During Napa’s intense “fire season” last year, I wondered what locals have been doing about this menace since 2017. Napa is a moneyed wine region. Surely it has the funds...
Facing The Fires
How Democratic Is Rioja?
Imagine being a voter in Liverpool Walton or South Holland and the Deepings. In the first of these constituencies, the Labour Party received 86% of the ballot in the last...
Perfume And Wine
I fell in love with both perfume and Sauternes at roughly the same time, when I moved to the Côte d’Azur for work in 1982. As it happens, neither had...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
