“Take my hand, tenez, trust me, leap, I won’t let go.” A favourite memory in rain-soaked Chablis, flood waters rising, taking a supplier’s outstretched hand as his courtyard began to...
Wine Hands
Luxury Bandits
Many qualifications have rocks and reefs rousing calm surfaces. Learner drivers are undone by parallel parking. Philosophy undergraduates discover The Spice-Box of Life isn’t a primer for formal logic. The...
Looking For Something Else
Most of the time, for most of history, people have wanted wine to taste other than how it does. That’s normal: raw beef straight off the bullock is a lot...
A wino visits El Bulli
General de Gaulle famously complained about the difficulty of governing a country that produced 246 different cheeses. Dining at El Bulli, the world’s most famous restaurant, leaves you with a...
A letter from the Publisher of...
Hello Le Pan is the only wine magazine that answers the questions to which real wine connoisseurs need answers. Is my private jet a good place to store my First...
Accented French – the red wines...
Every oenophile probably has that one moment of public blind tasting when it All Goes Right. Mine came sometime in the mid-noughties at the rooftop bar of the Athens Hilton....
A Fruity Number
I know we’ve just come through the silly season, when tales of killer chipmunks and dolphin sign language deputise for what’s normally classed as news in the British media, but...
Black Tower and the spirit of...
It was a Life on Mars moment. Hearing about the imminent relaunch of Black Tower made me feel like Sam Tyler, the detective in the BBC television series who gets...
Are en primeur Bordeaux scores out...
In his timely article on Wine-Pages about score inflation in Bordeaux, Stephen Brook sets out to prove that points reached a “preposterous level” in 2014. He also accuses me of...
