in the preparation of food. Fingal Ferguson of the renowned Gubbeen cheese family in Ireland, and maker of world-class knives, remembers his mother Giana in the early days of his parents’ farmhouse cheese revival in the 1970s, cutting the curds with her grandfather’s dressage sword on the side of the Aga. It was not, however, this splendid, dramatic rapier that triggered his passion for the craft, but a hobby that grew out of butchering. Ferguson’s handsome handcrafted knives, which he started making 20 years ago, come in all shapes and sizes from small paring knives to cleavers, and have acquired cult status at home and abroad. They are coveted by those who love cooking – from domestic cooks to celebrity chefs – and those who value craftsmanship and beauty, not to speak of functionality, in the tools they use. His collection, full of character, ranges from high quality satin hand-finished steel to the higher end Damascus patterned blades with handles carved from maple, beech, chestnut, bog oak, spalted poplar, alder, Micarta (a composite), carbon fibre, buffalo horn and, more unconventionally, compressed rock-hard Donegal tweed, and gemstone turquoise.  These knives are much in demand – at one point in 2017 he had 980 people on the waiting list. Francis Mallmann – the world-renowned Argentinian, Michelin-trained, Patagonia-loving chef famous for open fire cooking – declared Ferguson’s knives the best, and ordered a set of 22, one for each of the tasks in his kitchen. “He is one of my heroes as I love cooking with fire,” Ferguson reveals when we meet in his workshop on the family farm not far from the fishing village of Schull in west Cork, one sunny September morning. Located far out on the most south-westerly tip of Ireland, nestled beneath Mount Gabriel with breathtaking views across the Atlantic to Fastnet Lighthouse, Coney Island and Cape Clear, Gubbeen (which means little bite) is a 250-acre coastal farm with a 140-strong cheesemaking herd of Friesian, Holstein, Jersey and Kerry cows that graze peacefully in the surrounding fields. It is here Ferguson grew up and became in turn a farmer, cheesemaker, butcher, charcuterie-maker, knifemaker, husband and father.  “I was two and a half when mum and dad started making cheese, so I grew up with it. The farm is the backbone of everything we do, and you are either mucking about in the yard or putting on whites to clean the cheese,” he says with a smile. Tousle-haired, dressed in a bleu de travail workman’s jacket, followed by his border terrier, Mouche, he shows me around the farm where the cheesemaking is in progress, and to a barn piled high with straw bales at the entrance to his workshop. Flocks of geese and Barbary ducks patrol the yard, undisturbed. A nifty Jack Russell called Sunny makes an occasional appearance, checking out newcomers.   Grounded, thoughtful, practical and creative, Ferguson comes from pedigree stock on both sides of the family. His father Tom was in his twenties when he inherited the farm, run by four generations of resourceful Fergusons, including his great-grandfather who introduced an innovative and successful milking system in the 1880s that benefitted the whole area. Tom’s mother Mary was a founding member of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and ran one of Ireland’s first farm guesthouses.  Tom met Giana Luke – then in her twenties, of Austro-Hungarian ancestry, and daughter of the playwright Peter Luke – when she was visiting an uncle, a writer living in Inish Beg beyond Baltimore. “I was drifting around with a dog and a tent,” she later recalled. The pair fell in love, married in 1975 and started their life together. “She was a dreamer with a fascinating culinary background, and he was a west Cork farmer and a doer. Opposites attract,” Fingal smiles, adding that his own marriage to Dubliner Ciara Rogerson, a high-powered, Oxford-educated consultant statistician, carries on the family tradition.   Giana’s grandfather, hugely influential in her love and appreciation of food, was the Eton-educated Sir Harry Luke who spent 40 years in the British Colonial Service and dined for England in far flung places like Aleppo, Tonga, Tbilisi, Sierra Leone, Transcaucasia (present day Georgia), Armenia and Azerbaijan. His 1954 book, The Tenth Muse: A Gourmet’s Compendium, is a tour de force of descriptions of the culinary cultures he encountered on his extensive travels. Fingal’s own name he attributes to his parents’ love of Oscar Wilde whose middle name was Fingal – indeed one of his own five children is called Oscar. Memories of growing up between west Cork and occasional trips to his grandfather’s house in Jimena de la Frontera, in Andalusía, Spain, were huge influences: “being immersed in Spanish food and those long tables and robust flavours and if there was no garlic, there was no menu. That Spanish influence led us to preserve food with nothing left to waste. Food preservation was logical – we either share, swap or preserve,” explains Fingal whose self-built smokehouse was a pioneering step in establishing the farm’s charcuterie business. A strong work ethic is part of the Ferguson dynamic. “I was never pushed or forced into farming,” he says. At the Quaker school in Newtown in Waterford where he was educated, “if you were crap at something you were allowed to fail, but you had to compensate somewhere else and I was drawn to hands-on learning like woodwork because I love making things and hate having nothing to do. I can take most machines apart and put them back together again.” Having become the farm’s butcher, he got into knives, and with a family connected to food, needed to learn how to sharpen the tool of his trade properly. After school, when he spent some time in New Zealand “milking 800 cows on the North Island”, he made his first knife, then did a knifemaking and bladesmith workshop with Owen Bush & Bushfire Forge in the UK. “But my real inspiration,” Ferguson reveals, “was the knifemaker Rory Conner up the road here in Ballylickey who had trained with Bob Loveless in the US, one of the world’s top knifemakers. We used to contact Rory for knives for special occasions, for wedding presents – he is a real craftsman. All this led to knifemaking becoming my hobby.” In the workshop furnished with machinery, grinders, belts and assorted tools, Ferguson gives me a lesson in knifemaking, explaining that it has two essential parts – the metallurgy “taking the steel to make a blade and how different steels make different things. And the second part is the handle which can be classic or crazy – we live our personalities in our things, so you can have a carbon steel knife with a jet-black bog oak handle