“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the...
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When Tony met Rowan
Autobiographies, according to George Orwell, are only to be trusted when they reveal something disgraceful about the subject. If you discount the revelation that he got a third class degree...
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The Rules of BYO
Many of us have a few ‘special’ bottles in our collections but finding the time to drink them can prove surprisingly tricky. We don’t all have the skills or the...
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The HoseMaster of Wine™ Solves The Enduring Mysteries of Wine
Wine is more mysterious than the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Yellow Tail of musical theater composers. It’s more mysterious than North Korean FaceBook. Wine has more secrets than...
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The 2019 Lismore Tasting
This was the fifth Lismore tasting, designed to pit the best wines of South Africa blind against their peers from the rest of the world. In all, we tasted 35...
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It’s Amateur Hour – do you speak the lingo?
“All utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in”: Toni Morrison, 1998 “The times they are a-changin”: Bob Dylan, 1964 Digital media was...
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Listán Prieto: the New World’s original grape variety
Compiling a list of the ten best red and white grapes is an entertaining parlour game for consenting wine lovers. Should Chardonnay trump Riesling and Chenin Blanc? And what about...
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How I taste
The first, and maybe most important, step is to put on my tasting clothes. You cannot produce consistent tasting notes wearing different clothes all the time. Duh. The best critics...
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La Lune Sous L’Eau
My favourite wine bar, La Lune Sous L’Eau, is tucked away on a small side-street of a little French town, yet it is near enough a major airport so I...
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The Final Turn of the Screw
The Japanese have a single word for it: tsundoku. The English translation is less succinct but the phenomenon will be familiar to many of you: the practice of buying more...
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