To sell wine, the wine being of good quality is not essential. In fact, selling mediocre wine is easy; selling bad wine is easier still. Not easy in the sense...
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The Burgundisation of wine
Every so often, a new buzzword springs up in the wine world. Often rather nebulous, sometimes completely intangible, its role is pithily to reflect a trend gaining traction with the...
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Wine’s Old People Problem
HEALTH WARNING: Contains sweeping generalisations, use of stereotypes, and half-believed opinions dressed up as facts. If you feel agitated, apply “not everyone, but some…” liberally throughout. Abandon reading if agitation...
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Picking The Right Moment
Pharrell Williams, Kate Moss, and a soil expert walk into a bar… and share a bottle of Moët. Not my wittiest opening, but that’s because it isn’t really a joke....
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Drinking Together
Patrick McGovern was sometimes described as the Indiana Jones of wine, but this always struck me as wide of the mark. It was hard to imagine him wielding a bullwhip,...
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The Lost Domain
Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, published the year before the author died in action in 1914, is one of the most haunting and haunted novels ever written. Meaulnes, the restless, rebellious,...
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The Death Of Nostalgia
Something was eating away at me; had I written this piece before? Or had somebody else? The only result that came up after a hasty sanity check was an obscure...
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Where Next For Appellations?
Massive hailstones ravaged Chablis last year and fires consumed thousands of hectares in Galicia last month: climate change is accelerating. Grape-growing conditions in classic regions simply aren’t the same as...
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Wine Mismatching
The news came as no surprise, but it is welcome to have confirmation of one’s opinions nonetheless. If you have even a passing interest in the glorious pantomime that is...
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The Narrowing Of Choice
I picked up a book the other day which almost everybody knows about but which most, I suspect, have not actually read: Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England. It was published...
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What’s The Point Of Bolgheri?
I started writing this as a piece about Bolgheri, and ended up writing about myself, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. As in, we talk about...
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The Rewards of Patience
If anything teaches you patience, humility and a degree of circumspection, it’s making wine. However much of a hurry you may be in, a vineyard takes three years to produce...
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