sitting right next to a shiny Damascus steel knife with a vibrant multicoloured handle.” Strangely, most of the parts of the knife are named after parts of the body – the belly, the throat, the cheek, the heel and the spine. Sheets of steel of different types are stacked in a corner of the workshop. The painstaking method of making a knife begins, Ferguson carefully explains, when suitable steel is cut and drilled into the shape of the blade, and he shows me the design of the blade marked out on the steel. “It then goes into a kiln for a short specific period at temperatures as high as 1,080ºC depending on the type or process. It is at these temperatures where the magic of metallurgy takes place and we can transform it from soft into hard steel. It is then quenched or cooled rapidly as a key part of the process. After some little adventures with the tempering cycles which balance the hardness and makes the knife more useable, it is ready to become a blade, ready for more grinding and thinning out, defining the edge and then polishing ready for the handle.” Demanding skill and precision, “you could be hours making a knife – and the level of obsession will determine the outcome,” he adds. The level of workmanship in a knife can, in turn, inspire a reverence that affects how its owner wields it. Some of Ferguson’s knives are made from Damascus pattern welded steel which adds an eye-catching beauty when polished and etched – these steels can be outsourced or, as he explains, makers can go through the lengthy, highly skilled and more advanced process that involves more than 60 layers of lamination and that can take years to master. Japanese knifemakers, in particular, have embraced these skills, drawing on Japan’s great historical swordsmithing tradition; when the Samurai were forbidden to carry weapons, their swordmakers turned their craftsmanship to making cutlery instead. “One of the interesting psychological things about a Japanese-influenced knife, with its hidden tang design, is that you might treat the knife differently, use it differently,” says Ferguson. “Images will be conjured up of the precise, thoughtful and accurate knife skills of the Japanese.” In some of his work, he draws on such influences to make knives based around thinner edge geometry and around more precise use. “Western knives tend to be sturdier for more general use.”  Ferguson believes that “a knife is either practical or emotional. You can have a Damascus steel knife, beautiful to look at, but another with a broken handle may be your go-to knife. Knifemaking has to do with weight, balance, edge geometry and geometry. A knife goes through the ultimate form of abuse – every day it is wet and dry. It might be left on top of the cooker. There is a knife for every job in the world and that’s what makes our life so interesting. With all these different knives there is an element of creativity that allows for specialisation and so many elements that one can get obsessed about. One of the easiest knives for a cook to use, with an edge like a razor blade and a light handle, can be the first knife to break if used to cut up bones, so the boundaries and capabilities are endless.” His views on popular TV shows about knifemaking are interesting. “Forged in Fire is not aimed at knifemakers, just as MasterChef is not for chefs. These are shows for lay people that give you a little insight wrapped in drama, and help them learn about your world. The most important process is the attention to detail.”  He stores materials for the handles in a disused kiln and describes how they are attached to the blade with Loveless bolts. “These countersink nuts into the hole in the handle so as you tighten them, they become like a clamp. The bolster area is the most vulnerable area of the knife, so you are strengthening the bolt hole at its weakest point.” Back at his house – a beautiful building dressed in stone from Mount Gabriel, with mesmerising views of the sea – Ferguson keeps the finished knives in wooden boxes in an upstairs room away from the chaos of children’s toys and a busy kitchen downstairs. This is where orders are dispatched, packaged in heavy-duty canvas rolls, tied in a similar fashion to his charcuterie netting, and stamped with his logo: crossed knives that form the shape of a capital F. The appeal of Ferguson’s knives is stunningly obvious. But despite huge demand, his output isn’t set to increase any time soon. “After one of my knives became a viral sensation on social media, I had more than a thousand people wanting it, so I could spend the rest of my life making them. But the knifemaking side of the business has become a way in which I can channel my creativity.”  Ferguson invests a range of emotional energies into the knives he makes, each of which is a unique creation. “You can be gung-ho and vent if you are tired or emotional – or, if in a calm mood, you can be precise and careful. There is also a point where you can cut yourself or break the knife, so there is room and a role for every state of mind.” It is a delicate balance, and he feels blessed in that people want these knives, but they are not something that can be mass produced.  His profile has led to some odd demands. He has been asked for knives with handles made from the wood of a sentimental apple tree, or to be bejewelled with precious gems. He’s even been asked to work gold into the process of making a blade. “You can go to extreme lengths, and part of me wants the knives I make to go up on a wall and be displayed. You can have your haute couture of knives, and indeed the ones I’ve done now are very different; there is an evolution because I’m part of a community of knifemakers. Another part of me wants to see my knives on family tables being used every day.” While he is happy to work to specific requests from his clients, Ferguson is a man in tune with the fluidity of process, and the never-ending learning curve. “You can spend your life becoming a cheesemaker, gardener, farmer, making really good silage for the cows, but these are adaptable moving targets and as soon as you feel you know everything, you realise how much you don’t know – it is a process of continual learning and that’s how food led to the knives. The handmade knife is a tool that makes sense to a cook like a Mont Blanc pen to a writer. Carpenters respect their chisels. You don’t need to buy a handmade knife unless it is something that brings you pleasure. But you want people to enjoy the knife for what it is. Rory (Conner) always said that a good knife should be recognisable in the pitch dark – that you should know which way is up.” This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.

