Bill Nanson

Bill Nanson is a Yorkshireman living in Switzerland who is nuts about wine, and choc full of nuts about Burgundy in particular. He runs two sites, this one dedicated to general wine appreciation and tastings notes, and www.burgundy-report.com, which is a fledgling online magazine devoted to Burgundy, with a new edition published three or four times per year.



This is a simple site in terms of layout and presentation, with navigation provided by a navigation bar on the right hand edge of the screen, which rather niftily floats up and down the page to stay visible even when scrolling through longer sections.



SPECIAL FEATURES



Latest Tastes is linked directly from the home page and lists scores of wines tasted most recently. Nanson reviews each wine, usually with comments on its cellaring potential and value for money. Tasting notes are also accessible from the navigation bar (click on Tasting Notes), where wines are organised by region and colour. Every note carries a date of tasting.



Features is a growing collection of longer pieces of editorial on miscellaneous wine themes: visits to producers; food and wine matching; regional profiles and so on. These are well written in a chatty style, and often come with relevant maps and illustrations. In truth most of these are just more tasting notes, with a little extra background information tacked on, but they make for enjoyable reading.



Restaurants is a review section, mostly for places in Switzerland or France (where the author travels regularly) , but there are a few reports from elsewhere too.



Vintages is a very detailed breakdown of the qualities of the past dozen years in Burgundy, based on Nanson's extensive tastings. For each vintage he gives an overview of growing conditions and harvest details, as well as a breakdown of which specific area or producers fared particularly well, or particularly badly.



Blog is a running diary of Nanson's tastings and other wine adventures. It suffers from being updated irregularly and not carrying dates on the entries, so isn't really a "blog" (web-log) by current internet definitions!