Susannah Cibber was a terrific singer, by all accounts. Handel gave her the contralto solos in Messiah, and she had a great acting career as well: she became the highest...
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Hand In Hand
Rowan Hooper’s new book, Togetherness, is a fascinating study of symbiosis, what he calls a “neglected silo” of scientific research. The subject might sound a bit geeky and pointy-headed, but...
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Michelin And The Death Of The Wine Guide
It was entirely predictable that Michelin’s new venture into wine would trigger huffy French recriminations. Its Wine Selection Burgundy 2026, launched this month, awarded nine producers the top accolade of...
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The Yang Of Greek Wine
By now this is so well-known that repeating it enters broken record territory. The biggest story for Greek wine the past 20 years has been the rise of Assyrtiko. From...
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Marketing Natural Wine
I recall a conversation I had with one of the new people I met when I first moved to Madrid. She’d found out that I worked in wine. “In wine?”...
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Too Difficult?
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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