Fashion editor and author Deirdre McQuillan meets Fingal Ferguson to find out how butchery inspired him to become a knifemaker.


FONDATA: A Descendant of the Sword

A Descendant of the Sword 

Screaming Eagle winemaker Nick Gislason wears many hats – he is also the Technical Director of Lopez Island Community Fireworks and co-founder of Hanabi Lager. FONDATA's Gavin Lucas caught up with the busy man to discuss how these dichotomous ventures have more in common than you might think.

Screaming Eagle's Nick Gislason on winemaking, beer brewing (Hanabi Lager) and designing fireworks (Island Community Fireworks)

FONDATA: Curiosity & Wonder: Magic’s Secret Ingredients 

Curiosity and wonder: magic’s secret ingredients

Adler Deutsch

United States

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Per ordini di alto valore consigliamo la spedizione con un corriere terzo. Gli articoli spediti tramite terzi rimarranno in OWC fascettate.

A causa della quantità richiesta, non potrai selezionare una data di ritiro. Ti preghiamo di inviare la richiesta e ci coordineremo con il nostro magazzino per confermare direttamente con te la data di ritiro.

A causa della quantità richiesta, non è possibile procedere con l'acquisto. Ti preghiamo di selezionare un servizio di terze parti oppure di modificare la quantità (è consentito un massimo di 48 pezzi).

A causa della quantità richiesta, non sarà possibile selezionare una data di spedizione al checkout. Ti preghiamo di inviare la richiesta e ci coordineremo con il nostro magazzino per confermare direttamente con te la data di consegna.

Fino a 499 bottiglie in deposito, la tariffa è di 39¢/bottiglia al mese oppure un addebito mensile minimo di 50 $ (copre fino a 142 bottiglie). Per oltre 500 bottiglie, la tariffa di stoccaggio è di 35¢/bottiglia al mese.

Lo stoccaggio viene addebitato a 40 HKD per cassa da 12 bottiglie al mese. Si applica una tariffa minima mensile di stoccaggio di 80 HKD, che copre fino a 24 bottiglie.

Tariffa di stoccaggio standard

Selezionando la spedizione tramite terzi, ti assumi la piena responsabilità del rispetto di tutte le normative e autorizzi Vinfolio a trasferire gli articoli alla parte indicata nelle tue istruzioni. Gli articoli spediti tramite terzi rimarranno nel loro imballaggio originale.

Gli orari di ritiro sono tra le 8:30 e le 12:00 e tra le 13:30 e le 16:30, dal lunedì al venerdì. I vini al Will Call che non vengono ritirati entro 10 giorni lavorativi saranno trasferiti in deposito e soggetti a una tariffa di stoccaggio di 1,50 $ per bottiglia.

