Yeats entitled one of his mid-life poems ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’. The poem is mainly a complaint, about the tangled business of running a theatre (the Abbey in Dublin)...
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The Manipulation of Nature
Why are there so many exclamation marks in the world, and so few hyphens? What spurred this reflection was a menu: a dish featuring ‘Grilled line caught John Dory fillet’....
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The Judgment of Paris Revisited
Even for opera lovers, it promises to be an odd show. Next month’s Napa Valley Festival stages the premiere of a work bringing Bacchus and Venus to 1970s Paris and...
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Looking Back
Twice a year, I help to organise a wine dinner for a group of friends. For the most recent one, in Paris, my job was to bring the sweet wines...
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Grapes of Wrath
Riding the overground to The Wine Society’s latest panel on labour standards recently, I finished the final pages of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If you’re yet to read it,...
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Is The Customer Always Right?
Though technically I have an account, I have steered clear of Substack, which gives me the vibe of a methadone clinic for recovering Twitter addicts. The vertiginous dopamine highs of...
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A Storm In A Wine Glass
After a decade of social media hype, beautiful packaging and expensive publicity, is it time to call last orders on no-low? Pick up a trade magazine, open your emails or...
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The Matriarch Of The Chartrons
If you want to understand the modern science of wine, you must eventually study carbon dioxide and the mechanics of alcoholic fermentation. To do that, it helps to look to...
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Take Five
Commercially, the wine world’s problems continue. Young people are drinking less or not at all. Those who are drinking are largely not taking up drinking wine. It remains quite unfathomable...
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Let’s Keep Wine Democratic
The wine market’s extremes are getting more extreme. Late last month Yellow Tail owner Casella Wines plunged to a AU$5.5 million [£2.9 million] loss, against a background of contraction in...
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Nostalgia Isn’t Dead
The era that defined my youth is cool again. After years of gentle roasting from Gen Z, Millennials everywhere are finally having a reprieve: the 1990s and 2000s are enjoying...
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The Bare Canvas
The psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, observed of creative life that, “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” Van Gogh’s work was unappreciated for most...
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