Gli articoli verranno reperiti e spediti al nostro deposito di vini all'avanguardia per la migliore conservazione possibile, dove potrai organizzare il ritiro presso il nostro indirizzo di magazzino a Napa.

Ritiro in sede (Napa)

Hai inserito la password errata troppe volte. Il tuo account è stato temporaneamente bloccato. Attendi cinque minuti prima di riprovare.

Sembra che tu stia visitando da {country}, ti invitiamo a scoprire il nostro sito {nationality}.

Stai navigando da {country}?

Non siamo in grado di elaborare il tuo ordine se contiene sia biglietti per eventi sia un prodotto vinicolo o un distillato nella stessa transazione. Per procedere, rimuovi dal carrello i biglietti dell’evento oppure il prodotto. Potrai quindi completare l’acquisto.

Controlla il tuo carrello

Password dimenticata

Siamo nelle fasi finali dellaggiornamento alla nostra nuova piattaforma di trading. Come parte di questa transizione, stiamo attualmente migrando tutti gli inventari di proprietà dei clienti per garantire unesperienza fluida e senza interruzioni.

La nostra nuova e migliorata piattaforma sarà pronta per te venerdì 4 aprile.

Grazie per la tua pazienza — non vediamo lora di mostrarti cosa arriverà.

Ops, qualcosa è andato storto

Non abbiamo trovato nulla da mostrare qui.

Non abbiamo trovato alcun risultato da mostrare qui.

Si prega di notare: potrebbero essere applicati costi di consegna, dazi e IVA

Il nostro sito è temporaneamente in manutenzione.

Modalità manutenzione

La pre-autorizzazione di un metodo di pagamento consente al tuo Account Manager di effettuare pagamenti per tuo conto, senza verifica del pagamento.

Pre-autorizza

Questa transazione è stata bloccata per un errore di autenticazione.

Errore di autenticazione

La tua carta di pagamento è scaduta. Controlla i dati e riprova.

Carta scaduta

Fondi insufficienti per saldare l'importo. Controlla i dati e riprova.

Fondi insufficienti

Questa transazione è stata bloccata dal fornitore di pagamenti per possibile attività fraudolenta.

Transazione bloccata

Scegli un metodo di pagamento diverso e riprova.

Errore sconosciuto

mostra tutti gli articoli che attualmente conservi con noi. Questi articoli possono essere venduti, consegnati o trasferiti.

Presso {shortName}

La tua allocazione verrà annullata. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

Il tuo articolo pre-ordinato verrà eliminato. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

La tua richiesta di consegna verrà annullata. Sei sicuro di voler procedere?

rappresenta tutti i vini che sono in tuo possesso e che sono stati consumati.

Questo è il prezzo che hai pagato per questo articolo.

Prezzo di costo

Dopo aver aggiunto il nuovo indirizzo, verrai reindirizzato a questa pagina.

Crea un nuovo indirizzo

La tua notifica verrà eliminata. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

Il prezzo minimo al quale sei disposto a vendere. Se il prezzo di listino scende al di sotto di questo valore, la tua inserzione verrà rimossa.

mostra tutti gli articoli che hai pre-ordinato, inclusi i vini en primeur, e tutti gli articoli nella tua watchlist.

Futures

È possibile impostare un prezzo minimo per gli articoli in vendita basato su una percentuale del valore netto unitario attuale.

Puoi impostare un prezzo di mercato per gli articoli che stai vendendo basato su una percentuale del valore netto unitario corrente.

mostra tutte le azioni che hai effettuato sugli articoli nel tuo Portafoglio.

raggruppa ogni azione per tipo - Acquisto, Vendita, Consegna e Trasferimento in entrata - così è chiaro a colpo d'occhio cosa è successo a ciascun articolo.

Storico

mostra tutti gli articoli attualmente in transito da o verso {shortName}.

In transito

La consegna locale è gratuita per ordini superiori a 1.800 HK$ (in un'unica destinazione). Per ordini inferiori a questo importo, la consegna costa 150 HK$ fino a quattro casse e 50 HK$ per ogni cassa aggiuntiva.

Le spedizioni partono da €15 in Italia e da €45 verso la Svizzera e il resto d’Europa per un massimo di 48 bottiglie (75 cl). I costi variano in base alla destinazione. Per spedizioni più grandi è possibile richiedere un preventivo.

La data indicata di seguito è quella in cui il tuo ordine verrà spedito dal nostro magazzino locale. La data di consegna finale, insieme ai dettagli completi di tracciamento, ti verrà fornita una volta che il nostro team avrà elaborato la tua richiesta.

Puoi organizzare il ritiro presso il nostro negozio al 22° piano, 8 Wyndham Street, Central Hong Kong.
Gli orari di ritiro sono dalle 9:30 alle 18:00, da lunedì a venerdì.

Puoi organizzare il ritiro presso il nostro magazzino STI INTERNAZIONALE SPA, in Viale del Lavoro 57, 37051 Bovolone, Verona.
Gli orari di ritiro sono dalle 8:30 alle 12:30 e dalle 13:30 alle 17:30, dal lunedì al venerdì. Siamo chiusi nei giorni festivi.

Questo è il valore di mercato stimato attuale per questo articolo.

I prezzi impostati manualmente verranno sovrascritti. I vini già inseriti non sono interessati.

Aggiorna tutti i vini non inseriti al prezzo di mercato corrente.

Imposta tutto al prezzo di mercato

rappresenta tutti i vini attualmente presenti nel tuo Portafoglio che non sono conservati con noi. Premi l'icona

La mia cantina

Nome

Prezzo netto

Nuovo portafoglio disponibile

Nuovo portafoglio

Non hai alcuna fattura in questo momento.

mostra tutti gli articoli del tuo Portafoglio che sono attualmente sul mercato.

In vendita

mostra tutti gli articoli attualmente presenti nel tuo Portafoglio. Da questa pagina puoi eseguire azioni individuali su di essi.

Panoramica

mostra tutti gli articoli attualmente in attesa di un'azione da parte dell'utente.

In sospeso

Questo è il prezzo di mercato dinamico dell'articolo al netto del margine di negoziazione.

Questo è l'importo del profitto che riceverai se la tua inserzione verrà venduta.

I pagamenti pre-autorizzati consentono transazioni automatiche per tuo conto, garantendo pagamenti fluidi e senza complicazioni. Questo permette di elaborare addebiti ricorrenti, abbonamenti o pagamenti programmati senza approvazione manuale ogni volta.

Il numero di casse che desideri mettere in vendita

Il tuo articolo del catalogo verrà archiviato. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

I tuoi articoli del catalogo verranno archiviati. Sei sicuro di voler continuare?

Prima di richiedere la consegna, puoi modificare la quantità per ciascun articolo nella tua selezione qui sotto.

*Il prezzo di mercato è dinamico e può variare. Al momento della vendita, dal prezzo finale sarà detratta una commissione di negoziazione del 10%.

Prezzo di mercato totale*

Il prezzo fisso personalizzato al quale desideri vendere ciascun articolo.

Dividi in {caseSize} singole bottiglie da {bottleSize}cl.

Titolo

mostra tutti gli articoli che attualmente conservi con noi. Questi articoli possono essere venduti.

Disponibili per la vendita — gli articoli conservati con {name} sono idonei per essere inseriti nel marketplace.

Profilo

Questo articolo si trova presso FINE+RARE.

Questo articolo si trova presso FINE+RARE HOME Hong Kong, ed è disponibile per la consegna o il ritiro in sede. La maggior parte delle consegne a Hong Kong può essere effettuata entro 3 giorni lavorativi; la data esatta sarà comunicata al momento dell'organizzazione della consegna. Le consegne internazionali richiedono tempi più lunghi, ti preghiamo di contattarci per maggiori dettagli.

I vini venduti en primeur saranno rilasciati dal produttore dopo limbottigliamento, tipicamente 18 mesi dopo la fine della cosiddetta campagna. Il tuo vino sarà poi conservato da FINE+RARE in un deposito doganale fino a quando deciderai di richiederne la consegna.

Ci riforniremo di questo articolo al prezzo garantito dalla nostra rete di fornitori e organizzeremo una spedizione rapida a FINE+RARE.
 I tempi di consegna dipendono da molte variabili, ma in genere per un approvvigionamento rapido sono 2-4 settimane.
 Una volta confermato l'ordine, ti terremo aggiornato sulla data di arrivo prevista.
 Ogni articolo viene controllato all'arrivo dal nostro team di esperti e le fotografie sono disponibili su richiesta (si prega di notare che potrebbero essere applicati dei costi).

Reperiremo questo articolo attraverso la nostra rete di fornitori e ne organizzeremo la spedizione a FINE+RARE.
 I tempi di consegna dipendono da molte variabili, ma una stima media è di 6-12 settimane.
 Una volta confermato lordine, ti terremo aggiornato sulla data di arrivo prevista.
 Ogni articolo viene controllato al momento della ricezione dal nostro team di esperti, con fotografie disponibili su richiesta (si prega di notare che potrebbero essere applicati dei costi).

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